Chick Webb

Happy Birthday Chick Webb 1905(7,9)-1939...Although he was small of stature with a badly twisted frame due to childhood tuberculosis of the spine, he was a giant behind a drum set. His childhood doctor recommended he take up a musical instrument to "loosen up" his bones. Webb earned money for his drums selling newspapers and by age 11 was playing professionally on pleasure boats in and around his home town of Baltimore. He moved to New York at the age of 17 and began leading bands in various clubs before settling in for long regular runs at the Savoy Ballroom beginning in 1931. He established himself there as one of the best regarded drummers and bandleaders of the Swing style. He couldn't read music but had an amazing capacity to memorize all of the arrangements for his band and conducted from a platform placed in the center. For his drum set he had custom made pedals, goose-neck cymbals, a 28 inch bass drum and a wide variety of other percussion instruments which allowed him to produce his signature complex, thundering solos, sadly not captured in all of their energetic glory by the primitive Decca recordings of the time. Although his band did not become as influential or revered as some of his contemporaries in the long run, it was feared at the time in the Battle of the Bands at the Savoy. A famous encounter with the Benny Goodman band at it's peak (with Gene Krupa on the drums) left Goodman's band drained and defeated. In 1935, Webb hired the teenaged Ella Fitzgerald after she won a talent contest at the Apollo and from that point on, Webb let the music revolve around her prodigious talents. His biggest hit record in 1938, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" was Fitzgerald's idea based on a childhood rhyme. By November 1938, Webb's health began to decline, although he continued to play and tour in order to keep his band employed during the Great Depression, disregarding his own physical discomfort and fatigue, sometimes passing out between sets from exhaustion. He died after an operation in June 1939. On February 12, 1940, a crowd of over 7,500 people gathered to honor the first "King of Swing". (Like many jazz musicians, Webb's birth year has been disputed. The current accepted date is 1905)