In the mid 1930s, as the GreatDepression stubbornly refuses to lift, jazz comes as close as it has ever come to being America's popular music. It has a new name - Swing - and for the first time musicians become matinee idols. Clarinetist Benny Goodman finds himself hailed as the "King of Swing" even though he is music and arrangements that were invented by prior black artists. Goodman has a host of rival, among them trombonist Tommy Dorsey, alto saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford, trombonist Glenn Miller, and clarinetist Artie Shaw. Louis Armstrong heads a big band of his own with the help of Joe Glaser as his new manager, a tough mob-connected wheeler-dealer, who began to straighten out his legal mess, his mob troubles, and his debts. Duke Ellington continues his independent course. Billie Holiday emerges from a childhood filled with tragedy to make her first joyous recordings and begin her career as the greatest of all female jazz singers. Benny Goodman demonstrates that in a rigidly segregated country there is still room in jazz for great black and white musicians to play side by side onstage. On May 11, 1937, when 4,000 people gather at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to witness what is billed as "The Music Battle of the Century", a showdown between Goodman and the indefatigable percussionist Chick Web, a man who hates to lose.
—Garon Smith