The history of the jazz-styled dance band in Great Britain officially begins in 1919 with the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, although ragtime records made by British orchestras appeared as early as 1912. Of all European nations, Britain took to Jazz most comfortably, and by the time recordings of British Dance Bands began to become common in 1923, jazz was already a well-established commodity in the U.K. The tremendous success enjoyed by the American group Hal Kemp's Carolina Club Orchestra in 1924 gained the attention of authorities who were concerned about the deleterious effect touring American bands had on local orchestras, so an embargo was set up to keep the American bands out. This was relaxed from time to time to allow a specific American orchestra that the English wanted to hear, for example Duke Ellington, to come to the UK. The effect of the embargo was to encourage the British Dance Band to flourish, and it did not exclude individual Americans from joining local bands. American musicians such as Adrian Rollini, Frank Guerante, and Danny Polo enjoyed celebrity status in the UK upon abandoning their American careers to perform overseas. On the other hand, certain British bandleaders, such as Ambrose, Spike Hughes, Reginald Foresythe, and Ray Noble went to America to form and record with ensembles in the United States.

The way that this continuing cross-fertilization between the American model and the British bands played out was that jazz orchestras within the UK grew to be more numerous and of generally higher quality than those in continental European nations at the time. Recordings of jazz groups and dance orchestras such as Ambrose, Lew Stone, Fred Elizalde, the Savoy Orpheans, Jack Harris, and Sid Phillips compare favorably to those made by dance bands in the United States. The British style of swing was basically undistinguishable from the American model, except that it was a bit more polite and less serious, and featured singers that were obviously attuned to the UK style of English speech as opposed to American accents. The interruption of the Second World War meant mostly that the best talent ended up transferred into the military, and some key artists were lost during the London blitz, most tragically the exquisite South African singer Al Bowlly, killed in a bombing raid in 1941.

Whereas the American dance band went into a quick decline after the Second World War ended, in the UK they remained popular well into the Rock 'n' Roll era, and have never really gone entirely out of fashion, despite stiff competition over the years from newer developments in English music such as Trad, Skiffle, the more advanced forms of Jazz, Rock music, Punk and Reggae. — Uncle Dave Lewis

Continental Jazz is a long-established term coined to identify jazz-styled dance groups active in Greater Europe apart from Britain, generally limited to the period up until the end of World War II. Initially spurred on by the success of American groups traveling overseas (such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Lt. James Reese Europe's Fighting 369th Infantry "Hell Fighters" Band), European musicians established a reputation for playing "hot" music by the mid-1920s. This was different from American Jazz, however, as the European variety of Hot Jazz was tempered by the influence of indigenous forms such as the Paris Chanson or German operetta. In some instances Continental Jazz bands were joined by American expatriates who helped add spice to the mix. The main centers of Continental Jazz were naturally Paris and Berlin, although decent Continental Jazz bands also turned up in such unlikely locations as Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland. Poland, Italy and Russia were involved in this musical style to a somewhat lesser degree. With the Nazi incursion upon all of Europe during the Second World War, Continental Jazz began to disappear, and at war's end it did not spring back. By 1950, Bebop became the Jazz music of choice to be found in Paris and Scandinavia. — Uncle Dave Lewis

Experimental big bands began to incorporate elements of free jazz and improvisation as early as the '60s, and fueled by the work of smaller avant-garde ensembles and classical composers, increased their scope in the following decades to embrace atonal music, discordance and increasingly complex structures. From the post-bop beginnings of groups like the Sun Ra Arkestra and Carla Bley's big band, to the full-on chaos of the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, experimental big bands produce an amazing diversity of sounds within the large group format.

When swing became popular and the big-band craze first landed in the '30s, not every American — nor every fan of music — was ready for the hard-swinging style led by Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman. The sweet bands, often derided and unfairly compared to those swing bands also active during the 1930s and '40s, came out of a different tradition entirely. Though similarly influenced by jazz maestros from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong, the sound of the sweet band was simply an outgrowth from the society orchestra of the 1910s and '20s. Based mostly in New York, hundreds of society bands fanned out across the metropolis each weekend, playing easily recognizable versions of the hits-of-the-day for light dances and debutante balls. The major early sweet bands, Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians and Les Brown & His Band of Renown, paved the way for the most popular band of the World War II era, the Glenn Miller Orchestra. And even after large orchestras became unfeasible after the war, the sound of the sweet bands lived on for decades via The Lawrence Welk Show and various big-band tours

Perhaps one of the most unexpected fads of the '90s was the emergence of Retro Swing, a joyous, relatively amateurish celebration of jump blues, hot dance, and swing. There were a number of accomplished artists — such as Brian Setzer and the Squirrel Nut Zippers — within the scene, but generally, retro swing was played by twentysomethings — children of alternative rock who found that they favored martinis and Sinatra to dope and grunge. Certainly, the scene was tangentially related to the lounge hipsters in indie rock, those fans that rediscovered Esquivel and assembled groups that played lazily swinging easy listening. However, retro swingers weren't really an elitist pack. They made good-time party music, designed for dancing and fun. At first, the scene was concentrated in Los Angeles, but Doug Liman's 1996 film Swingers, which featured Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, brought it into the mainstream, and soon afterward, a deluge of retro swing bands were appearing on major and indie labels. Some had been doing it for a while — veterans included BBVD, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and, Brian Setzer, who pioneered the whole sound in the early '90s with his big band, the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Others were fresh-faced kids, swooning over the legacy of the Rat Pack, while borrowing ideas and songs from Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive. It was a self-conscious hybrid and most bands certainly couldn't play as well as the first-wave swingers they were emulating — as a matter of fact, soloing hardly even mattered in retro swing — it was the overall feel and groove that counted

The Ballroom Dance form, which is actually a relatively loose term and not as strict as many think, became prominent in 1812 and continued to develop throughout the intervening century. The waltz helped develop ballroom dancing and can easily be discerned as constituting two-thirds of these dance and musical forms. The waltz itself developed in Austria and was eventually surpassed in practice by the U.S. and Britain. In fact, most ballroom innovations and continuities are to be found in the British Isles. Ballroom dances may seem more serious than other forms of dance, and to some extent they are. The major characteristic of the ballroom dance, however, is not the serious nature of the music but rather the fact that the couples continue dancing together, arm in arm (or touching), and remain together throughout the dance — there is no switching of partners unless someone "cuts in." One partner is generally held and guided by the other. Until the development of the waltz, couples were often apart on the dance floor or switched partners in the course of the dance — even in such renowned forms as the minuet. — Keith Johnson

While New Orleans jazz has improvised ensembles, when jazz started becoming popular in the 1920s and demand was growing for larger dance bands, it became necessary for ensembles to be written down, particularly when a group included more than three or four horns. Although swing largely began when Louis Armstrong joined Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra in 1924 and Don Redman began writing arrangements for the band that echoed the cornetist's relaxed phrases, the swing era officially started in 1935 when Benny Goodman's Orchestra caught on. Swing was a major force in American popular music until the big-band era largely ended in 1946. Swing differs from New Orleans jazz and Dixieland in that the ensembles (even for small groups) are simpler and generally filled with repetitious riffs, while in contrast the solos are more sophisticated. Individual improvisations still paid close attention to the melody but due to the advance in musicianship, the solo flights were more adventurous. The swing-oriented musicians who continued performing in the style after the end of the big band era (along with later generations who adopted this approach) were also playing "mainstream." The many stars of swing during the big-band era included trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Bunny Berigan, Harry James, and Roy Eldridge; trombonists Tommy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden; clarinetists Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw; tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Ben Webster; altoists Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter; pianists Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole; guitarist Charlie Christian; drummers Gene Krupa and Chick Webb; vibraphonist Lionel Hampton; bandleader Glenn Miller; and singers Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jimmy Rushing.

Although virtually all jazz groups prior to the rise of bebop in the early to mid-'40s played for dancers, the term Dance Bands is used to describe orchestras of the 1920s and '30s whose primary function was to play background music for dancers rather than to serve as vehicles for jazz improvisations. The more progressive dance bands of the early to mid-'20s (such as those led by Paul Whiteman, Isham Jones, and Ben Selvin) left some room for short solos and by the late '20s most of the less commercial dance bands had brief spots in their arrangements for trumpeters or reed players to solo after the vocal refrain. The dance bands, although emphasizing the melody and vocalists, were generally influenced by jazz and incorporated elements of swing after the emergence of Benny Goodman in 1935, although they were often classified as "sweet" bands. After 1945, dance orchestras became less common, were often tied to nostalgia, and were much less relevant to jazz.

Big Band refers to a jazz group of ten or more musicians, usually featuring at least three trumpets, two or more trombones, four or more saxophones, and a "rhythm section" of accompanists playing some combination of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. "Big band music" as a concept for music fans is identified most with the swing era, although there were large, jazz-oriented dance bands before the swing era of the 1930s and '40s, and large jazz-oriented concert bands after the swing era.

Classification difficulties occur when stores shelve recordings by all large jazz ensembles as though it were a single style, despite the shifting harmonic and rhythmic approaches employed by new ensembles of similar instrumentation that have formed since the swing era. By lumping the music of all large jazz bands together, marketers overlook the different kinds of jazz that large groups have performed: swing (Duke Ellington and Count Basie), bebop (Dizzy Gillespie), cool (Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, Gil Evans), hard bop (Gerald Wilson), free jazz (some of Sun Ra's work after the 1950s), and jazz-rock fusion (Don Ellis' and Maynard Ferguson's groups of the 1970s). Not all of them are "swing bands."

Many listeners consider big band to denote an idiom, not just an instrumentation. For them, the strategies of arranging and soloing that were established during the 1930s link all large jazz ensembles more than the different rhythmic and harmonic concepts distinguish those of one era, for example bebop, from those of another, for example those of jazz-rock.

Another important consideration is that journalists and jazz fans of the 1930s and '40s drew distinctions between bands that conveyed the most hard-driving rhythmic qualities and frequent solo improvisations, and those that conveyed less pronounced swing feeling and improvisation. The former were called "swing bands" or "hot bands" (e.g., Count Basie's and Duke Ellington's). The latter were called "sweet bands" (e.g., Glenn Miller's, Wayne King's, Freddy Martin's, and Guy Lombardo's). Although the big-band era ended by 1946, there have been some large orchestras used in jazz ever since, even if virtually none (other than the Count Basie ghost band) operate on a full-time basis. Nearly all are led by arrangers. — Mark Gridley