The worlds of rock music and swing music may not seem like the most likely of bedfellows, but Rock swings is a genre that has some famous pioneers and is currently enjoying a renaissance. But what does it mean, how did it start and where is it going?

What Is Rock Swings?

Rock swings is the name for a genre of music that is a mash-up between rock music and swing music, coming from the title of a famous 2004 album by legendary singer Paul Anka, which saw him perform hits by the likes of Nirvana, Van Halen and Oasis.

Its origins therefore lie in the popular music of the 1930s to early 1960s when swing was king thanks to the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. It’s the big band soundtrack to so many classic movies and TV shows and remains popular for fans of the Rat Pack era, while modern day swing singers like Michael Buble have demonstrated that it can still fill arenas and sell records.

The swing age came to an end due to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, with Elvis Presley and the Beatles grabbing the hearts of young people on both sides of the Atlantic. We’re arguably still living in the rock music age, even if it has gone through a lot of phases (punk, grunge, nu-metal, etc) since then.

How Did Rock Swings Get Started?

However, swing music has never fully gone away and there have been times over the last 50 years when the two worlds have met. One of the first was the innovative/gimmicky Pop + Jazz = Swing record by Benny Golson, which utilised stereophonic sound to present album where the songs were either performed by a jazz band or a pop orchestra or both, depending which channel you were listening to. It was a brave experiment, but not one that the public embraced, with the jazz portions of the music eventually released as Just Jazz.

Pat Boone kicks off !

But if nobody was ready for that in 1962, audiences were even less prepared for Pat Boone’s shocking transformation in 1997 when the none-more-clean-cut American icon suddenly started weather leather and a dog collar and released the album In A Metal Mood: No More Mr Nice Guy.

On that he covered songs by the likes of Judas Priest, Metallica and Alice Cooper in a swing style, much to the dismay of his traditionalist (and often religious) fans and the bemusement of rock music fans. However bizarre his foray into the rock music world might have seemed, it came at a time when interest in swing and lounge music was starting to rise, boosted by the 1996 movie Swingers, which prominently featured swing revival band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

In 1997, the compilation album Lounge-a-Palooza (taking its name from the rock music festival Lollapalooza) was released, bringing artists from the pop, rock and swing world together, and its most famous track was a swing cover of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. it demonstrated how well the two genres could work together without seeming like a gimmick or a joke.

However, the next prominent artist to make rock swings music was definitely not taking things entirely seriously. In 2000, comedian/musician Richard Cheese released the first of his albums, Lounge Against The Machine, which took popular (and often explicit) rock and metal songs and performed them in a swing manner. It was so successful that Cheese (real name Mark Davis) has been able to build a career out of it and has released ten albums to date.

Enter Paul Anka.

In 2004, Paul Anka followed the lead of Boone by releasing an album that featured his big band covers of famous rock songs, albeit without the leather or the dog collar. Anka had enjoyed hits in the 50s and 60s like Diana, Lonely Boy and Put Your Head On My Shoulder and was also responsible for writing the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson theme as well as She’s A Lady for Tom Jones and the English lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

Rock Swings earned him the kind of attention he hadn’t enjoyed in years, with the novelty factor of hearing someone sing Smells Like Teen Spirit backed by a big band rather than crunching grunge guitars ensuring that fans of both rock and swing music wanted to check the album out. That he had avoided making himself or the music seem ridiculous in the process helped earn him some good reviews too, as well as a placing in the UK Album Charts top ten.

By taking the process seriously (aside from apparently failing to get through an attempted recording of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson without laughing). It even included a duet with Bon Jovi on My Way (he had covered their It’s My Life on Rock Swings, which included a line referencing My Way).

Anka certainly inspired British singer Paul Young to follow suit, and in 2006 he released an album called Rock Swings – On the Wild Side of Swing, which saw him transform hits by the likes of Metallica, David Bowie and Eminem into swing songs. While the idea of an 80s blue-eyed soul star doing a swing version of a hip hop anthem might sound ripe for ridicule, Young took the album as seriously as Anka had and the results were mostly successful.

Where Next For Rock Swings?

Over the last decade, there have been fewer examples of rock swings releases, but that is set to change in 2017 with the arrival of "UK Rock n' Pop JAZZ" by Roy Charles and Matt Walters. It will be a compilation of 16 UK rock and pop songs performed in the rock swings style by producer Walters and singer Charles and will be essential listening for fans of the coolest music genre around.

James Ellaby | 
Jan 2017