Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America

Preface

⢇ PREFACE In 1932 Duke Ellington made history with a recording that captured the feel of the entire swing era. “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” represented an energetic defiance of a depressingly downward spiral in national and world events. Nine years later, in 1941, the Duke brought to the stage a musical revue that likewise called on a style of music and dance that had rapidly escalated in popularity in the United States and was about to go global. This musical, Jump for Joy, drew from and celebrated several forms of black culture of the late 1930s, from music and dance to comedy and dress. It capped a period of black cultural achievement and exuberance unprecedented in American history and possibly not since matched. And when the country entered the war in December of that year, the dance and music that had incubated in 1930s America became a fad worldwide. In the 1960s, when San Francisco demonstrators challenged Ellington to make a statement on civil rights, he answered, “I made my statement in 1941 in Jump for Joy and I stand by it.”1 But I am jumping ahead of myself. The question is: Why jumping? And why the 1930s? It all started with jazz. And basketball. It’s easy to find parallels between jazz and basketball. Both are ensemble performances depending on fundamental knowledge of the art but also on the ability to improvise in the moment. Anyone can score; anyone can solo. And the most interesting part of the game or the music often takes place away from the ball or the melody. The abilities of individual players have taken the sport and the art to places that the original composers or creators of the game could never have envisioned. The slam dunk, for instance, is like those wonderful , transcendent moments in jazz when a performer does something so unexpected and unnecessary but so gratifying that it seems to lift the whole room—not just the player but everyone in the place. There’s much criticism today, as always, of unnecessary showmanship and celebration, self-aggrandizement, and over-the-top virtuosity in sports and xii P R E FAC E jazz. But I don’t mind showy moments—I live for them. A lot of people do. Moments of performance that might seem self-congratulatory actually do a lot for the spiritual well-being of the audience. They create a world of virtual time that not only raises us above our ordinary lives but also cements people together, gives us a feeling of having experienced something rare and valuable : something that makes us us. The slam dunk is possibly just for show. Sometimes the artistry of the dunk works at cross-purposes with actually scoring. But there are showy moments in basketball that are transformative, elevating the practical to a thing of beauty. Like the jump shot, for instance. It’s not really necessary to jump—not every time—to make a basket. But people do. Furthermore, there were no jump shots in the early years of the game. Who started doing it? And when? The origin of the jump shot is the Holy Grail of basketball history. All the historians involved in this search mention the same few players in the later 1940s and early 1950s—and all are white. Not one historian mentions the 1937 rules change that completely altered the game and probably made jump shots possible. What about that rules change? Until 1937, after every score, players had to return to mid-court for a tip-off. Games were slow and low-scoring, often in the low 20s. In practice, up until 1937, basketball was a half-court game. But in 1937 the National Basketball Committee eliminated the center tipoff after goals. Now players could run from one end of the court to the other, and faster, running teams immediately had the advantage. Players began to shoot from a running position, which meant they no longer planted both feet on the ground and launched a two-handed set shot. Instead, they left their feet and shot on the run with one hand and began to love the freedom of this shot. I started thinking about that jump, about speed, and height, and skyscrapers , and jazz. I had in mind a piece by the Count Basie Orchestra, a piece called “One O’Clock Jump,” the first of many swing pieces that were called “jumps.” Brian Rust’s...