On thing to remember about "swing" is that you already know it. The reason for that is simple: swing is the underlying beat for popular music/dance music for about the last eighty years, and is there in all our "traditional" genres, like blues, bluegrass old time, and such.

The explanations above are good, but I'll tell you what they told me when I was learning to read jazz arrangements:

Jazz/Swing is a compound meter, and each beat, represented by a quarter note, is divided into triplets.

Just play all the quarter notes staccato, and play all the eighth notes as if each pair was a dotted eighth and a sixteenth note (meaning that each pair is a triplet).

The other notes take care of themselves.


Remember the phrase "Beat me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar!"? That's "Boogie-woogie" which is eight eighth notes, in that dotted eighth
sixteenth pattern I explained--If it makes it easier, think'
"Dooby-dooby-dooby-dooby".

It's really important to have that staccato quarter note thing happening, though--everything else bounces off of that..