Sweet Jazz

Sweet jazz is the melodic, arranged pole of early jazz-age dance music: the 'sweet bands' led by *Paul Whiteman*, *Guy Lombardo* and their peers, who played the hits of the day in smooth, violin-and-saxophone arrangements with minimal improvisation, in deliberate contrast to the 'hot' bands. Based in hotel ballrooms and on network radio, sweet bands were the most commercially successful jazz-adjacent orchestras of the 1920s and 1930s — Lombardo's Royal Canadians claimed 'the sweetest music this side of heaven' — and their polish fed directly into swing-era pop and postwar easy listening.