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A big band is a type of musical ensemble that originated in the United States and is associated with jazz and the Swing Era typically consisting of percussion, brass, and woodwind instruments totalling approximately 12 to 25 musicians. The terms jazz band, jazz ensemble, jazz orchestra, stage band, society band, and dance band may describe this type of ensemble in particular contexts. A standard big band consists of two horn sections: saxophones, and brass, which includes trumpets, and trombones and a rhythm section that includes guitar (originally acoustic), acoustic bass or electric bass, drums, and piano). Some big bands use additional instruments, such as various woodwinds, horns, tuba and percussion. Big bands can also include a string section that includes violins, as well as violas, and 'celli. In the early 1920s, big bands were an outgrowth of the ragtime ensemble with the addition of saxophones, which was becoming the instrumentation used in vaudeville theatre orchestras. Big bands, as they ultimately evolved, of usually ten pieces or so began to rise in prominence during the 1920s "jazz age". One notable exception, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, contained more than 20 musicians, but it was not until the early 1930s that bands with 13 or more musicians became commonplace. With the advent of network radio in the mid-to late 1920s big bands became the predominant force in popular music. Most of these bands did not include much improvisation, as jazz was still primarily identified with smaller bands of perhaps seven or eight pieces or less. Initially their main provenance was in the ballrooms of large hotels where their sole purpose was to provide music for dancing as well as in dancehalls generally found in larger cities. By the end of the 1920s, as radio became more and more popular, bands were beginning to add more higher-caliber jazz influenced musicians and as a result featured more and more improvised soloing. With the onset of the Great Depression, radio became an even more important factor in their popularity, because of the decline in audience attendance in ballrooms and hotels and the severe decline in the record business that was also a result of the bad economic conditions. This confluence of events, (the rise of network radio and worsening economic conditions) in conjunction with musicians "crossing over" between what was styles of "sweet" (non-jazz) dance music and "hot" (improvised) jazz music brought about the rise of virtuoso bandleaders such as Benny Goodman, some of whom achieved great fame and celebrity as performing and recording artists. With the advent of motion pictures including sound in the late 1920s, big bands could easily be exploited in films and as such, Hollywood movies became important engines of creating popular music, and as the big bands began to dominate the music business, Hollywood motion picture producers were quick to capitalize on their popularity. Big bands began appearing in movies in the 1930s and continued to do so into the 1960s. Many films made in the early 1940s that featured big bands were made for the sole purpose of putting the biggest popular music stars of the day on screen, with little regard for storyline or plot. Swing music as musical style began in the 1920s and slowly but steadily rose in popularity through the early 1930s. Duke Ellington's popular song ''It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)'' with lyrics by Irving Mills (1931), states ''it makes no difference if it's sweet or hot'' and was perhaps prophetic, as it was during that period that the style was incubating and as the bands grew to larger than eight or nine musicians they needed written arrangements for their songs. In late 1935, with the success of Goodman's band popularizing the style on a scale as yet unseen, big bands quickly rose to prominence playing swing music as the country slowly began recovering from the Depression. True to the song lyric, there was a considerable range of styles among the hundreds of popular bands. ''Swing bands'' were as the name implied the "hotter" (jazz influenced) bands and ''Sweet'' bands generally stayed more in line with the tradition of "salon" dance orchestras, but regardless of the path taken by bandleaders, many were very successful. By the late 1930s, even the leaders of the most conservative dance bands knew they had to have at least one or two exciting jazz soloists in their ranks to turn up the heat when it was necessary, and the opposite was true for the most die-hard "jazz" influenced ''hot'' big bands, in order to keep the dancers (and ballroom management) happy, who, along with fox-trots, wanted their share of waltzes, rhumbas, tangos, and the like to dance to. Big bands began decline in popularity not long after the end of World War II in 1945. Jazz music itself had started undergoing its transition to Be-bop as early as 1941, which meant that musicians were thinking in terms of the freedom found in playing with small groups as opposed to playing in large bands whose music was predicated on written arrangements. As far as the audience was concerned, it has been surmised that younger veterans of the war, now again at home and in civilian life, were growing older, settling down and getting on with their lives getting married, beginning careers, starting families, etc.; and so the popular decline was taking place at the same time as when musicians were looking for other more inspiring outlets for their creativity. The American musicians union had imposed a ban on recording from mid-1942 until late 1944 over recording royalties to its members, and again later from December 1947 to December 1948, during and after which record companies began to look elsewhere for their rosters of artists. Amid the air of post-war conservatism, ''jazz'' as a musical style leaving swing bands behind and economic forces within the music industry dictating direction, vocalists as solo artists began to dominate the popular music business and the big bands and their leaders began facing a steep decline in the late 1940s, when many big bands broke up. However, during the years of their greatest popularity, essentially tagged the "swing era" from 1935-1946, the most notable bandleaders of "sweet" and "hot" bands had become major celebrities and so they were able to maintain their following to some extent longer than those not so famous. By the late 1940s, theaters that had continued featuring bands and stage acts in between movies through the war years had all but abandoned their band and live entertainment policies, and as the 1950s progressed, many suburban ballrooms were converted into bowling alleys and supermarkets. As the big bands receded in general popularity, there were up and coming composers and arrangers who were very much a part of the big band tradition though, and many became bandleaders and integrated the performance of various styles of music not typically associated with swing with traditional big band instrumentation. After World War II many of the musicians who had been featured in the most popular bands before the war settled into lucrative careers freelancing in recording studios for movies and television as well as playing in studio orchestras and bands backing other artists on records. Many of them and remained employed that way well into the 1970s. As decades progressed though, big band music tended to become identified more and more with the World War II years, although they had their ascent and even greatest peak in popularity by 1942 when the US was just beginning to get involved in the war. Even with recording forbidden by the musicians union during much of the war and the growing shortage of young musicians to fill the empty seats of others from the bands joining the armed forces, and gasoline rations limiting travel by the bands, personal appearances by big bands and their presence in movies raised millions of dollars in war bonds and magnified their popularity, not to mention that the big band format was still the driving force in popular music. Many fans of big band music young and old would often wonder if the big bands would ever "come back", a question that was even put to many retired bandleaders who were still alive and maybe even performing, such as Goodman who worked through the 1970s into the 1980s with his small groups as well as Artie Shaw who had quit the music business as a performing musician altogether in 1954. In the late 1990s, swing made a slight comeback in the US. In any event, a sustained resurgence has never happened to any great degree. While jazz "combo" ensembles using up to approximately seven or maybe eight musicians are largely improvised, big band music is primarily crafted in advance by an arranger ''out of necessity'' because of the number of musicians in the band. ==Instrumentation== In the beginning, about 1920, the number and disposition of players was by no means standard, but by the 1950s had evolved into a ''de facto'' standard of 17-pieces, for which many commercial arrangements are available. This instrumentation consists of five saxophones (most often two altos, two tenors, and one baritone), four trumpets, four trombones (often including one bass trombone) and a four-piece rhythm section (composed of drums, acoustic bass or electric bass, piano and guitar). However, variants to this instrumentation are common. From its beginning, when bands were made up of whatever was available in more cases than not, composers, arrangers, and bandleaders have used sections with more or fewer players, and additional instruments, such as valve trombone, baritone horn/euphonium (both of which are usually used in place of or with trombones), vibes, bass clarinet, French horn, tuba, banjo, accordion and strings (violin, viola, cello). Male and female vocalists have also joined big bands to perform particular arrangements. In recent years synthesizers and / or electronic keyboards have been added, often replacing the piano. In the 1920s, a typical dance band may have included up to as many as three violins, and it became a commercial asset for violin players to market themselves as able to double on saxophone when the saxophone was coming into popular vogue. Clarinet players coming from a jazz or traditional background also were quick to embrace the commercial opportunities that were presented, and many early saxophone sections were as much a cross-over of converted violinists as they were of clarinet players who made the switch. By the 1930s it was just assumed that most (if not all) saxophone players played clarinet, and many arrangements from the period called upon any or all of the saxophone parts and whoever was playing them to switch over to clarinet, bass clarinet or another size saxophone for some period of time. Saxophone "doubling" now might mean being called upon to play any other woodwind instrument, such as flute, piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet as well as soprano sax. "Doubling" in the brass section is generally confined to trumpet players being occasionally called upon to play flugelhorn. Some trombone players who started as trumpet players might exclusively play valve trombone and many trombonists also play the valve trombone. Often however, brass section players are called upon to utilize a variety of mutes that completely change the timbre (sound texture) of the instruments. As for the rhythm section, the 1920s rhythm sections included banjo and tuba. By the mid-1930s the guitar had replaced the banjo, and Double bass had replaced the tuba. The electric guitar eventually came to replace the hollow-body acoustic guitar used into big bands as a result of two of its pioneers, Eddie Durham and Charlie Christian who were both chiefly identified with the big bands of Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Many guitarists still prefer to use an amplified hollow-body electric guitar when playing in a big band. electric instruments including electric bass are often used in rhythm sections now as are electric pianos and synthesizers. Many bandleaders have also made the conscious decision to omit the guitar altogether in many big bands. Latin or other auxiliary percussion instruments may also be added, such as cowbells, conga drums, bongo drums, tambourines, triangles, vibraphone, marimba, etc. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Big band」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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