For much of the first half of the 20th century, swing music was popular music. People spent their Saturday nights swing dancing in hotel ballrooms to a live dance band, commonly a big band that performed jazz, swing, and other popular tunes.
Dance band music also dominated the airwaves. It was common practice for music publishers to send promotional copies of popular sheet music to radio stations around the country for musicians to play on air.
In this era, Seattle’s KOMO-KJR Radio was one of the largest employers of professional musicians in Washington state. All of the station’s music programs were performed by singers, orchestras, chamber groups, and of course, popular regional big bands or jazz orchestras of the day.
As a result, KOMO developed a large and comprehensive sheet music library — 20,000 pieces of dance band and piano-vocal sheet music housed in 38 metal file cabinets — which the station donated to the Seattle Public Library in 1964. Sixty-two years later, the collection can still be found on the Central Library’s 8th floor.
On Oct. 17, Seattle bandleader Jacob Zimmerman and the Cloud Drop Orchestra will perform several of these KOMO pieces in a special concert at the Central Library’s auditorium. The free admission event is sponsored by the Seattle Public Library Foundation, 4Culture and private donations.
“This is a special thing, ” Zimmerman said. “There are very few bands at all in the world that get opportunities to play with a large ensemble like this and play this kind of music.”
‘I love this era of music’
The upcoming concert was organized by music librarian Bob Tangney, who has managed the collection since he started working at the library in 1998.
“I love this era of music, so ever since I got hired, I've been kind of messing around with it,” Tangney said.
Tangney, who’s also a long-time singer that performs in community choirs, grew up with this music because his parents loved it.
“At some point, I discovered a drawer and sheet music my mom had bought back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and I started looking at that and got interested,” Tangney said, adding that he also loved listening to his parents’ LPs of Glen Miller and Benny Goodman.
As an adult, Tangney is drawn to the sweetness, nostalgia, and escapism in the songs.
“They don't talk about The Depression, or they're not about soldiers dying in the war. They're about homesickness, or they're longing for better days, that kind of thing. Some of them are just love songs,” he said.
As for the “messing around” — Tangney is modest. He’s a careful steward of the KOMO sheet music, which library patrons are welcome to view and check out.
Over the last few decades, he’s created several binders, organized by details such as songwriters, arrangers, keys, and copyright information, to make it easier to search through the massive archive.
This isn’t the first time he’s coordinated a concert to showcase the music in this collection, either. He worked with the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band, led by now-retired director Scott Brown, to organize a performance of songs from this collection in 2014.
“Ever since then, I'm like, God, I'd love to do this again. It was really fun, and I love to have the actual material being used,” Tangney said.
Rare songs by first-rate songwriters
It’s not uncommon for in-the-know performing musicians, some from as far away as San Francisco, to come to the library to dig through the collection, Tangney said. That’s how he first met Zimmerman, who he eventually approached to perform KOMO collection songs again in the upcoming concert.
Zimmerman, an alto saxophonist who was raised in Seattle and played in the award-winning Garfield High School Jazz Band, is an early swing aficionado himself and a mainstay performer for regional swing dancers.
Tipped off by Casey MacGill, a multi-instrumentalist also known throughout the Pacific Northwest for his specialization in early swing, Zimmerman began sifting through the KOMO collection around 2016. Initially, he was discouraged when he opened the cabinets and didn’t recognize a single song title.
“My first thought was when I thought, ‘Oh, it's a huge collection. Then that means probably any song that I think of, they're gonna have it, and I can just go and find that.’ When I opened up the file cabinets for the first time, I realized like, well, there's a ton of music here, but that's not necessarily gonna work out,” he said.
While many of the composers featured in the KOMO collection — like Harold Arlen, who wrote “Over the Rainbow,” and Irving Berlin, composer of “Blue Skies” — contributed to the core jazz repertoire, the KOMO collection isn’t full of well-known works. This collection contains rarer songs that are more difficult to access and weren’t canonized in the same way.
“These [songwriters] wrote hundreds of songs, and so this gives access to things that maybe didn't become hugely popular, but they're still written by these first-rate songwriters, and they're rare, and they're not in print anymore,” Tangney said.
Many of the songs in the collection aren’t in the public domain yet, either.
Resurfacing history
With the rarity of these songs in mind, Zimmerman started performing songs in the collection with his own groups, even if they were unfamiliar to him. He found some hidden gems of similar quality to the jazz standards, as well as arrangements that reveal important history.
At one point, he discovered sheet music to a 1930s swing favorite, “There's a House in Harlem for Sale,” by Henry Red Allen. Zimmerman discovered little nuances in the sheet music that have added authenticity to his own performance of the tune.
“There were all these details in the arrangement, which I wouldn't necessarily have trusted my ears to be able to pull off the recording,” Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman selected a few favorite finds like this one for the library performance, but it won’t all be early swing. Zimmerman plans to highlight the full range of repertoire that dance bands of the day would’ve performed — from New Orleans “hot jazz” and swing to foxtrots and waltzes.
“That's part of the story of jazz bands that history doesn't often tell [and] isn't really reflected in records, too,” he said. “Like, if you were pegged as a jazz band…like the Fletcher Henderson band, for example, who was one of the prominent bands that played at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, they played waltzes all the time, and they played sweet dance music, and they played basically every kind of music.”
Zimmerman appreciates how special this sheet music library is for its breadth and depth of songs. He’s passionate about resurfacing and reframing dance band tunes that were, from his perspective, unfairly written off as corny and uncool somewhere along the way by jazz tastemakers.
“When I listen to a lot of what's called ‘dance band music’ from back then, I'm like, ‘Oh, wait a second, this very much sounds like jazz to me,’” Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman will perform for an hour with his 10-piece group, the Cloud Drop Orchestra. Tangney will also sing one of the songs he first discovered in his mother’s sheet music collection.
The Cloud Drops Orchestra, directed by Jacob Zimmerman, will present a free concert of jazz from the KOMO sheet music collection on Saturday, Oct. 17,at the Seattle Central Library.’s Auditorium on Level 1. Registration is not required.
