If you want to understand what made Chick Webb special, start with the drums. Most big band drummers of the 1930s were timekeepers — steady, functional, largely invisible beneath the brass and reeds. Webb was the opposite. He played with a aggression and wit that made the whole band feel like it was organized around his kit rather than the other way around. He drove the band from the back, but everyone in the room knew exactly who was in charge.

Webb was born in Baltimore with tuberculosis of the spine, which left him with a hunched back and required a specially elevated custom drum kit so he could reach everything comfortably. None of that slowed him down. He came up through the New York scene in the late 1920s and eventually planted his flag at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where he became the house bandleader. The Savoy held regular battles of the bands, and Webb's crew beat nearly everyone — including, famously, Benny Goodman's orchestra. The Savoy crowd was a tough judge, and they loved Webb above almost everyone else.

The band's sound was hot and direct. Webb favored punchy arrangements with room for soloists to stretch out, and he had a real ear for talent. When he hired a young Ella Fitzgerald in 1935 — she was a teenager, essentially an unknown — it changed the trajectory of both their careers. Ella brought a polish to the band's recordings that made them commercially viable in a new way, and Webb's swinging rhythm section gave her a foundation she'd spend decades building on. Their collaboration produced A-Tisket, A-Tasket (1938), one of the biggest hits of the decade.

The recorded output is worth digging into even if it sounds dated in spots. The early sides from the late 1920s and early 1930s are rougher, more raucous, closer to the raw energy of the Savoy floor. As the decade went on and Ella became more central, the band got a little smoother — more radio-friendly, more pop-inflected. Neither version is wrong. They're just different sides of a band that was always responding to what the audience wanted while still swinging hard enough to keep the dancers honest.

Webb died in 1939, at around 34, from complications related to his spinal condition. He'd been declining for a while but kept performing as long as he could. After his death, Ella fronted the band for a few years before going solo. Webb never got the kind of retrospective fame that Benny Goodman or Duke Ellington accumulated over long careers, partly because he died young and partly because he was a drummer — leaders who also played an instrument that could carry a melody tend to get more ink. But anyone who's heard him drive a band through a live set knows exactly how good he was.