Texas Shout #39 Western Swing and The Spanish Tinge

Set forth below is the thirty-ninth "Texas Shout" column. The initial installment of a two-part essay, it first appeared in the May 1993 issue of the West Coast Rag, now known as The Syncopated Times. Two terms you'll encounter as you read your older-style jazz festival programs are “western swing” and “Spanish tinge.” What types of music do these describe and how do they fit into the older-style jazz picture? By “older-style” jazz, I mean the types of jazz played at festivals covered by WCR, i.e., Dixieland and swing (which I will refer to collectively in today's column as “D/S”). “Dixieland” is the generic term covering several styles of jazz utilizing the jazz vocabulary and conventions of the twenties, while “swing” is the generic term describing jazz styles utilizing the jazz vocabulary and conventions of the thirties. For reasons set forth below, I need to distinguish D/S, for today's purposes, from bop and other more advanced jazz forms. A band is playing western swing when it plays jazz licks, which may or may not be improvised, over a country/western rhythm, i.e., a rhythm section using the types of shuffle and back-beat character­istic of country bands rather than jazz bands. A band is using Spanish tinge when it plays jazz licks, which may or may not be improvised, over a rhumba, tango, samba or other Latin beat. Thus, although t