Russell Davies presents a history of jazz, from its earliest stirrings to the end of the millennium.
16: Rhythm Is Our Business. Russell Davies reaches the early thirties, a time when the big bands were just starting to gravitate towards swing. It was in 1932 that Duke Ellington recorded It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, but it was
Fletcher Henderson 's Honeysuckle Rose, recorded in the same year, that definitively displayed the pantherish, forward-leaning quality of the new guitar and string bass rhythm section on which swing was built. Other key figures who helped the idea of swing to take off were Jimmy Lunceford and Benny Moten , in whose Kansas City Orchestra featured a young pianist called Count Basie. Repeated from Saturday 6pm