The Swing Era - roughly the years from 1935 to 1945 - was the summit of jazz music's public appeal, when - allegedly - good music was popular and popular music was good. It was the dominant pop mode of the day, its leading figures as iconic as Hollywood movie stars. And one of its biggest names, Lionel Hampton, who died last weekend, aged 93, epitomised both the era's musical successes and its capacity for rabble-rousing excess.
On stage he exuded a combination of supercharged ebullience, showmanship and sheer drive that bordered on the manic. Other jazzmen, however, appreciated the talent behind the sometimes tasteless cavalry charges he led at the head of the big band he started in 1940 - none more so than Louis Armstrong, who, the story goes, heard him fooling around with a vibraphone in a West Coast studio in 1930 and, impressed, urged him to keep on playing it.
Until then Hampton, born in 1908 in Louisville, Kentucky, had been a drummer. Hampton, a lifelong Catholic, got his first drum lessons from a (presumably) swinging nun.
He must have been a prodigy; by the time his mother had moved the family to Chicago (his father had been killed in the first World War) it became clear that music was his metier and that he had the drive as well as the talent to succeed in it.
It was as the drummer in band leader Les Hite's orchestra, backing Armstrong in Los Angeles, that he had his apocryphal epiphany in 1930. In LA, too, he met a dancer, Gladys Riddle, who married him and encouraged him to study music formally. In a union which lasted until her death in 1971, she ran Hampton's career with an iron fist; shrewd, tough and focused, she, like Hampton, displayed a business acumen rare enough among jazz musicians.
His other key career encounter was a jam session in Los Angeles in 1936 with clarinettist Benny Goodman and pianist Teddy Wilson. Goodman, the "King of Swing", was on the crest of enormous popularity leading his orchestra. With Wilson, who was black, as was Hampton, he had formed one of the first integrated groups to play regularly in public.
They all hit it off musically and the famous Benny Goodman quartet, completed by Goodman's drummer, Gene Krupa, was born. Neither Wilson nor Hampton were members of Goodman's big band; the quartet, which achieved a success and distinctive personality of its own, was a change of pace from the orchestra.
It was enough to elevate Hampton to band-leader status, both on record and in fact, with a hit, Flying Home, that became indelibly associated with him.
By then primarily a vibes player, he could still whip a band together from the drum kit, but he also played piano as if it was a vibraphone, using his two index fingers like mallets; unique might be the kindest word to describe it. He sometimes sang, too; "good-natured" covers a multitude.
He and Gladys, both careful with a dollar, ran a big band on and off for decades after that. A considerable amount of emerging talent - always the least expensive to hire - thus graced his bands. Among the greatest were bassist Charlie Mingus, trumpeters Joe Newman, Clifford Brown, Art Farmer and Clark Terry, as well as tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin, all to make their names in the 1950s, after bop had been absorbed into the jazz mainstream. And in Illinois Jacquet he had a kind of musical alter ego - an inventive saxophone soloist who could whip an audience into a frenzy with calculated abandon.
For there was a calculated professionalism behind the extroverted public persona and the natural musicianship that inhabited it.
Hampton, who did numerous US State Department goodwill tours over the years and still kept his foot on the accelerator into the 1980s, was no-ted for playing before he went in front of the public, so that, fully warmed up, he could hit the stage running.
Famously, too, when he led a band with outstanding new talents like Brown and Farmer on a European tour in the mid-1950s, he refused to allow his young lions to play or record away from his band. The brand image was not to be diluted by moonlighting. Fortunately, it didn't stop them. In Paris they slipped out of their hotel by the fire escape and recorded with French musicians anyway; the results were memorable.
Although he toured so much, he visited Ireland only once, when, genial as ever, he played at the Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork in the 1980s. By then even his fabled energy was winding down and it was clear his greatest days were history.
Nevertheless, it was some history. Before Hampton turned the vibes into something to be reckoned with in the 1930s, only Red Norvo and Adrian Rollini had made any serious attempts to give it a jazz voice. When Hampton poured his own larger-than-life spirit into the instrument, he set a style and a standard for playing it that wouldn't be surpassed until first Milt Jackson and later Gary Burton came on the scene.
As for his recordings, besides the acclaimed "chamber jazz" sessions with Goodman, he also had excellent encounters in the 1950s with more modern players like Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson. And, scattered throughout his numerous big band recordings - even into the 1980s - there are worthwhile moments.
But music wasn't his only outlet. With his wife he ran several publishing companies, all successful business ventures, and a record label. And he made an impact developing low-income housing projects in Harlem and Newark, gradually metamorphosing into the Republican political establishment. In education he endowed the Lionel Hampton School of Music at the University of Idaho.
Whatever he took out of life, he also put a considerable amount back in. His place in jazz history is secure.
Lionel Hampton: born April 20th, 1908. Died August 31st, 2002