I want to elaborate on this a bit. There’s a lot of variety in big band music. There was Glenn Miller, for example, who was on the pop side (and *String of Pearls *is one of my favorite tunes). Ellington, a bit less so. The Goodman band could play pop stuff with the best of them, but the subsets of the Goodman band were pretty hardcore jazz, especially when Charlie Christian was included. And Goodman himself could play classical music quite well when he wanted to (I believe he recorded Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, as did Wynton Marsalis).