Glenn Miller CD's
GLENN MILLER ON FILM - COMPLETE MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS
This wonderful single CD has nineteen (19) selections taken directly from the soundtracks of the two Glenn Miller motion pictures, with ORIGINAL performances of the classic Miller hits from the two Miller motion pictures, ORCHESTRA WIVES and SUN VALLEY SERENADE.
Amazon Listing for "Glenn Miller on Film" - Not in stereo. (Studios recorded the soundtracks in two channels for the purposes of equalizing the different sections of the band for the final mono soundtrack. The video of Sun Valley Serenade features these "stereo" tracks, but not this CD, going by the Amazon audio clips online.)
RALPH FLANAGAN
Ralph Flanagan produced what are arguably the most accurate Glenn Miller "imitation" recordings, adding the famous sound to songs outside the traditional Miller repertoire as well as to established Miller hits. Having recorded in the era when "high fidelity" was just getting its legs, these are likely the best balance between the genuine Miller product and clean-sounding wide-range recordings.
Bandleader, conductor, pianist, composer, and arranger for the orchestras of Hal McIntyre, Sammy Kaye, Blue Barron, Charlie Barnet, and Alvino Rey. He was educated at Lorain High School, where he was a member of the National Honors Society, the student senate and newspaper staff, Hi-Y and the chorus. During World War II he served in the Merchant Marine, and then by 1949 he formed a very successful orchestra which is credited with re-popularizing the Glenn Miller "sound", and which made many records, among them "Rag Mop" and "Hot Toddy". (The Flanagan orchestra's theme songs were "Giannina Mia" and "Singing Winds", the latter title also applying to the orchestra's singing group.) He joined ASCAP in 1950, and his popular-song compositions include "Hot Today" and "Flanagan's Boogie".
He was voted the "favorite band" in a number of early 1950s polls, played for over two million people in a year's time, and racked up big grosses, including some $600,000 in 1951 alone.
http://www.bigbandlibrary.com/ralphflanagan.html
• given name: Ralph Elias Flenniken
• birth: Apr. 7, 1914, Lorain, OH
• death: Dec. 30, 1995
• education: graduated from Lorain High School, Lorain, OH, 1931
• military service: U.S. Merchant Marine, Oct. 1942-1946
• hobbies: piloting his own plane, woodworking, photography
• dislikes: "loud-mouths, wild clothes, bad drivers, and city life"
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"Actually, his contributions were in what I'd call 'the arranging field,'" singer Harry Prime, who worked with Ralph Flanagan's band from 1949 to 1953, told me recently. "He was not a very personable guy. He was nice enough . . . but he was kind of shy . . . He didn't have many smarts about the music business, and I would call him a guy that was, sort of, 'a fish out of
water,' because many times when we were playing ballrooms, as we traveled the country . . . we played every major ballroom and casino and hotel in America, and did it numerous times... and he would constantly be coming up to me and saying, 'What am I doing here? I just can't stand this being "in the fishbowl," all these people coming up and talking to me.' He was really not a guy that enjoyed the spotlight at all . . . He had been mainly a 'background' man."
"You gotta remember as we're talking about him that this was not the kind of guy that I would spend... When we would be off the bandstand, Flanagan was an entity unto himself. He didn't mix much with the other guys," Prime said. "When we were looking for a place to go have a beer, or something good to eat, he would be looking for a hobby shop. He loved to come on the stand with all these, like, cufflinks that lit up, and he was a strange guy to be in the music business . . . He just wasn't a party-type guy, and was totally different from most of the musicians that I knew . . . So there was no putting our heads together, consulting . . . He never said to me, ' What do you think you'd like to do?,' anything like that. He was a very hard guy to be real friendly with."
Flanagan had worked as pianist and arranger for Sammy Kaye's band from 1937 to 1941, and went on to write arrangements for Charlie Barnet, Boyd Raeburn, Tony Pastor, and, starting in 1946, Perry Como's "Chesterfield Supper Club" radio show on NBC.
"He had been an arranger and was a rather obscure guy in the recording business," Prime reflected. "But they found out that he had a flair for imitating other sounds, and probably his best imitation was doing the Miller sound."
Evidently, Flanagan approached Herb Hendler, a producer at Rainbow Records, in 1946, desiring to make a set of 78-rpm discs, "A Tribute to Glenn Miller."
Flanagan conducted the orchestra, which was built around a number of Miller alumni, including Bobby Hackett and Dale McMickle (trumpets), Al Klink and Ernie Caceres (saxophones), and Trigger Alpert (bass).
Hendler suggested using Miller's "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" as a guide.
Selections chosen were Make Believe and Always, two songs written in the 1920s (old); Low Gear and Come On In, two Flanagan originals (new); I'm Getting Sentimental Over You and Goodbye (borrowed from Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, respectively); and St. Louis Blues and Basin Street Blues (blue).
Without question, the man most responsible for Flanagan's success as a bandleader was Hendler.
"He was a manipulative guy," Prime commented. "He was shrewd and he was energetic. He was very clever."
Hendler knew, for instance, the various artists-and-repertoire, or "a&r" men, at the record company.
"He had the contacts at RCA Victor, and once he got in with Victor, with Joe Csida and some of those other guys down there... [ Hugo ] Winterhalter and all, and Henri Rene... he had that contact," Prime went on. "He was a guy that would smile at you, but he would be picking your pockets while he was smiling, you know."
I asked how true was the story that RCA had confused Flanagan with the marvelous arranger Bill Finegan. Had Prime heard that?
"I heard it constantly," he laughed. "And I was constantly denying it. No, they wouldn't make a... when you think about it, they knew who Bill Finegan was. He had a big reputation... And he was around New York all of the time."
So, according to Prime, the story was a phony.
"You gotta remember, these people that were the major players in that world of the big band business and the entertainment business were usually crossing one another's paths every day, walking on the street, where they had lunch, you know. And it was a big thing where they converged on the Brill Building or the Gateway Restaurant or Lindy's or Jack Dempsey's Restaurant. And there was no way that RCA Victor could have mistaken Bill Finegan for Ralph Flanagan. But, what happened was the two guys that handled Flanagan realized that this would be a very big talking point and . . . they didn't deny it, they just let it fly. And the thing had legs, the story grew, and it became a story that looked good everywhere we went."
By 1949, the strike had been resolved and Hendler had joined RCA Victor. When the company wanted to revive interest in dance music, he turned to Flanagan.
"They decided to go for the big challenge and put out a Miller-type dance band, under Ralph Flanagan's name," Prime recalled. "So that's when they contacted me to be the singer with the band."
He was voted the "favorite band" in a number of early 1950s polls, played for over two million people in a year's time, and racked up big grosses, including some $600,000 in 1951 alone.
Flanagan, again mirroring Miller, even had a vocal group, which was called The Singing Winds. (Singing Winds was the name of Flanagan's theme song.)
Prime left Flanagan in 1953. "I'm listening to the radio and hearing guys like Eddie Fisher, Jerry Vale, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, Steve Lawrence... and not a one of them ever sang with a band," he observed. "The format was changing while I was out there, trying to do what everyone said, 'This is the way you do it... the way Sinatra did it, the way Haymes did it, the way Como did it.'"
"But the format changed in those years after World War II," Prime said. "People didn't give a damn whether you sang with a band. In other words, if you were with Tommy Dorsey prior to World War II, that was the top of the rung . . . you were known all over America. After World War II, there were guys that sang with Tommy Dorsey and nobody even knows them today. That's how it slipped, the prestige angle."
"He came to Sunnybrook Ballroom, but what he was doing... he had disbanded his regular band, and he'd come into a town [ and ] he'd go to the union and get a bunch of musicians that . . . weren't really with him . . . He'd put the arrangements in front of them and they'd play his music. And I went up to Sunnybrook to see him . . . but that's the last time I saw him."
At this writing, it's been a decade since Flanagan's death, and more than 50 years (!) since Prime was the singer with his group. Although Prime was there from the start, recorded and traveled with Flanagan, and sang on a large portion of the band's selections, he was not given any choice in his material.
With Flanagan sometimes quoting, almost note-for-note, various bits and pieces of Miller's original arrangements on his new records, RCA's big promotional push behind Flanagan angered one of the men who had actually been a huge part of that sound with Glenn, Tex Beneke.
"It did, but Tex... I felt sorry for him in a way... but his demise was much his own [ doing ]," Prime observed.
Beneke was, at the time, leading the 'official' Glenn Miller Orchestra, also signed to RCA Victor, and wanted the group to progress, musically.
"They created a demand by recording for about two or three months, in New York, with the best musicians in the city, what they call 'studio men,'" Prime noted. "And then when the band became popular, and people were demanding to see it, they auditioned young men who wanted to travel with the band and make a reputation with them. So the men who hit the road... the only one from the original group was me. The rest of them were guys that did not make the original records."
"He had an excellent band. I thought his band was better than Flanagan's," Prime told me. "But, he just didn't like that idea of playing the ghost band of Glenn Miller . . . He wanted to sound like the Tex Beneke Orchestra, and, believe me, to me that was a great sound. I loved the way the band played and sounded, and the things that they did. He had an excellent boy vocalist in Garry Stevens, and they did some real good things . . . RCA Victor was so insistent on continuing that [ original ] Miller sound that they looked around for a guy and found Flanagan."
Hendler and his business partner, Bernie Woods, pushed it to the point that Flanagan's band, following in Miller's footsteps, opened at the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Statler in New York City on September 11, 1950, and was featured on the radio in a show sponsored, like Miller had been, by Chesterfield cigarettes.
Prime last saw Flanagan in 1958, when Flanagan appeared with a pickup band at a one-night stand in Pottstown, PA.
Some musicians then had reputations as drinkers; Flanagan would have a drink or two only occasionally.
"All he needed was to get two or three drinks in him and then he was like a guy who drank 'til he got stoned," Prime remarked. "But then he wouldn't drink again for about three months . . . He was an occasional drinker, but what an occasion when he did drink!"
Perhaps the most embarassing moment occured when Flanagan was arrested for public nudity.
"It happened in Atlantic City," Prime remembered. "He started drinking, one of those nights he decided he was going to 'pop a few,' and he went down on the beach and disrobed. And he was walking on the beach with no clothes on. They locked him up [ chuckles ]. I had to lead the band on the Steel Pier for about two nights."
Flanagan enjoyed flying his own single-engine plane to jobs, when possible. He escaped injury in 1954 when the light plane he was piloting crashed, as he was taking off from a Chicago airport. His plane was caught in the propwash of a four engine aircraft.
"Flanagan was just a so-so piano player," Prime reflected. "He was an arranger, and like most arrangers, they did their best work in what I'd call the 'shadows' of the band. And I think it proved true, because as soon as he got what he considered enough money to get out of the business, he got out fast and retired to Florida and became almost reclusive in his lifestyle. He had a chain of motels down there, or something like that . . . He's a guy that never sought the limelight and was uncomfortable in the limelight."
Still, Prime looks back on his vocals for Flanagan with satisfaction.
"No matter what key he put me in, I could sing it," he said. "And there were tempos that would have killed Ray Eberle, like You're Breaking My Heart and things like that . . [ the Miller band's ] arrangements were so much kinder to Ray Eberle . . . While I was vocalizing up front, Flanagan would be calling . . . 'Play louder, play louder!' You had to battle the band all the time."
No wonder Prime is excited about the freedom he has enjoyed during the last few years, singing at a restaurant about 30 miles outside of Philadelphia.
LINKS:
Samples of Ralph Flanagan music - Amazon
RAY EBERLE
Glenn Miller vocalist and orchestra leader Ray Eberle was the brother of Jimmy Dorsey singer Bob Eberly. Ray had no professional experience when he joined Miller in 1938. Miller, looking for a male vocalist for his new orchestra, asked Bob if he had any brothers at home that could sing. Bob said ''yes,'' and Miller hired Ray without question.
Though not all music critics were impressed with Ray's voice, he became an integral part of the Miller line-up, singing on many of the group's biggest hits. Even Miller's own musicians weren't happy with Eberle's style and often voiced their complaints, but Miller stuck with him. It was his lack of discipline that ultimately led to his departure from the group in 1942, though the actual event that led to his dismissal was beyond his control. Stuck in traffic during a Chicago engagement, he was late for rehearsal. Miller fired him on the spot, no questions asked. Eberle responded by blasting Miller in a trade paper. An angry Miller retorted with his own version of Eberle's firing.
Despite the riff with his former boss Eberle soon landed a job with Gene Krupa. He stayed only a short while, though, leaving to go solo. He starred in several movies in 1943, but before the year was out he entered the army. When his tour of duty ended in 1945 he formed his own orchestra, which drew on his past life with Miller. The group broke up in the mid-1950s, after which Eberle continued singing, often appearing on television. In 1970 he joined former Miller bandmate Tex Beneke's orchestra for a national tour. He later re-formed his own orchestra. Ray Eberle died from a heart attack in 1979.
STAN KENTON
Kenton Interview, 1972
Stan Kenton's orchestra captured the world's imagination in the late 1940s, just as other swing bands were fading. For the next three decades, he would be the most popular bandleader who played what was, essentially, art music. Kenton's band didn't play primarily for dancers. Unlike Woody Herman's, it didn't have an entertaining, singing showman up front. Yet Kenton was a master of marketing: He packaged and sold the concepts of newness and modernity to a pop-music audience.
At first his experiments ran parallel to the beboppers, who were likewise introducing a more sophisticated harmonic system into jazz. In a different manner than Dizzy Gillespie, Kenton introduced Afro-Cuban polyrhythms to North America. His music was at once futuristic, masculine and highly romantic, and his fanatical followers were the jazz equivalent of Trekkies.
Stan Kenton was born in Wichita, Kansas on December 15, 1911, and raised first in Colorado, then in California. He learned piano as a child, and while still a teenager toured with various bands. He attended Bell High School, in Bell, California, where he graduated in 1930. In June 1941 he formed his own band, which developed into one of the best-known West Coast ensembles of the 1940s. In the mid-1940s, Kenton's band and style became known as "The Wall of Sound", a tag later used by Phil Spector.
Kenton played in the 1930s in the dance bands of Vido Musso and Gus Arnheim, but his natural inclination was a band leader. In 1941 he formed his first orchestra, which later was named after his theme song "Artistry in Rhythm". A competent pianist, Kenton was much more important as an arranger and inspiration for his loyal sidemen.
Kenton spent the summer of 1941 playing regularly before a very appreciative audience at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach, CA. Kenton, who enjoyed high-note trumpeters and thick-toned tenors, struggled a bit after its initial success. Its Decca recordings were not big sellers.
By late 1943 with a Capitol Records contract, a popular record in "Eager Beaver", and growing recognition, the Stan Kenton Orchestra was gradually catching on. Its soloists during the war years included Art Pepper, briefly Stan Getz, altoist Boots Mussulli, and singer Anita O'Day. By 1945 the band had evolved quite a bit.
Pete Rugolo became chief arranger (sharing Kenton's ideas), and June Christy was Kenton's new singer; her hits (including "Tampico" and "Across the Alley From the Alamo") made it possible for Kenton to finance his more ambitious projects. A popular recording of "Laura" was made, the theme song from the film Laura (starring actress Gene Tierney), and featured the voices of the band.
Calling his music "progressive jazz," Kenton sought to lead a concert orchestra as opposed to a dance band at a time when most big bands were starting to break up. By 1947 Kai Winding was greatly influencing the sound of Kenton's trombonists, the trumpet section included such screamers as Buddy Childers, Ray Wetzel, and Al Porcino. Jack Costanzo's bongos were bringing Latin rhythms into Kenton's sound, and a riotous version of "The Peanut Vendor" contrasted with the somber "Elegy for Alto". Kenton had succeeded in forming a radical and very original band that gained its own audience.
In 1949 Kenton took a year off. In 1950 he put together his most advanced band, the 39-piece Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra that included 16 strings, a woodwind section, and two French horns. Its music ranged from the unique and very dense modern classical charts of Bob Graettinger to works that somehow swung despite the weight. But from a commercial standpoint, it became impossible. Kenton managed two tours during 1950-1951 but soon reverted to his usual 19-piece lineup.
In the mid-1950's, Kenton returned to a swinging period which was quite successful and produced some new recordings of his classics "in Hi-Fi" for Verve Records.
Kenton's manner seemed far from the wild-eyed avant-gardist his music might suggest; his style was buttoned down and conservative. He never appeared in less than a suit and tie and conducted himself like a combination of college professor and church leader.
Kenton's last successful experiment was his mellophonium band of 1960-1963. Despite the difficulties in keeping the four mellophoniums in tune (the "mellophonium" was a newly-engineered instrument offering a sound somewhere between a trumpet and a trombone), this particular Kenton orchestra had its exciting moments; the albums "Adventures in Jazz" and "West Side Story" each won Grammy awards in 1962 and 1963. Kenton Plays Wagner (1964) was produced in concert with his interests in jazz education and encouraging big band music in high schools and colleges instructing what he called "progressive jazz." Stan knew what he had in the body of work that was The Stan Kenton Orchestra and in the remainder of his life and career, he took on the challenge of ensuring his legacy that was Progressive Jazz.
In the early 1970s Kenton split from his long-time association with Capitol Records and formed his own label, "The Creative World of Stan Kenton". Recordings produced during the 1970s on this new label included several "live" concerts at various universities. Kenton made his charts available to college and high-school stage bands. When Kenton took to the road during the early 70's, he took with him seasoned veteran musicians, teaming them with relatively unknown young artists to mentor America's youth and take advantage of the unchecked energy in those young players, andpreserving the legacy of his work as an active music form. New Kenton arrangements (including those by Hank Levy, Bill Holman, Bob Curnow, Willie Maiden and Ken Hanna) expanded the repertoire.
Jack Sandmeier, Road Manager during these years, tells the story of an unusual meeting in a hotel lobby lounge between Woody Herman and Kenton. Unusual because they both toured more than fifty weeks a year "one-nighters," in order to keep their respective bands on the road, they hardly ever met. As Kenton discussed a chronically late band member, Herman said to him, "Fire his ass, there's thousands of them and only two of us."
He had an aneurysm in 1972 and recoverd, returning to the bandstand. He had a skull fracture from a fall in 1977 while on tour in Reading, PA. Kenton continued leading and touring with his big band up to his final performance in August 1978. He suffered a stroke in August 1979, from which he did not recover.
- Born December 15, 1911, in Wichita, KN; died August 25, 1979, in Hollywood, CA; married three times; three children; several grandchildren.
"From the time I was fourteen years old, I was all music," he told Carole Easton in Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton. After graduating from high school in 1930, the music-crazy Kenton scraped out a living as a musician for five dollars a night playing speakeasies and gambling halls in San Diego and Las Vegas.
Info source: www.artistdirect.com/nad/music/artist/bio/0,,452684,00.html#bio
Article on Kenton, Capitol, Sinatra, "Live at Basin St. East" ...
Wikipedia: Stan Kenton
Amazon List: Kenton Books
Stan Kenton Interview, 1972
Interview Copyright © 1972 Les Tomkins.
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www.jazzprofessional.com/interviews/kenton_1.htm
Q: Stan, the band sounds marvellous. Would you say that this is as good as the best of your bands in the past?
A: Yes, every bit as good; in some ways better. You know, each band has its own personality. It's because of the musicians that make it up. The overall direction, purpose and sound are the same. But some people think this is the best band that I've ever had.
Q: Well, I heard it at Croydon, and I gather from members of the band that it wasn't necessarily the best night it's had. All I can say is: it sounded quite superb to me.
A: They got involved with the record they were making, and recording, as you well know, is quite an emotional experience. Sometimes the guys are not quite objective about themselves. People that have recorded for a long time know: with a particular kind of music like ours, it sometimes takes an engineer and the technicians a while to get acquainted with how they're going to handle it.
And the fellows heard the first playback or so, and it was all mixed up and wrong; the engineers hadn't found themselves yet. So they formed rather a false impression. That's one of the advantages of some of the older guys, I guess: they know what is happening. But the younger guys, as well as they play, sometimes say: "Oh, it's gonna be terrible here." It affects them psychologically.
Q: How did it go at Ronnie's?
A: Very good. We played the first two sets down there in the dark, you know, due to the power cuts. I've never played the club before; I was in there once in 1969. But I think they were happy.
Q: Generally speaking, you play more concerts than clubs, don't you? You'd call it a concert band, would you?
A: Oh yes, definitely. Occasionally we'll play a dance, but mostly we play music for listening, either in a concert situation or in a club situation. I like to think that ours is music for music's sake. Whenever you play dance music, it serves a function, it becomes a utility; you have to worry about the tempos and what you're going to play for people. But when you're playing for listening, you're free; you can create the music you feel that you want, and don't have to adhere to any standards.
Q: After all these years in the business, it's obvious, from seeing you in front of the band, that you're just as enthusiastic and as concerned about your music today as you ever were. The years haven't made you blasé at all?
A: No-not at all. I'm glad that you say that. It's a compliment, and I don't really know why it is. It's just the way I am.
Q: You just feel that you have a standard, and you must always uphold it?
A: Well, I feel that I must approve of what we're doing first, before I can ask anybody else to approve of it. And I have never tried to study surveys or go into any kind of research to find out what people want, what they like, and try to give it to them. I don't think that's our purpose- or mine, anyway. It's any artist's purpose to create the finest thing they know how to create, then present it to the public and hope for acceptance.
Q: Well, over the years you've had a mixture of reactions. Some of your most progressive things have possibly not gone as well as you would have hoped. I suppose you'd say that, along the line, you'd had to make some concessions.
A: What you say is true. It's a case of making compromises to gain an end. But if you start compromising and you forget about what the end is supposed to be, then that's bad. You've got to know where you're going.
Q: In recent years, since you were in this country in 1963 with the mellophonium band, we've heard some reports of your activities but, until recently, very little on records. We heard you were involved with the Neophonic band; was that a regular organisation or strictly devoted to students?
A: Let me explain it to you like this: I had two small children at home, and there was no mother.
I tried to maintain as normal a home as possible for them when they were little. So my tours had to be limited to six or eight weeks in the Spring, and about the same amount in the Fall.
And it was during this period that the Neophonic was started in Los Angeles, in order for me to be at home. Now, of course, the children are older, and they're in school; it gives me a chance now to get back to music fulltime.
Which we've been doing for the last year and a half or two years. But to answer the question about the Neophonic; it was started mainly because of a particular need. The modern composers today, that are writing the art music-as we might call it-are writing because they have evolved in jazz, and they're thinking in terms of jazz.
But they can't get proper performances on their music by symphony orchestras-because it has to be interpreted and played by jazz musicians. And there was no outlet for them.
So we created the Neophonic as a showcase for modern composers that are writing in the jazz idiom, that are trying to write, not dance music, film music or TV music, but the finest music they know how.
It gained quite a bit of artistic recognition, but again, as with things like that, we had financial problems. Possibly one day, when I dissolve this band and go home, I'll get the Neophonic going again.
Q: But what came out of that? Did you get some composers off the ground?
A: Yes. The important thing that came out of it is: the thing was picked up by some of the colleges and universities in lieu of their concert bands. That is to say, the concert bands based on the traditional approach to concert music; whereas the Neophonic is based upon jazz.
There are now some college and university Neophonic bands going around the country. The most active has been the band at Cerritos College-a twoyear college in the suburban part of Los Angeles, in s town called Norwalk-the Collegiate Neophonic; that keeps going all the time. Some of the guys in the band that I have right now came out of the Collegiate Neophonic.
Q: You reached a certain point, apparently, where you felt that your musical output was in danger of being heard no longer; you discovered that some of your original masters were being deleted. You took positive action about that, didn't you?
A: Well, it's because of marketing conditions in the States. Capitol were the ones that started it, really. They decided that they would close up their branches; they used to have branches in every major city, with promotion men and their own samen. They conceived the idea of making a bigger profit if they would give the records to independent distributors who later became known as `the rackjobbers'. These are the fellows that put the records in the supermarkets and drug stores and made them available that way. They're at cut prices; also they wanted to sell to most of the people most of the time so what they did: they started marketing only kids' music, you know. I guess it's because a lot of adults have kids' minds also.
Jazz was just disappearing everywhere; so was classical music. There was really no place for people who had sophisticated tastes to find the music that they wanted. So I could see us going down a one way street with a dead end. And when there are so many important jazz artists walking around in the States with no record contracts at all, it's not as it should be.
When Capitol as a company fell apart and these practices were the reason for it falling apart then all of our stuff was deleted. Whereupon I made a deal with Capitol Records to lease back to me the important masters that we had recorded, and we formed The Creative World out of that.
Q: So now you have complete control of all your recorded repertoire, do you?
A: Yes, and we're now in the process of opening up manufacturing and distribution in Europe, and also in Great Britain. We have to do that.
As well as reissuing older material, you've made some new albums for this label with the present band? We've got about three so far, but we're going to make more.
One was the Redlands session; another, released recently, was made at Brigham Young University, which is out West; in the state of Utah. Both of them are double album packages, recorded live.
Q: Since taking your affairs into your own hands in this way, have you found a reawakening of interest?
A: Oh, certainly. I can even see it over here, and The Creative World doesn't mean anything yet. But I believe we're better off this time than we were in '63, when we were here. I don't know whether it's a new interest in big band jazz or what, but I do feel there's some reason for it.
We're kinda lucky over in the States, in that we have our constant activity in the schools. Be cause all you get on the air is what we call `format radio' which is the top twenty or the top forty over and over again, all day long. You don't hear jazz. So, when we go into the schools the young musicians get to hear this music, and they never heard it before. It's quite a different experience for them.
And the exciting thing is, most of the schools all have jazz bands even the junior high schools. Some of the universities have as many as two and three bands. In Denton, Texas, at North Texas State University, there are eleven bands going there every day twenty two musicians in each band, and no one man plays in two bands. So it gives you an idea of the activity in big band jazz. If all this is any indication as to the future, I look for a most exciting future for the big band jazz. There's new blood coming all the time.
Q: Would you say this was some kind of reaction against the predominance of rock type groups, or has it any thing to do with some of the rock groups seeing the light and adding horns?
A: I do think that the rock groups that have added horns have helped. Especially when Blood, Sweat And Tears came along as well as Chicago. A lot of the young people thought that jazz was old fashioned, you know because of the way their parents talked about it and they want their own music. But when they heard these groups playing this music, these long, extended improvisations and everything, they thought they were listening to rock music. It wasn't it was jazz.
Like, there was a cute thing when we played a date up in Toronto, Canada. We did an afternoon three hour session at this high school, and they in vited young musicians and teachers from all over the To ronto area to be there. We had, I guess, about eight or nine hun dred young players there. And we always start the clinics with a demonstration concert that lasts about forty five minutes; so that the people can hear the band play and watch the fel lows; because the fellows work with them the rest of the after noon. It's a kind of a `getting acquainted' period.
So that night where we were playing, in the hotel there, a woman came up to me and she said. "My son was at your clinic this afternoon." I said: "Was he? What does he play?" and I think she said trombone or something.
"Did he like it?" I asked her; she said: "Oh yes, you know what he said? He said the band sounded like three Blood, Sweat And Tears and three Chicagos going all at the same time ! " If they can just get exposed to it that's the thing. I think, too, that in the watering down of music, trying to appeal to the kids, they haven't had a chance to even have any choice in sophisticated things. They've just listened to their music all the time.
Q: Do you: think the word jazz itself has become a kind of stigma?
A: Well, it seems to have put young people off. But I think we'll probably always use the word, although there have been some times when all of us thought we should call it some thing else but it's still jazz. Duke one time said : "I think we need a new word."
Q: You've worked with young musicians at all times in your bands. How would you compare today's musician ship with past eras?
A: There are more musicians today than ever before; it just seems like they're everywhere. And they play much better than the older fellows.
Q: Why is that, do you think?
A: They're better educated; I think they're more dedicated, and I think their values are different. And maybe the element of competition, too, because they know that if they don't practise and study there's another guy who's studying and practising who is going to get ahead of him. So it's really a delight.
The thing that concerns me a lot, is: where are the leaders? There are plenty of musicians; but it seems like the young guys that should organise and get things together are not showing themselves. It takes a young leader to come along, and he has to say to himself: "I want to lead a band, and I'm' sure that I'm right and everybody else is wrong and I'm gonna prove it." That's what makes a leader.
Q: Well, that's what you did back in the 'forties, after all.
A: I think so-yes.
Q: They seem to be looking to other people to take the lead, do they?
A: I don't know, but they're not coming forward. Well, there are two or three young guys in the States, that I think something might happen with. Maybe there's just the feeling of not wanting to sacrifice what you have to sacrifice to get something going. There's been Don Ellis; and we have Tommy Vig in Los Angeles, too-he's a very capable personality and musician, but so far he hasn't been able to get anything off the ground. He came from Hungary to the States-a brilliant drummer and arranger in the big band idiom.
Q: Speaking of musicianship hearing this band of yours play an old score like "Opus In Pastels", although they were playing the same notes, they phrased them their own way, and it became like a new composition based on the old one.
A: Yes. Well, I feel this way about the band: I want the band to sound different every day we play. Not completely different, but I think it's very important that the band has a sound of spontaneity about it. If you take a piece of music and rehearse it to such a fine degree, and insist that the band plays it the same way all the time, it becomes static, and there's really no emotional content in it.
I tell the Soloists that they should take chances; they must, because out of taking chances they forge ahead. And the rhythm players especially I'd like them in a constant state of creativity. Don't play the same thing every time, you know.
That's why I'm so fond of Von Ohlen and Worster, too-they are creators. And when Von Ohlen is playing drums, he's thinking every second; he's not remembering how he played it yesterday. That's what I think makes a band exciting. When I'm conducting things, I conduct it different every time.
Q: The one very obvious thing which also strikes me is the rapport between you and the band.
This has always been your attitude to band leading, has it? You've never felt that it was necessary to be the kind of remote tyrant that some leaders have been.
A: No; it's an organised thing. There has to be some kind of subconscious communication that goes on, and it's my jab to draw energy from them, to know when there should be restraint and when I should let it go free. We don't have the feeling, like a lot of bands do, that I am the leader and I'm supposed to be called Mr. Kenton and that sort of thing. They know I'm the leader.
A cute thing on the subject: there was a man that came to Zurich from Holland to do a newspaper story; and I was sitting in a coffee shop with him. The musicians kept coming in and going out, and they'd say: "Hi, Stan" and I'd say "Hi" to them. All of a sudden this Dutch fellow said: "I notice they don't call you Mr. Kenton." And I didn't know what to say to him.
I finally teased him, and said : "No, they don't. I try to get them to, but they won't."
Q: Well, I suppose that kind of a relaxed out look is something that some people might find hard to understand.
A: People can't understand why I stay in the same hotel with the band; they think I should be at another hotel. Other times, people will offer to drive me to different places in a car; but the band goes on a bus, and I have to be with them.
Q: But for four months recently you weren't with the band. And yet it held together.
A: Yeah, it was a phenomenal thing. I never thought they'd make it, but they did. I think everybody in the trade looks on it as such an unusual thing, that they were able to do it. No one could have expected them to last for four months without me. Because musicians, to play this kind of music, have to be geared pretty high, you know, and when people are in that high gear, you can sometimes have trouble personality clashes and so forth. But they didn't. No one man was changed.
Interview Copyright © 1972 Les Tomkins.
Artie Shaw
Shaw's exit from music raises at least one contradiction, Sudhalter said. "If you take him at his word, that he so loathed the jitterbugs, why did he keep coming back to it? If something is sufficiently repugnant to you the natural response would be to say, 'Screw this,' and become something else. I don't doubt he's disdainful, but why did he keep organizing bands and doing all the things that would elicit these very responses from audiences? There's a paradox there."
Shaw also was notoriously temperamental, a crusty band leader who denounced jitterbugs as "morons" in a 1939 interview, insulted fans for invading his privacy and openly chided the industry that drove his career.
"When people came up to me during work and said something I didn't like, I told them to go to hell," Shaw wrote in his 1952 autobiography, "The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity."
This topic triggered his legendary temper during an interview in March. "I hated the audiences," he bellowed. "And I hated the ambience -- bloodsuckers, the agents, the a‑‑holes. I couldn't handle that."
Shaw formed roughly a dozen bands during his career. To satisfy creative yearnings, he assembled large groups with lush string sections, often rejected by fans and occasionally critics. When those failed commercially, he toggled over to stock swing bands that cranked out "Beguine" and other popular standards he regarded as pabulum. Fans ate it up.
Shaw credits psychoanalysis for saving his life, that is, giving him the strength to leave the music business, which he believes was sapping him emotionally and physically. But fans, friends and musical peers still lament his exit, seemingly at the top of his craft.
"I was going around the country doing my impression of Elvis," Shaw said, a comment that drew a round of good-natured laughs. "I was that big a star, believe it."
Shaw derides Glenn Miller as the Lawrence Welk of jazz. His music carries no surprises and it doesn't take you anyplace special beyond the dance floor.
On Benny Goodman: "He never went past the original four, five, six chords. He didn't understand bop. He didn't understand what was happening to his music. What he did was very good, but it was in its time."
Woody Herman: "He knew he wasn't a very good clarinet player, but he was an excellent bandleader. So everybody does what he's got to do."
Gene Lees, 74, (songwriter and former editor of Down Beat magazine) once a longtime friend of Shaw, called him "one of the most evil men I've known in my life." Then, as now, Lees declined to elaborate, saying only that Shaw "has hurt so many people." Lees called Shaw a "chronic ingrate" who "didn't appreciate his own success" and "quit being a first-rate musician to become a second-rate writer." Sammy Cahn devoted an entire chapter in his memoir to Shaw, blasting him as an "empty man," devoid of heart.
Asked to respond, Shaw waved his hand and said, "I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of saying anything. Let 'em wonder."
Arthur Jacob Arshawsky was born May 23, 1910, to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City's Lower East Side and raised in New Haven, Conn.
As a child, Shaw received anti-Semitic taunts. The episodes haunted him. As a musician, he realized he could pass as gentile and avoided revealing his Jewish roots to fellow musicians. It wasn't until he wrote "Cinderella" that he confessed his shame over his Jewish identity.
"It took me a long time to get over the impact of it," Shaw said. "It gave you a sense of inferiority, so you had to prove you were better. It had something to do with my drive. If you press a spring hard enough, it will jump farther. So I guess my ego was squashed enough so it had to burst out."
His parents split up when he was 13, and Shaw's relationship with his father was "nonexistent," he said. "I think he was very self-involved. He wanted to be something else. He never could quite make it, so he was very bitter.
"To this day, I remember at 10 o'clock at night, 'Go out and get me a pack cigarettes,' " he said, mimicking his father's Yiddish accent and syntax. "Lord Salisburys, he smoked," Shaw said, and then, after a thoughtful pause, repeated the brand name, chuckling at the memory. "And I was always very resentful of that."
Artie Shaw said in a recent article, "Love is an agreement between two people to overestimate each other."
He says that women used to scratch their phone numbers in the paint of his car, and they'd tear his clothes off, tear his tie, tear his shirt buttons. Things like that.
With Lana Turner, they eloped on the first date. "It became kind of her game of chicken," Shaw said. " 'You don't mean that.' 'Yes I do.' 'Try me.' 'All right, come on.' "
Glamorous women became synonymous with Shaw. Historians record eight marriages. Shaw likes to say seven, including Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Kathleen Winsor, Betty Kern, Doris Dowling and Evelyn Keyes. "The first one wasn't even a marriage," he said. "It was annulled. It didn't exist. But seven is quite a few. I kept practicing."
Shaw's fingers ran glissandos across imaginary clarinet keys in the air. "All night long, all day long, my fingers are doing that," he said, his voice rising in pitch with a palpable tone of annoyance. "And I have to remind myself when I get tense not to do that anymore."
Does he miss performing? A wan smile creased his lips and Shaw responded with a pat anecdote:
"I told someone this the other day," he said. "If you had an arm that was gangrenous and you had to have it cut off, would you miss it? Probably. Of course you'd miss it. But it saved your life. So I had to get rid of that driven thing. It would have killed me."
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Millionaire playboy and bandleader Charlie Barnet is one of the more colorful figures in jazz history. Barnet was born into New York high society in 1913. He rebelled against his parent's wishes that he study law and became a jazz musician instead. The free spirited Barnet, at just 16 years of age, led his own band on a transatlantic ocean liner crossing the ocean 22 times and later went to the South Seas and Latin America. He formed his first important band in 1933 and cut several sides in 1934 with an all-star group led by Red Norvo. In 1936, while playing with his own orchestra at the Glen Island Casino, he introduced vocal group the Modernaires, who later went on to fame with Glenn Miller. 
