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Focused Profiles on Jazz and its Creators while also Featuring the Work of Guest Writers and Critics on the
Subject of Jazz.

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Jazz Big Band Composer-Arrangers: What They Do and

How They Do It
© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

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Have you ever wondered why a Jazz big band works the way it does, let © -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights
alone, how it works at all? reserved. “The most stimulating young Jazz
journalist to surface in years. G...

Why the instrumentation is the way it is - generally 4 trumpets, 3-4

trombones, 5 saxes and a rhythm section made up of piano, bass and drums
with a guitar added to it on occasion?

How the music they play is organized, arranged and constructed?

The very best explanation I have found to the question of how and why a Jazz
big band works the way it does - especially one that includes a historical
perspective on how the craft [or art, if you prefer] evolved - is contained in
the following essay by the late, esteemed Jazz author, Gene Lees.

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Pencil Pushers
JazzLetter
November 1998

“One sunny summer evening when I was about thirteen, I saw crowds of
people pouring into the hockey arena in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Curious to
know what was attracting them, I parked my bicycle behind the arena (in
those days one had little fear that one's bicycle would be stolen) and, in the
manner of boys of that age, I sneaked in a back exit. What was going on was
a big band. I remember watching as dark-skinned musicians in tuxedos
assembled on the stage, holding bright shining brass instruments, taking their
seats behind music stands. And then a man sat down at the piano and played
something and this assemblage hit me with a wall of sound I can still hear in
my head, not to mention my heart. I now can even tell you the name of the
piece: it was Take the "A " Train, that it was written by one Billy Strayhorn,
that the band was that of Duke Ellington, and that the year had to be 1941,
for that is the copyright date of that piece.

JazzProfiles

This blog is my gift to my friends.

Geugie Hoogeveen's Gift to JazzProfiles and Its

Readers [Listeners?]

Hi Steven, You don't know me - and I don't really

know you, but I’ve been enjoying your Jazz
Profiles blogspot for some time now. (Specifically
the recent Roy DuNann piece..) So first of all:
thanks for that! Secondly, the reason for me
writing you is that I’ve been quite busy organizing
my jazz collection and have compiled and
uploaded a handful of homemade radio shows on
I learned that bands like this came to the arena every Saturday night in the the podcast platform Mixcloud. Initially this was a
summer, and I went back the following Saturday and heard another of them. project intended for Izaak, my son, who’s only two
I was overwhelmed by the experience, shaken to my shoes. It was not just years old right now, but I think they’d be quite
interesting for any true classic bop and hard bop
the soloists, although I remember the clowning and prancing and trumpet
jazz lovers. Problem is; nobody's listening to
playing of someone I realized, in much later retrospect, was Ray Nance with
them.. I thought, if you shared my enthusiasm,
Ellington, and a tenor saxophone player who leaned over backwards almost to they perhaps could be linked somehow to your
the stage floor, and that had to have been Joe Thomas with Jimmie blogspot.. But only if you think that’s appropriate.
Lunceford. With both bands, it was the totality of the sound that captivated Two important notes: 1: there’s absolutely no
me, that radiant wall of brass and saxes and what I would learn to call the commercial incentive involved here 2: the
rhythm section. podcasts are a hundred percent non stop music,
so no talking, jingles or add’s etc. Check them
out, if you have the time. Right now there are five
compilations, each one focussing on on a major
I discussed the experience with my Uncle Harry. When I told him about these
jazz label, so there’s Prestige, Blue Note, Savoy,
bands I'd seen, he encouraged my interest and told me I should pay attention Riverside and Contemporary for now. Ok, so
as well to someone called Count Basie. that’s basically it.. Thanks for taking the time and
let me know what you think.. Kind regards,
Geugie Hoogeveen the Netherlands
My Uncle Harry — Henry Charles Flatman, born in London, England — was a
trombone player and an arranger He played in Canadian dance-bands in the Verve Podcast
1920s and '30s, and I would hear their "remote" broadcasts on the radio.
Once one of the bandleaders dedicated a song to me on the air. I am told that
I could identify any instrument in the orchestra by its sound by the time I was
three, but that may be merely romantic family lore.

But what held these instruments together in ensemble passages? I even knew
that: people like my Uncle Harry. I remember him sitting at an upright oaken
piano with some sort of big board, like a drawing board, propped above the
keyboard. He always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and one eye
would squint to protect itself from the rising tendrils of smoke, while his
pencil made small marks on a big paper mounted on that board: score paper,
I realized within a few years. He was, I'm sure he explained to me, writing

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"arrangements" for the band he played in. I seem to recall that he was the
JAZZ LABELS | E06: VERVE |"MY ID…
first person to tell me the difference between a major and minor chord. JAZZbyLABELS
JAZZ for | E06: VERVE |"MY ID…
IZAAK
by JAZZ for IZAAK

00:00 -3:02:32
Because of him I was always aware that the musicians in a band weren't just
making it up, except in the solos. Somebody wrote the passages they played
together. 102 2

And so from my the earliest days I looked on the record labels for the
parenthesized names under the song titles to see who wrote a given piece.
When the title wasn't that of some popular song and the record was an
instrumental, then chances were that the name was that of the man who
composed and arranged it. Whether I learned their names from the record
labels or from Metronome or Down Beat, I followed with keen interest the
work of the arrangers. I became aware of Eddie Durham, whose name was on
Glenn Miller's Sliphorn Jive which I just loved (he was actually a Basie
arranger); Paul Weston and Axel Stordahl who wrote for Tommy Dorsey;
Jerry Gray, who wrote A String of Pearls, and Bill Finegan, who arranged Little
Brown Jug, both for Glenn Miller; and above all Fletcher Henderson, who
Savoy Podcast
wrote much of the book (as I would later learn to call it) of the Benny
Goodman band. Later, I became aware of Mel Powell's contributions to the
JAZZ LABELS | E05: SAVOY |"HALF …
Goodman library, such as Mission to Moscow and The Earl, as well as those of JAZZbyLABELS
JAZZ for | E05: SAVOY |"HALF …
IZAAK
Eddie Sauter, including Benny Rides Again and Clarinet a la King, Jimmy by JAZZ for IZAAK
Mundy's contributions to that band included Swing-time in the Rockies and
00:00 -3:00:00
Solo Flight, which introduced many listeners to the brilliance of guitarist
Charlie Christian; and Gene Gifford, who wrote Smoke Rings and Casa Loma
Stomp for the Casa Loma Orchestra led by Glen Gray. 83 3

The better bandleaders always gave credit to their arrangers, whether of

"originals" or standards such as I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, and I
became aware of Skip Martin (who wrote that chart), Ben Homer and Frank
Comstock with Les Brown, and Ralph Burns, Shorty Rogers, and Neal Hefti
with Woody,Herman, Ray Conniff with the postwar Artie Shaw band
('Swonderful and Jumpin' on the Merry Go Round are his charts) and, later,
Bill Holman with various bands, and then Thad Jones and Gerald Wilson.
Some of the arrangers became bandleaders themselves, including Russ
Morgan (whose commercial band gave no hint that he had been an important
jazz arranger), Larry Clinton, and Les Brown. And of course, there was Duke
Ellington, though he was not an arranger who became a bandleader but a
Blue Note Podcast
bandleader who evolved into an arranger— and one of the most important
composers in jazz, some would say the most important.
JAZZ LABELS | E04: BLUE NOTE | "…
JAZZbyLABELS
JAZZ for | E04: BLUE NOTE | "S…
IZAAK
by JAZZ for IZAAK

00:00 -3:05:54

78 3

Riverside Podcast

JAZZ LABELS | E03: RIVERSIDE |"T…

JAZZbyLABELS
JAZZ for | E03: RIVERSIDE |"TO…
IZAAK
by JAZZ for IZAAK

00:00 -3:03:06

75 3

One error: I assumed that Duke Ellington wrote everything his band played,
only later becoming aware of the enormous role of Billy Strayhorn, who was
kept more or less in the background. Strayhorn of course, not Ellington, wrote
the band's latter-year theme, Take the "A " Train. I was aware very early that
someone named Gerry Mulligan — scarcely older than I, although I did not
know that then — wrote Disc Jockey Jump for Gene Krupa, and someone
named Gil Evans did some gorgeous writing for the Claude Thornhill band.

Contemporary Podcast

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I daresay the arranger I most admired was Sy Oliver. It was many years later
JAZZ LABELS | E02: CONTEMPORA…
that I met him. He wrote the arrangements for an LP Charles Aznavour JAZZbyLABELS
JAZZ for | E02: CONTEMPORAR…
IZAAK
recorded in English. I wrote most of the English translations and adaptations by JAZZ for IZAAK
for that session, and about all I can remember about the date is the awe I felt
00:00 -3:01:00
in shaking the hand of Sy Oliver.

65 2
I was captivated by the Tommy Dorsey band of that period. From about 1939
on, I thought it was the hottest band around. I did not then know that Sy
Oliver was the reason.

He was born Melvin James Oliver in Battle Creek, Michigan, on December 17,
1910. He began as a trumpet player and, like so many arrangers, trained
himself, probably by copying down what he heard on records. In 1933, he
joined the Jimmie Lunceford band, playing trumpet and writing for it, and it is
unquestionable that some of the arrangements I was listening to that night in
Niagara Falls were his. Others were surely by Gerald Wilson.

Prestige Podcast
A few years after his death, Sy's widow, Lillian, told me that Lunceford paid
Sy poorly and Sy was about to leave the music business, return to school and
JAZZ LABELS | E01: PRESTIGE |"AF…
become a lawyer. He got a call to have a meeting with Tommy Dorsey. JAZZbyLABELS
JAZZ for | E01: PRESTIGE |"AFT…
IZAAK
Dorsey told him he would pay him $5,000 a year more (a considerable sum in by JAZZ for IZAAK
the 1940s) than whatever Lunceford was giving him, pay him well for each
00:00 -3:03:54
individual arrangement as opposed to the $2.50 per chart (including copying)
he got from Lunceford, and give him full writing credits and attendant
royalties for his work if Sy would join his band. Furthermore, he told Sy that if 87 2
he would give him a year, he, Tommy, would rebuild the band in whatever
way Sy wanted.

Sy took the offer, and Tommy rebuilt the band that had in the past been
known for Marie and Song of India and the like. It became the band of Don
Lodice, Freddy Stulce, Chuck Peterson, Ziggy Elman, Joe Bushkin, and above
all Buddy Rich, who gave it the drive Sy wanted and whom Sy loved. The
change was as radical as that in the Woody Herman band from the Band that
Plays the Blues to the First Herd of Caldonia and Your Fathers Mustache. It
became a sort of projection of Sy Oliver led by Tommy Dorsey, and Sy's
compositions and charts included Well, Git It!, Yes Indeed, Deep River, and,
later on (1944) Opus No. 1, on which Lillian Oliver received royalties until the
This is a 1957 KMLA FM radio broadcast from the
day she died, and their son Jeff does now.
Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, CA.

SCerra
Recently I mentioned to Frank Comstock my admiration for Sy Oliver, and he
11 Somebody Lov…
said, "I think Sy touched all of us who were arranging in the 1940s and '50s
and later." And then he told me something significant.

Frank said that he learned arranging by transcribing Jimmie Lunceford

records, which doubtless meant many Sy Oliver charts. Frank's first important
professional job was with Sonny Dunham. "And he was known, as I'm sure
you're aware, as the white Lunceford," Frank said. The reason, Frank said,
was that when Dunham was starting up his band, Lunceford gave him a whole
book of his own charts to help him get off the ground. And Frank was hired
precisely because he could write in that Lunceford-Oliver manner.
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Bill Kirchner 1995 Interview with Jazz Master

Johnny Mandel

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Please click on the image of Johnny to be redirected

to Bill's interview with Johnny.

Coming Nov. 2nd - Sophisticated Giant - Dexter

Gordon Bio by Maxine Gordon

In the various attempts to define jazz, emphasis is usually put on

improvisation. Bill Evans once went so far as to say to me that if he heard an
Eskimo improvising within his musical system, assuming there was one, he
would define that as jazz. It is an answer that will not do.
Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter
Gordon Maxine Gordon Foreword by Farah
There are many kinds of music that are based on, or at least rely heavily on, Jasmine Griffin Afterword by Woody Louis
improvisation, including American bluegrass, Spanish flamenco, Greek dance Armstrong Shaw III Sophisticated Giant presents
music, Polish polkas, Gypsy string ensembles, Paraguayan harp bands, and the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter
Russian balalaika music. They are not jazz. In the early days of the concerto Gordon (1923–1990), one of the major innovators
of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history,
form, the soloist was expected to improvise his cadenzas; and well-trained
and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the
church organists were expected, indeed required, to be skilled improvisers, up
book that her late husband began, weaving his
to and including large forms. Gabriel Faure was organist at La Madeleine. “solo” turns with her voice and a chorus of voices
Chopin and Liszt were master improvisers, and the former's impromptus are from past and present. Reading like a jazz
what the name implies: improvisations that he later set down on paper, there composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a
being no tape recorders then. Doubtless he revised them, but equally selection of Dexter’s personal letters reflects his
doubtless they originated in spontaneous inventions. Beethoven was a colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the
magnificent improviser, not to mention Bach and Mozart. celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to
Dexter, “Man, you ought to leave your karma to
science.” Dexter Gordon—the icon—is the Dexter
who is now known and beloved and celebrated, on
Those who like to go into awed rapture at the single-line improvisation of a albums and on film and in jazz lore—even in a
Stan Getz might well consider the curious career of Alexander Borodin. First street named for him in Copenhagen. But this
of all he was one of the leading Russian scientists of his time, a practicing image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms
surgeon and chemist, a professor at the St. Petersburg Medico-Surgical with the three-dimensional man full of humor and
Academy. (He took his doctorate on his thesis on the analogy of arsenic acid wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being
with phosphoric acid.) Music was never more than a relaxing hobby for him, both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a
and his double career raises some interesting questions about our modern comforting insider who was a son, father, husband,
and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt
theories on left-brain logical thought and right-brain imaging and spatial
to fill in the gaps, the gaps created by our
information processing. Borodin improvised his symphonies before writing
misperceptions, but also the gaps left by Dexter
them down. And if that seems impressive musicianship, consider Glazunov's. himself. Maxine Gordon is an independent scholar,
Borodin never wrote his Third Symphony down at all: he improvised the first oral historian, and archivist in the fields of jazz and
two movements and fyis friend Glazunov wrote out the first two movements African American cultural history whose book,
from memory in the summer of 1887, a few months after Borodin's death. Sophisticated Giant, fulfills the promise she made
(He constructed a third movement out of materials left over from other to her late husband, jazz saxophonist and Academy
Borodin works, including the opera Prince Igor.) Award nominated actor Dexter Gordon, to
complete his biography. University of California
Press, November 2, 2018 Pre-orders:
www.dextergordon.com/book
Most of the Borodin Third Symphony, then, is improvised music. I can't https://www.amazon.com/Sophisticated-Giant-
imagine that anyone, even Bill Evans (if he were here), would try to call it Legacy-Dexter-Gordon/dp/0520280644
jazz.
Kannakkol and Quads - "Hindu Bop"
How then are we to define jazz?

The remark "if you have to ask, you ain't never gonna know," attributed to
both Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, is clearly unsatisfactory, though a
certain kind of jazz lover likes to quote it for reasons that remain obscure.
You could say that about many kinds of music. It is an evasion of the difficulty
of definition.

A simple definition won't cover all the contingencies, and a complex one will
prove ponderous and even meaningless. Even if you offer one of those clumsy

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(and not fully accurate) definitions such as "an American musical form
emphasizing improvisation and a characteristic swing and based on African Konnakkol & Quads Transcription
rhythmic and European harmonic and melodic influences," you have come up
with something that conveys nothing to a person who has never heard it.
Furthermore, the emphasis on improvisation has always been
disproportionate. Many outstanding jazz musicians, including Art Tatum and
Louis Armstrong, played solos they had worked out and played the same way
night after night. Nat Cole's piano in the heads of such hits as Embraceable
You were carefully worked out and played the same way repeatedly.
Bandleaders of the era would tell you their players had to play solos exactly
as they did on the records. Otherwise, some of the audience to a live
performance would consider itself cheated or, worse, argue that the player
wasn't the same one who had performed on the record.

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If improvisation will not do as the sole defining characteristic of jazz, and if Posts
non-improvisation, as in solos by Louis Armstrong and Art Tatum, does not
make it not jazz, then what does define it? Comments

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Remembering The Curtis Counce

McKinney's Cotton Pickers was based in Detroit, part of the stable of bands Group
operated by the French-born pianist Jean Goldkette: his National Amusement © -Steven Cerra, copyright
protected; all rights reserved. " The
Corporation fielded more than 20 of them, including one under his own name
Curtis Counce quintet is one of the
whose personnel included Frank Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy and great neglected jazz bands of...
Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, and Spiegle Willcox (who is still playing). One of
Goldkette's bands, the Orange Blossoms, became the Casa Loma Orchestra, Al Haig: [1924-1982]
with pioneering writing by Gene Gifford. Artie Shaw has argued that the © -Steven Cerra, copyright
protected; all rights reserved. You
"swing era" began as a popular musical movement not with Benny Goodman really have to mine the Jazz
but with the Casa Loma. Also in Detroit, Redman was writing for the Cotton literature to find anything about
Pickers and Bill Challis for the Goldkette band, both bands influencing A...
musicians all over America who listened to them on the radio. Gil Evans in
Tiny Kahn: Over 300 But Less
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"remotes" by the Casa Loma. Even the Isham Jones band of the 1930s was © -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright
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“Tiny's ears are what really got to
factors, there is good reason to consider Detroit — awash in money from both
me. I don't know if h...
the illegal liquor importation from Canada and the expanding automobile
industry and willing to spend it freely on entertainment — the birthplace of
the big-band swing era. Legendary 1980 Weckl-Gadd-Colaiuta DRUM
SHOWDOWN

But the structural form of the "big band" must be considered the invention of
Ferde Grofe’, who wrote for the Art Hickman band that was working in San
Francisco and almost certainly was influenced by black musicians who had

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come there from New Orleans. Hickman hired two saxophone players from
vaudeville to function as a "choir" in his dance band. The band caused a Legendary Gadd-Weckl-Colaiuta DRUM SHOWDOWN
sensation, and Paul Whiteman was quick to hire Grofe’ to write for his band,
as he was later to hire Bill Challis and various soloists who had been with
Goldkette. The band of Paul Specht was also influential, through the new
medium of radio broadcasting: its first broadcasts were made as early as
1920. Don Redman for a time worked in the Specht office, and it may well
have been the value of his experience there that influenced Fletcher
Henderson to hire him. Henderson also hired Bill Challis. Once Henderson got
past his classical background and got the hang of this new instrumentation,
he became one of the most influential — perhaps, in the larger scale, the
most influential — writers of the era.

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These explorers had no choice but to experiment with the evolving new
instrumentation. There was no academic source from which to derive Email address... Submit
guidance, there were no treatises on the subject. Classical orchestration texts
made little if any reference to the use of saxophones, particularly saxophones
in groups. And these "arrangers" solved the problem, each making his own Staying In Touch via Twitter

significant contribution. While Duke Ellington was making far-reaching Follow @Dadocerra
experiments by mixing colors from the instruments of the dance-band format,
the Grofe’-Challis-Redman-Henderson-Carter-Oliver axis had the widest
influence around the world in the antiphonal use of the "choirs" of the dance-
band for high artistic purpose; The instrumentation expanded as time went
on. Three saxophones became four, two altos and two tenors, the section's Blog Archive
sound vastly deepening when baritone came into widespread use in the
▼ 2018 (314)
1940s. The brass section too expanded, growing to three trumpets and two
trombones, then to four and three, and eventually four and even five ► September (10)
trumpets and four trombones, including bass trombone. ► August (43)
► July (56)
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This instrumentation may vary, and of late years its range of colors has been
extended by the doubling of the saxophone players on flutes and other ► May (39)

woodwinds, the occasional addition of French horn (Glenn Miller used a ► April (39)
French horn in his Air Force band and Rob McConnell's Boss Brass uses two) ► March (37)
and tuba, but structurally the "big band" has remained a superb instrument of
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expression to the many brilliant writers who have mastered its uses.
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Steve Grossman and Michel Petrucciani
The big-band era may be over, but the big-band format is far from moribund. Ike Quebec
The "ghost" bands go on, though the revel now is ended, and their greatest Lester Young: "The House in the Heart" by
actors are vanished into air, into thin air: Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Bobby Sc...
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Shaw does not lead it. It is the only ghost band that has a live ghost. (Woody Perspectives...
Herman seems to have invented the term "ghost band" and swore his would Jazz in Paris
never become one. It did.)
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infused them with their own anima. Terry Gibbs has attested that sometimes,
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when the crowd was thin, Woody Herman would skip the last set and let the
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band continue on its own; and it never sounded the same as when he was
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there, Terry said. The current Count Basie band does not have the "feel" of

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the original. There are of course two things without which a Basie band is not University of North Texas Recently Released
a Basie band: Basie and Freddie Green. But those conspicuous omissions Big Ba...
aside, Basie was able to get a groove from that band that eludes his Roger Kellaway and Finding New Wonders
successors. Didier Lockwood: Jazz and the Violin

► 2017 (328)
Far more interesting than the ghost bands are those regional "rehearsal
► 2016 (303)
bands" that spring up all over the country, and indeed all over the world, or
► 2015 (239)
the recording bands assembled to make albums and, afterwards, dissolved—
at least until the next project. ► 2014 (264)
► 2013 (182)
► 2012 (169)
As we begin the twenty-first century, the evolution of jazz as the art of the
► 2011 (134)
soloist has slowed and, in the example of many young artists imitating past
masters, ceased completely. There is an attempt to institutionalize it in ► 2010 (113)
concert halls through of repertory orchestras such as that at Lincoln Center ► 2009 (53)
led by Wynton Marsalis, the Liberace of jazz, and a brisk concomitant interest
► 2008 (46)
in finding and performing, when possible, the scores of such "arrangers" as
► 2007 (1)
George Handy.

There is an inchoate awareness that it somehow isn't quite kosher to imitate

the great soloists of the past, though that hasn't deterred some of the
younger crop of players from swiping a little Bubber Miley here, a little Dizzy
Gillespie there, but it is all right to play music by jazz composers of the past,
because written music is meant to be re-created by groups of musicians. And
so the emphasis in the current classical-ization of jazz is to a large extent on
the writers for past jazz orchestras. In this jazz is being institutionalized as
"classical" music has been, the latter for the good reason that Beethoven
couldn't leave us his improvisations, he could leave only written music to be
re-created by subsequent players.

Much of this re-creative work is rather sterile. It lacks the immediacy, and
certainly there is none of the exploratory zeal, that this music had when the
"arrangers" first put it on paper. The new stuff being composed and/or
arranged is much more interesting. And in any case, all too much of it is
focussed on Duke Ellington. This incantatory fervor for Ellington has precluded
a fitting concert recognition of Fletcher Henderson, Sy Oliver, Eddie Sauter,
Ralph Burns, Bill Finegan, Billy May, and so many more who certainly deserve
it. Unnoticed even by the public who admired them, these writers
("arrangers" seems a pathetically inadequate term) were building up a body
of work that is not receiving the homage that is its due.

Thirty years ago, it seems to me, the writers in the jazz field were not taken
seriously at all by some people. All was improvisation, the illusion being that
jazz was fully improvised, rather than being made up of carefully prepared
pieces of vocabulary, what jazz musicians call "licks" — chord voicings,
approaches to scale patterns, and the like.

The influence of the big-band arrangers has now spread around the world.
The format itself survives, of course, though rarely in full-time bands. It is

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found in the work of certain bands that come together from time to time,
such as in the Clarke-Boland Big Band, now alas gone, based in Germany and
led by the late Kenny Clarke and the wonderful Belgian arranger and
composer Francy Boland. It is encountered today in the Rob McConnell Boss
Brass in Toronto, and in Cologne in the WDR (for Westdeutsche Rundfuk) Big
Band. Some years ago, I saw a Russian television variety show that included
a big band, playing in the American style — not doing it well, to be sure, but
doing it. The format survives in countless bands imitating Glenn Miller.

With the end of the big-band era, various of the arrangers for those bands
found work elsewhere. Many of them began writing for singers. Marion Evans,
alumnus of the postwar Tex Beneke-Glenn Miller band, wrote for Steve
Lawrence, Tony Bennett, and many others. So did Don Costa, who wrote for,
among his clients, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra's primary post-Dorsey arranger was
Axel Stordahl and, later, Nelson Riddle, alumnus of the Charlie Spivak band.
Peter Matz, alumnus of the Maynard Ferguson band, wrote for just about
everybody, as did the German composer Claus Ogerman, particularly noted
for his arrangements of Brazilian music. On any given work day in the 1960s,
musicians were rushing around New York City and Los Angeles to play on
these vocal sessions, a last hurrah (as we can now see) for the era of great
songwriting, a sort of summing up of that era, the flower reaching its most
splendid maturity just before it died.

Some of the arrangers, for a time, got to make records on their, instrumental
albums in which they were allowed to use string sections. Among them were
Paul Weston (whose deceptively accessible charts are of a classical purity),
Frank de Vol, Frank Comstock, and most conspicuously Robert Farnon.

Many of these arrangers and composers began to influence motion picture

music. They turned to film (1) for money, and (2) for a broader orchestral
palette. They included Farnon, Benny Carter, Johnny Mandel, Billy Byers,
Eddie Sauter, George Duning, Billy May, Patrick Williams, Michel Legrand,
Allyn Ferguson, John Dankworth, Dudley Moore (whose gifts as a composer
were eclipsed by his success as a comedian and actor), Johnny Keating, Pete
Rugolo, Oliver Nelson, Roger Kellaway, Lennie Niehaus, Frank Comstock,
Shorty Rogers, Lalo Schifrin, Tom Mclntosh, Quincy Jones, J.J. Johnson, Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Mundell Lowe, and Henry Mancini who, with his
Peter Gunn scores, did more to make jazz acceptable in television and movie
music than anyone else in the industry's history. That is a consensus among
composers.

These people profoundly affected film scoring, introducing into it elements of

non-classical music that had been rigorously excluded, excepting little
touches in the scores of Alex North and Hugo Friedhofer and others and the
occasional use of an alto saxophone to let you know that the lady in the scene
was not all she should be. The medium had been dominated by European
concert-music influences. Early scores appropriated the styles and techniques
of Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms — and sometimes their actual music.
Later the twentieth-century Europeans had an influence, up to and including
Bartok and Schoenberg, though probably no one was ripped off as much as
Stravinsky, whose 1913 Rite of Spring is still being quarried by film
composers. In his scores for the TV series Mission: Impossible, Lalo Schifrin
used scale exercises he had written for his teacher Olivier Messaien at the
Paris Conservatory.

The appeal of film scoring to "jazz" composers and arrangers is obvious. Most
of them had extensive classical training, and strong tastes for twentieth-
century European composers, especially Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and
Bartok. (William Grant Still, essentially a classical composer but also an
arranger who scored Frenesi for Artie Shaw, studied with Edgard Varese as
far back as 1927.) This familiarity with the full orchestra inevitably led to a
sense of restriction with the brass-and-saxes configuration of dance bands.
Despite a general hostility of many jazz fans toward string sections as
somehow effete, many of the leaders wanted to use them, and some tried to
do so, among them Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, and Harry
James.

These experiments were doomed for two reasons. The first was a matter of
orchestral balance. A 100-member symphony orchestra will have a
complement of as many as 60 string players. This is due to complex
mathematical relationships in acoustics. Putting two instruments on a part
does not double the volume of the sound. Far from it. To balance the other
sections, a symphony orchestra needs 60 string players. But the instruments
of a standard dance-jazz band can drown even the 60 strings of a symphony
orchestra, as appearances of jazz bands with symphony orchestras have
relentlessly demonstrated. (In the recording studio, of course, a turn of the
knobs will raise the volume of the string section to any level desired.)

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As far back as the 1940s, such arrangers as Paul Weston, Axel Stordahl and,
in England, Robert Farnon used their work with singers as a means to explore
string writing. Indeed, strings had been used in the 1930s and early '40s by
singers such as Bing Crosby. But the uses of strings behind singers became
much more subtle and sophisticated in the '40s, '50s, and '60s with the
writing of such arrangers as Nelson Riddle, Marion Evans, Don Costa, Marty
Manning, and Patrick Williams. Some jazz fans abhorred the string section;
musicians know there is no more subtle and transparent texture against
which to set a solo, whether vocal or instrumental.

No bandleader could afford the large string section needed to hold its own
with dance-band brass-and-saxes. And so those bands who embraced them in
the 1940s tried to get by with string sections of twelve players or fewer —
and on the Harry James record The Mole, there are only five. There was
something incongruous, even a little pitiful, in seeing these poor souls sawing
away at their fiddles on the band platform, completely unheard.

During World War II, with his U.S. Army Air Force band — when money was
no object, because all his players were servicemen — Glenn Miller was able to
deploy 14 violins, four violas, and two celli, a total of 20 strings. But this was
still hopelessly inadequate against the power of the rest of the band.
It was in film that former band arrangers were able to experiment with the
uses of jazz and classical orchestral techniques, for the money they needed
was there, along with a pool of spectacularly versatile master musicians who
had been drawn to settle in Los Angeles for its movie and other studio work.
To this day, some of the most successful fusions of jazz and classical
influences have been in the movies, including such scores as Eddie Sauter's
Mickey One and Johnny Mandel's The Sandpiper.

That era is gone. Gone completely. The singers of quality are of no interest to
the record companies; neither are the songs from the great era of
songwriting, the songs of Kern, Porter, Warren, Rodgers and Hart,
Carmichael, Schwartz.

Thus the superb orchestras that used to be assembled in the 1960s to record
such songs with such singers are a thing of the past. Even in the movies, the
change has been total. There are no longer excellent studio orchestras on
staff, and orchestral writing of any kind is comparatively rare in films. The
producers long ago discovered that they could use pop records as scoring.
Pop records and synthesizers. The long-chord drone of synthesizers, not even
skillful but sounding like slightly more developed Hammond organs (which
were used for dramatic underscore in the old radio soap operas) are heard in
movies today. Only a handful of composers, and "real" musicians, are able to
derive their living from movie work, or from recording.

A story circulated rapidly among musicians a few years ago. A musician was
called to play on a recording session that utilized a large "acoustic" orchestra.
Afterwards he was asked what it was like.

He said, "It was great. We must have put two synthesizer players out of
work."

The remark is usually attributed to Conte Candoli.

Conte says he didn't say it. "But I wish I had."

A film composer was asked to submit some themes to the director of a movie.
He gave him five. The director waxed enthusiastic. The next day he told the
composer he was throwing out three of the themes. Why?
The director said he had played them for his daughter, and she had disliked
those three.

"How old is she?" the composer asked.

"Five."

The brilliant comedy writer Larry Gelbart, creator of M.A.S.H. has said that in
the movie industry today, you're dealing with fetuses in three-piece suits. It
must be remembered of the current crop of executives in the entertainment
industry that not only did they grow up on rock-and-roll and its branches, in
many cases their parents grew up on it.

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The president of the movie branch of Warner Bros, has stated publicly that he
shows script ideas to his fourteeen-year-old son. If his son doesn't like them,
he throws them out.

Yes, the era is over.”

Posted by Steven Cerra at 7:00 AM

Labels: big band jazz, sy oliver, tommy dorsey

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