So, putting this out there as a way to understand me better as a thinker. I think that genres are contextually dependent. I don't think the neo-Swing music I danced to in the 90s is the same genre as 40s Swing music. I think it's a different genre. Even if it sounds the same.

I think Duke Ellington or Count Basie making Swing music in the 30s when it was new and dangerous and they were dealing with racial segregation is a different genre than than when Glen Miller was doing it in the 40s as "America's Music" representing America's assembly line might.

Where Swing was the war effort. In the 30s it was "degenerate." In the 40s it was patriotic. And all that neo-Swing I listened to in the 90s, when Swing was nostalgia, including great music by Steve Lucky and the Rumba Bums featuring Miss Carmen Gettit? Not the same genre.

I don't think you can make Swing music anymore, because Swing music is not just a configuration of instruments, but a larger historical and cultural context...and that context matters. Sha-Na-Na playing 50s Rock'n'Roll in the 70s is not doing what 1950s Little Richard was doing.

And part of what goes into my thoughts about that? In the 1970s when you want to find 1950s music, you find it on the "Oldies" station--a different genre name. In the 1950s it wasn't "Oldies" that made you feel safe in the face of contemporary punk--it was scary.

I think Neo Swing is a different genre than Swing, because they have different contexts. They have different audiences, they do and mean different things. These distinctions are import to me because if you don't pay attention to the cultural differences?

If you don't think about the difference between Fletcher Henderson, Glenn Miller, and Lavay Smith, if you collapse them all into the same genre...you miss so much. You can't understand 1930s Big Band Jazz if you think it's the same genre as 2010s conservatory trained big bands.

And just to make it clear, I don't think different is better or worse. Just different. I don't think neo-Swing is better or worse than 30s Swing. I think simply that neo-Swing was speaking to its moment in some way different than 1930s Swing spoke to its own...and that matters.