Inigo wrote:... just listening to Tuxedo Junction...
That was my mother's favorite record.
I think others have brought forward the right idea: it's not so much that folks "hate" big band as that they are sick of turning up hundreds of copies of the same records every time they find a box of 78s. I used to feel the same way about Artur Rubinstein's '40s vintage sets of the Rachmaninoff 2d and Grieg Piano Concerti--every time I found a bunch of records, I could count on it, there would be another copy of one of those sets (or, frequently, both), and I'd just do one of these numbers:
.
Be patient, folks--the generation that bought, and then squirreled away, all those Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey records is fast leaving us, and as it does so, too, will the records. It's a pure matter of demographics--I'm told the same thing happened, to a lesser degree, with scroll label Victors and contemporary pressings before the flood of big band--and in fact I think it's already well underway; I feel as if I'm not seeing nearly as many big band disks as I did, say, 15 years ago.
Oh, and for the, uh, record: while overwhelmingly a classical/opera listener and not in any way fixated on them, I like the better examples of big band just fine, and given my choice I tend to favor Artie Shaw (especially with his Gramercy Five, assuming that counts as "big band" and not some variant of "jazz") and Benny Goodman over, say, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. And I'm not even that big a fan of the clarinet!