Theodore "Fats" Navarro: 1923-1950 - A Career Retrospective

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Fats was a spectacular musician because, in a time when cats arrived on the scene with nothing, he came on with everything: he could read, he could play high and hold anybody's first trumpet chair, he could play those singing, melodic solos with a big beautiful sound nobody could believe at the time, and he could fly in fast tempos with staccato, biting notes and execute whatever he wanted, with apparently no strain, everything clear. And every note meant something. You know there are those kinds of guys who just play a lot of notes, some good, some bad. Fats wasn't one of those: he made his music be about each note having a place and a reason. And he had so much warmth, so much feeling. That's why I say he had everything.”

- Roy Haynes, drummer and bandleader

Fats Navarro was dead before the LP era began, officially as a result of latent tuberculosis, although the disease was abetted by heroin addiction, the real cause of his decline. His recorded legacy came entirely from the days of 78 rpm releases, and from a variety of preserved broadcasts which make up around a third of the surviving recordings on which he is heard. Even from that limited source, however, there has emerged a general consensus among musicians, critics and listeners that the trumpeter stood alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis as the most significant performer on that instrument in early bebop.

Born Theodore Navarro of mixed black, Chinese and Cuban descent in Key West, Florida, on 24 September 1923, he played both piano and tenor saxophone as a youth but by the age of seventeen he was already touring in dance bands as a trumpeter. One such band dropped him off in Ohio in 1941, where he studied briefly before hooking up with the respected Indianapolis-based territory band led by Snookum Russell. In 1943, he joined Andy Kirk's nationally-known outfit, where he partnered Howard McGhee in the trumpet section, but his big breakthrough to prominence came in 1945, when singer Billy Eckstine brought him into his historically crucial bebop-inspired big band as principal trumpet, replacing Dizzy Gillespie, who left to form his own unit.

Dizzy took Eckstine along to hear Navarro (who was variously known as Fats, Fat Boy or Fat Girl, from his high voice and effeminate manner as well as his girth) play with Kirk's band, and it didn't take long for the singer to make up his mind. As he recalled later for Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff's oral history of jazz, Hear Me Talkin to Ya, he “...  went with Dizzy to the club where the band were playing, and the only thing Fats had to blow (because Howard McGhee was the featured trumpet player) was behind a chorus number. But he was wailing behind this number, and I said to myself, 'This is good enough; this'll fit.'

So I got Fats to come by and talk it over, and about two weeks after that he took Dizzy's chair, and take it from me, he came right in. Fats came in the band, and great as Diz is - and I'll never say anything other than that he is one of the finest things that ever happened to a brass instrument - Fats played his book and you would hardly know that Diz had left the band. 'Fat Girl' played Dizzy's solos, not note-for-note, but his ideas on Dizzy's parts, and the feeling was the same and there was just as much swing.”

He joined the band in January 1945, and remained with Eckstine until the autumn of 1946, when the punishing touring schedule proved too much for his already failing health. In addition, he was chafing against the restrictions of the big-band format, which he felt allowed him insufficient opportunity to develop musically. The remainder of his all-too-brief career - he died on 7 July 1950 - was spent as a freelance musician, and was given over to working with a variety of small bop groups in New York, mostly at the behest of other leaders. In that time, he left a legacy of around 150 recorded sides (including airshots) of remarkably consistent quality, a curtailed body of work which is nonetheless one of the most significant in jazz. His future employers would include swing-era giants like Coleman Hawkins and Benny Goodman, and such leaders of the bebop movement as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and Dexter Gordon and other important figures like Illinois Jacquet and Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis. He cut an important co-led session with Howard McGhee in 1948, but his most significant partnership was the one he forged with pianist and arranger Tadd Dameron.

The earliest of his post-Eckstine small-group sessions came under the leadership of drummer Kenny Clarke, in a band which also featured a second trumpeter, the very youthful Kinny Dorham (later known as Kenny). Clarke had been the drummer most associated with the initial development of the bebop style, and if Max Roach and Art Blakey were to make even more important contributions, both would acknowledge Clarke's lead in the evolution of the form. The band cut two sessions, the first on 5 September 1946, as Kenny Clarke and His 52nd Street Boys, and the other as The Be Bop Boys the following day.

Gil Fuller, best known for his work with the Dizzy Gillespie big band, was included as arranger on both sessions, working with nine and eight-piece bands respectively, and his influence is clearly apparent in the well-groomed charts. The solo honours go to Navarro and pianist Bud Powell, and both are heard at greater length than usual on the second set of four tunes, recorded at double length for release over two sides of a 78 rpm disc.

Unfortunately, the original acetates have never been found, which means the re-mastered versions now available also have to preserve the fade in the middle, made to accommodate the change of side. 'Fat Boy' is dominated by a lengthy saxophone chase, but its nickname-sake gets in a spicy solo before the scramble begins. He is heard to even better advantage on 'Everything's Cool' and 'Webb City', where he and the pianist are allocated more generous space. These two could usually fire each other's playing, although it was often achieved in adversarial fashion in a relationship which had its dark side, as Leonard Feather's famous account in the sleeve note for The Fabulous Fats Navarro (Blue Note) will confirm.

“I remember one night during a jam session I was running at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street for which I had booked both Fats and Bud Powell, the tension between the two was aggravated as Bud chided Fats between sets. At the beginning of the next set Fats reached the bursting point. While the audience looked on in silent, terrified tension, he lifted his horn and tried to bring the full weight of it crashing down on Bud's hands. He missed, thank God, but the strength in the blow was enough to buckle the horn against the piano; Fats had to borrow a trumpet to play the set.”

That doesn't sound like the Fats described by Dizzy: 'He was sweet. He was like a little baby. Very nice.' Or by Tadd Dameron: 'He was pretty quiet, soulful, sensitive. He never found himself, really. He was always searching. I don't know what he was looking for - he had it!' The incident is testimony, perhaps, to how difficult and provocative a partner Powell could be, but Feather ends the story by pointing out that the incident failed to affect the close friendship and mutual admiration between Bud and Fats'.

Even in these early recordings, it is possible to hear how mature a stylist he had become by the mid-1940s. In an interview with Barry Ulanov for Metronome in 1947 he claimed to be uncomfortable with describing his music as bebop, a term he disliked, but set out both his artistic creed and affiliation: 'It's just modern music. It needs to be explained right. What they call bebop is really a series of chord progressions. None of us play this bebop the way we want to, yet. I'd like to just play a perfect melody of my own, all the chord progressions right, the melody original and fresh - my own.' Interestingly, his definition foregrounds melody and harmony rather than rhythm, and that is clearly reflected in his playing. Although he spiced up his work with a sprinkling of accents borrowed from the examples of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, in general he takes something of a conservative approach to rhythmic accentuation, flowing easily and smoothly along the beat at any tempo.

Navarro was back in the studios again before the end of 1946 but the eight sides he cut with Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis and His Beboppers in December are less impressive overall. At this stage, Davis was a hard-blowing, stereotypical middle-rank tenorman steeped in the honking Harlem jump-band tradition, and his riff-based compositions (all eight titles are credited to him, most of them built on the 'I Got Rhythm' changes) are functional rather than memorable. A solid rhythm section led by pianist Al Haig helps the sessions swing in meaty fashion, but their continuing musical interest lies in Navarro's contributions. Those are every bit as cogent and well-focused as his work elsewhere, both in the ensembles (employing both a cup-mute and the open horn) and when featured as a soloist - 'Stealin' Trash' and 'Red Pepper' offer typically sure-footed examples.

Coleman Hawkins made a very different tenor partner that same month. The saxophonist was intrigued by the new generation of beboppers, and Fats is heard on two selections from a session which also featured J.J. Johnson, Milt Jackson, and a rhythm section of Hank Jones, Curly Russell and Max Roach. The diverse musical influences meet in a half-way house between swing and bop, territory in which the trumpeter is entirely at home. He is heard in crisp, idiomatic fettle in the ensemble on “I Mean You', and takes a brief, punchy solo on 'Bean and the Boys'.

In January of 1947 he cut a rare session under his own name for Savoy, as Fats Navarro and His Thin Men. It marked the beginning of what was to be the most fruitful of his musical partnerships, with pianist and arranger Tadd Dameron. The band also featured Leo Parker on baritone saxophone rather than the standard alto or tenor, providing a conspicuous contrast of styles as well as sonority in the front line. Gene Ramey on bass and Denzil Best on drums completed the quintet which cut four tunes in the session.

If Navarro profited from the association with Tadd Dameron, so did the pianist. Dameron was born in Cleveland on 21 February 1917 (he died in 1965), and had cut his teeth on writing arrangements for a number of big bands - Dizzy Gillespie would give the premiere of his large-scale composition 'Soulphony' at Carnegie Hall the following year. Navarro was Dameron's most productive collaborator in a rather stop-start career fragmented not only by the struggle to maintain a band for any sustained period of musical development, but also by a spell in prison for drug offences from 1958.

Dameron is not a virtuoso soloist in the Powell manner. He played what is sometimes dismissively described as 'arranger's piano', concentrating his attentions on developing the harmonic form and structure of the composition. He was always primarily concerned with arranging and, increasingly, composition. Fontainebleau recorded for Prestige in 1956 may be the peak of his achievement, and one of the most successful through-composed jazz works ever written. In another 1947 interview with Barry Ulanov, also for Metronome, Dameron stressed his preoccupation with a beautiful sound  - 'There's enough ugliness in the world. I'm interested in beauty' - and the importance of personal expression, both of which he found in profusion in Navarro's playing. These qualities - always allied with a surely developed sense of overall form and attention to harmonic structure - are what lifts the whole session out of the casual blowing ethos of much of the earlier small-group material featuring the trumpeter. It was a more refined approach that was much to his liking, given his own palpable concern with the clear articulation of form within his solos. He played with a sweetness and richness of tone unmatched by any of the other bop trumpeters, and was less reliant than Gillespie and his imitators on sheer speed or dramatic flourishes of sustained high-register playing, although entirely capable of brilliantly effective use of either in building and releasing tension within a solo.

Navarro's burnished tone and his liking for carefully shaped melodic lines perhaps owe something to his admiration for swing-era players like his third cousin, Charlie Shavers, or Freddie Webster, who was also an acknowledged influence on the early development of Miles Davis. It came allied to a technical mastery of the horn which allowed him to cope with the furious tempos of bebop without ever losing his sense of poised equilibrium. His lyrical sensibility found a fine foil in Dameron, as is already clear even at this early stage.

Fats follows Parker in the solo rotation on all four tracks, and produces something engagingly different on each occasion. On ‘Fat Girl', he switches from muted horn in the introduction and ensemble chorus to deliver a delightfully relaxed, gracefully executed solo on open horn. His fleet, sharp-edged contribution to the Indiana'-based 'Ice Freezes Red’ is outdone for speed by his flying but fully controlled whirl through 'Goin' to Minton’s’ and 'Eb-Pob' allows him to show off his high-note chops at a more moderate tempo in a solo which follows a beautifully sculpted line of mounting tension, mid-way climax and gradual release. Dameron guides and prompts under all of the horn action, in what is the beginning of a beautiful (if often troubled) friendship, and takes a proficient but unambitious chorus on 'Eb-Pob', a blues with an added bridge and a title which is an anagram of bebop.

Navarro may have been an amiable, sensitive guy, but he developed the junkie's sly cunning as well. Dameron recalls a sequence of resignations from the band, followed by a return at a slightly higher salary each time as the trumpeter played on the leader's high regard for his work and his prowess scared off potential replacements. In Jazz Masters of the 40s, Ira Gitler reports Dameron's recollection that “I used to try to get other fellows to play with me, and they'd say, ‘Oh, is Fats in the band? Oh, no!’ It got to the point where I had to pay him so much money that I told him he should go out on his own. I said, "Once you start making this kind of money, you need to be a leader yourself." But he didn't want to quit. He didn't have security because of his habits.' Eventually, and inevitably, given that Dameron was never either notably overburdened with work or pulling down top dollar, Navarro priced himself out of the band altogether.

The trumpeter cut a second session under his own name for Savoy later in 1947, this time with Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone and a Dameron-led rhythm trio with Nelson Boyd (bass) and Art Blakey (drums). The session, recorded on 5 December, yielded a fine example of his style at a more deliberate tempo and gentler mood in 'Nostalgia', built on the chord progression of the standard 'Out Of Nowhere'. (Oddly, the trumpeter's studio legacy includes no ballads, although his style seems well suited to that form.)

Fats plays sweetly lyrical solos on both takes, using a muted horn; the construction of both solos is very similar, suggesting that his melodic conception for any given tune was firmly fixed in his mind when he came to commit his thoughts to the recording process. That view is partially borne out by other alternate takes, both from this session and elsewhere, in that while they reveal an acute attention to telling shifts of detail, they do not possess the kind of radical take-to-take revisions evident in Charlie Parker's legendary alternates. That consistency has led some to wonder whether the trumpeter may actually have pre-planned his improvisations before going into the studio. It seems more likely, however, that they simply indicate a firm grasp of what he wanted to produce on any given melody and progression, and perhaps provide further evidence of his concern with finding the right form and structure for the specific context in which he was playing.

Sandwiched in between his own Savoy sessions, Navarro recorded two others in 1947 in which Dameron led the band, the first for Blue Note on 26 September, and the second for Savoy on 28 October. The Blue Note recording featured the core of the band which played on Navarro's subsequent December date for Savoy discussed above, with Ernie Henry added on alto saxophone and Shadow Wilson in for Blakey in the drum seat, and will be considered shortly, along with the subsequent Blue Note sessions of 1948-49. Dameron's writing on tunes like ‘A Bebop Carol' (based on 'Mean to Me') and the amiable stroll of 'The Tadd Walk' for the Savoy session is typically sophisticated, while the trumpeter is in fine form in his contributions to the set, which also featured vocalist Kay Penton on two tunes.

Shortly after this session, Navarro cut a date under the leadership of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, also for Savoy, with another Dameron-led rhythm section featuring Nelson Boyd (bass) and Art Madigan (drums). Navarro is heard on three of the four tunes they laid down and makes notable solo contributions to 'Dextrose', where his tone and sinuous line is characteristically lovely, and 'Index', where he opens his solo with a breath-catching extended, unbroken phrase which is a model of controlled technique and creativity.

An intriguing broadcast from this period brings the trumpeter together with Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano, in unusual circumstances. Barry Ulanov had organised a battle of the bands, split along traditional versus modernist lines, for a radio shoot-out in September 1947. Listeners were asked to vote and the victorious modernists invited to return to the studios on 8 November. The original line-up had featured Dizzy Gillespie, but for the celebration broadcast Navarro was in the trumpet chair (with his regular partner in the Dameron band, Allen Eager, on tenor saxophone). His feature, 'Fats Flats', based on his own 'Barry's Bop', based in turn on 'What Is This Thing Called Love?', is a beautifully poised piece of bop trumpet work of the kind we would by now expect from him, and he makes an equally dazzling contribution to 'KoKo'. The date has been issued on Spotlite, under the title 'Anthropology, and provides a fascinating comparison of styles when compared with Gillespie's contribution to the original session, preserved on the Lullaby in Rhythm album from the same label, worth hearing in any case for the explosive playing of Navarro and Parker, and the additional interest of Tristano's presence. The album is filled out with three poorly recorded cuts from the Dameron band, with the trumpeter marked absent.

While their work for Savoy is very fine, the Navarro - Dameron combination arguably achieved their greatest studio performances in the music they recorded for Blue Note. The September 1947 session already mentioned was followed by another on 13 September 1948, and a third on 18 January 1949. They have been collected as The Fabulous Fats Navarro in two volumes on both LP and CD, and subsequently made available in an indispensable two-CD set, The Complete Blue Note and Capitol Recordings of Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron, which also includes Dameron's recordings of 21 April 1949 with Miles Davis, and important Navarro material with Howard McGhee and Bud Powell, as well as a version of 'Stealing Apples' cut with Benny Goodman.

In addition to these classic studio takes, a valuable series of live broadcasts from the Royal Roost in 1948 has been preserved on both LP and CD in a Milestone album as Fats Navarro featured with The Tadd Dameron Band. The material includes Dameron classics like 'Good Bait', 'Dameronia', “Tadd Walk’ and 'Our Delight', as well as Navarro's own 'Eb-Pob', Charlie Parker's 'Anthropology' and Gershwin's 'Lady Be Good'. It is particularly valuable in preserving Navarro's thoughts on the relaxed, strolling theme of what is probably Dameron's best known bop tune, 'Good Bait'. It is heard in two quite distinctive takes on this set, but was not included in any of their studio sessions together. The trumpeter features on about three-quarters of the material on the album, and while the music-making (and the recorded sound) is not quite as finely focused as in the studio recordings, it has the benefit of on-stage spontaneity and longer playing time, and anyone interested in either musician should seek it out alongside the Blue Note material. In his sleeve note for the album, Stanley Crouch quotes drummer Roy Haynes's succinct appraisal of Navarro's qualities, which seems worth reiterating here.

“Fats was a spectacular musician because, in a time when cats arrived on the scene with nothing, he came on with everything: he could read, he could play high and hold anybody's first trumpet chair, he could play those singing, melodic solos with a big beautiful sound nobody could believe at the time, and he could fly in fast tempos with staccato, biting notes and execute whatever he wanted, with apparently no strain, everything clear. And every note meant something. You know there are those kinds of guys who just play a lot of notes, some good, some bad. Fats wasn't one of those: he made his music be about each note having a place and a reason. And he had so much warmth, so much feeling. That's why I say he had everything.”

Navarro never found a sweeter context to display those manifold qualities than the Dameron band, and the pianist found a soloist who could provide both the beauty and the grasp of form he needed, and do so at the highest level of creative improvisation.

The four tunes cut at the session of 26 September 1947 all have an alternate take. In the case of 'The Chase', the marked improvement in Charlie Rouse's tenor solo alone would demand the choice of the master take for release, even if everyone else were not also in slightly sharper form. Navarro turns in two strong, beautifully judged solo performances, each of which confirms his complete command of both horn and music at a fast tempo, as well as emphasising his signature tone, the fat, immaculately poised trumpet sound justly described by fellow trumpeter Joe Newman as 'one of those big butter sounds'.

Dameron had a good ear for a memorable, catchy theme, and his compositions provided plenty of scope for his soloists to develop their conceptions. In 'The Squirrel', a blues said to have been inspired by the pianist watching a squirrel in Central Park one day, the originally released take captures the ebullient spirit of the piece more fully than the slightly under-characterised alternate, and the ensemble choruses are more developed. Navarro builds his solo with a precise concern for tension and release, and a hint of the New Orleans trumpet tradition in his rolling phrases and skittering glances off the high notes at each of its peaks. The opulent 'Our Delight' is one of Dameron's best-known tunes, and both takes here find Navarro playing with a very clear conception of precisely what he wanted to say.

The trumpeter nails each of his solos conclusively, with only minor embellishments in the melody from take to take, and both are gems of lucid construction and creative phrasing. The session's final tune, 'Dameronia', with its Monk-ish echo of 'Well, You Needn't' in the theme, is another of the pianist's best. In the alternate take, Navarro uses the final note of the saxophone solo as a launch pad to roar in with a dramatic descending opening phrase, and builds a robust, muscular solo statement from it. He thinks better of that approach in the released take, opening in very different fashion, then turning in what is arguably his most functional, least memorable solo of the session.

The combination's next Blue Note session took place just under a year later, on 13 September 1948, shortly after the band began their residence at the Royal Roost. Only the leader and Navarro remain from the first recording. Allen Eager, a Dameron regular, and Wardell Gray shared tenor duties, with Curly Russell on bass and Kenny Clarke behind the drums. Cuban percussionist Chino Pozo (a cousin of the better-known Chano Pozo) contributed conga drum on two takes of 'Jabhero,’ and Kenny Hagood laid down a smooth vocal on a single take of “I Think I'll Go Away'. Dameron's chord progressions are always fascinating, and Navarro is in great form on all three of the purely instrumental tracks. They possess all the virtues we have already heard in his two previous recordings with the pianist, but, perhaps more overtly than in any of the other studio sessions, the different takes reveal him thinking hard about the detail of his performances. In the alternate takes of 'Jabhero' and 'Lady Bird', for example, he tries out double-time passages which are not included in the two released takes, while on 'Symphonette', a swinging riff tune, he interpolates some hard and fast rapid-note bop phraseology into the released take, but smooths them out considerably on the alternate.

The Dameron - Navarro studio sessions for both Savoy and Blue Note represent an important continuum in the development of bebop, as well as in the respective careers of both players. Their final visit to the studio was a Capitol session with a ten-piece band on 18 January 1949, which might have been historic (it preceded the first of the so-called 'Birth of the Cool' sessions by a couple of days), but did not yield fully satisfactory results on the two tracks in which the trumpeter is featured. There is plenty to enjoy on both 'Sid's Delight' and 'Casbah' nonetheless, but it marked the end of the Dameron - Navarro association. By the time the pianist returned to the studio to finish the session in April, he had Miles Davis in the trumpet chair.

Navarro's next studio venture remains an intriguing one. It re-united Fats with his old section-mate from the Andy Kirk band, Howard McGhee, a fine bop trumpeter from Oklahoma who cut his teeth in the big bands of Charlie Barnet and Kirk, then gigged with Coleman Hawkins before forming his own small band in Los Angeles in 1945. The Blue Note session took place on 11 October 1948, and featured the two trumpeters with Ernie Henry (alto sax), Milt Jackson (piano), Curly Russell (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). Jackson also played what became his main instrument, vibes, on two takes of Navarro's 'Boperation' (the second of which was not issued until its appearance on the Complete disc), while McGhee switched to piano.

In the sleeve notes for the various releases of The Fabulous Fats Navarro the order of the trumpet soloists is wrongly identified. In ‘The Skunk', a raunchy blues, Navarro follows Henry, while McGhee follows Jackson, and in the celebrated 'Double Talk', it is Navarro who leads the solos and trading exchanges each time. It is odd that both Leonard Feather and (at least according to Feather's sleeve note) Alfred Lion should be similarly mistaken in identifying two players with, as this fine session makes clear, such distinctive styles.

Stylistic identification can be a treacherous business, though, as Dizzy, Fats and Miles Davis demonstrated on another famous session earlier that year. The Metronome All-Stars recording on 3 January 1948 featured all three trumpet stars on 'Overtime', which Dizzy later described in his autobiography in these terms: 'I know each one of them sounded like me because we played on a record together, the three of us, and I didn't know which one was playing when I listened ... I didn't know which one of us played what solo because the three of us sounded so much alike.' Davis, in a remark quoted by Jack Chambers in Milestones I, concurs, but adds the caveat that when he and Fats played together 'We'd sound alike, but when we played separately, we didn't sound alike'. Certainly, the short solos on 'Overtime' do not reveal anything of the considerable individuality of the three players.McGhee's Eldridge-inspired approach, however, is definitely distinct from Navarro's.

In the Blue Note session, they push each other in constructive fashion, and nowhere more so than on 'Double Talk', another extended piece intended to occupy two sides of a 78 rpm release, but with the side-fades erased. The faster alternate take is the more uninhibited of the two, but the trumpet-playing from both men is scintillating on each version, with the closing sequences of sixteen, then eight, then four-bar traded choruses providing some particularly compelling responses.

Fats was back in the studio on 29 November 1948, this time at the behest of Ross Russell's Dial label, for a session accompanying the smooth vocal stylist Earl Coleman, a baritone in the popular sweet-toned style of the period. The band also featured Don Lanphere's tenor saxophone, and Max Roach on drums. The trumpeter is heard in restrained but tasty solo spots on 'Guilty' and 'Yardbird Suite', and provides a pretty if dimly-recorded obbligato (the word literally means 'necessary', and refers in music to an independent instrumental part which complements the principal melody, as distinct from an accompaniment) to Coleman's vocal lines on 'A Stranger In Town' and 'As Time Goes By'. He is caught in more characteristic manner, however, on two sizzling instrumental takes of Denzil Best's fiery 'Move' laid down by the quintet. (Guitarist Al Casey, who expanded the group to a sextet for the vocal items, sat these out.) You can practically hear their joy in being able to flex their muscles after the sweet stuff and they dig in hard on both takes, with Navarro in fleet, exuberant form, and the subtle differences he introduces in each take again gives the lie to any suspicions of preparation.

The other genuinely significant session in Navarro's discography is the one he cut with Bud Powell's Modernists for Blue Note on 8 August 1949, in a band which also featured the 18-year-old Sonny Rollins on tenor, Tommy Potter on bass, and drummer Roy Haynes. The four quintet cuts - the pianist's own 'Bouncing With Bud', 'Wail' and 'Dance of the Infidels', plus Monk's '52nd Street Theme' - laid down that day are classics, with Powell hitting sustained peaks of creativity he could not quite carry off into the two slightly routine trio cuts which completed the session, and Navarro soaring in characteristic fashion. It is almost possible to feel the crackling electric tension running between these two, especially on the charged master takes, and while Rollins acquits himself well, he is not yet the focus of attention he would soon become. The session is something of a template for the classic Blue Note horns-plus-rhythm style of the succeeding decade, as bebop transmuted into the less fluid, less frenzied derivation which would be labelled hard bop. Navarro would not survive to make a contribution to that development.

[References include Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the 40s, Carl Woideck’s insert notes to The Complete Blue Note and Capitol Recordings of Fats Novarro and Tadd Dameron [Blue Note CDP 72438 33373 2 3], Kenny Mathieson, Giants Steps: Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz, 1945-1965, Barry Kernfeld, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Leonard Feather insert notes to The Fabulous Fats Navarro [Blue Note CDP 7 815322] and Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.]

Ronnie Cuber - Boffo Baritone Saxophonist

Ronnie Cuber, Master Jazz baritone saxophonist, left us on October 7, 2022 and I am re-posting this piece from the archives to his memory.

As both my Jazz buddy and Scott Yanow have noted [see below], Ronnie made a number of recordings for Xanadu in the 1970's. Unfortunately, it does not appear as though these have been reissued on CD.

Each time I hear Ronnie’s baritone playing, I am impressed with his easy facility in getting around such a cumbersome instrument and how fluid he is in being able to express his ideas on such a gigantic "axe" [musician speak for instrument].

I have always found him to be a joy to listen to.

After reviewing this profile about him, I hope you’ll get to know his music so that you can feel that way, too.

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“A powerful baritonist in the tradition of Pepper Adams, Ronnie Cuber has been making excellent records for over 20 years. He was in Marshall Brown's Newport Youth Band at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival and was featured with the groups of Slide Hampton (1962), Maynard Ferguson (1963-65) and George Benson (1966-67). 
After stints with Lionel Hampton (1968), Woody Herman's Orchestra (1969) and as a freelancer, he recorded a series of fine albums (both as a leader and as a sideman) for Xanadu and performed with Lee Konitz's nonet (1977-79). 

In the mid-'80s Cuber recorded for Projazz (in both straight-ahead and R and B-ish settings), in the early '90s he headed dates for Fresh Sound and SteepleChase and Cuber performed regularly with the Mingus Big Band.”

 - Scott Yanow, All-Music Guide

I have been intrigued by the sound of the baritone saxophone ever since I first discovered it while listening to Harry Carney growl out a few notes on it during a Duke Ellington arrangement of Indian Summer.

However, Harry didn’t solo much and if he did, these were not on my meager holdings of Ellington records.

The first time I heard the instrument extensively soloed was on the original Gerry Mulligan Quartet Pacific Jazz recordings of the early 1950s that featured Chet Baker on trumpet. Because of them, I became accustomed to hearing the lighter, more airy or reedy sound that Mulligan produced on the baritone saxophone.

As a result, it was quite a shock when I first encountered the deeper and more dense tone that Pepper and other baritone saxophonists whom he influenced such as Gary Smulyan, Nick Brignola and Ronnie Cuber, to name only a few.

In a way, the sound they achieve on the baritone saxophone is a throwback to Harry Carney’s gravely tone wherein the notes seem to be barked and blurted out of the instrument as compared to being airily nudged out in the Mulligan sound.

Given the vast amount of air that has to be pushed through this huge horn to make a sound, listening to the rapid flow of improvised ideas that they produce on the baritone sax, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that these guys are an amazingly talented bunch of musicians.

To give you a taste of Ronnie's playing during his formative years, I’ve used his version of Dizzy Gillespie's Tin Tin Deo from his Xanadu Cuber Libre LP [#135] as the audio track to the following video dedicated to The Art of the Baritone Saxophone. Ronnie's playing on this track is an excellent example of his take-no-prisoners approach to Jazz improvising. He is joined by Barry Harris on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Albert "Tootie" Heath on drums.

We thought that you might also be interested in this more detailed overview of Ronnie's career as excerpted from the Concord Music Group’s website.

© -Concord Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Ronnie Cuber’s name has drifted in and out of prominence over the past three decades, but the distinctive sound of his baritone sax has never been out of earshot. From his early, high-profile role in guitarist George Benson’s quartet in the mid-1960s, through gigs with King Curtis, Aretha Franklin, and Eddie Palmieri at the dawn of the ‘70s, Cuber first fashioned a solo recording career with a pair of sterling straightahead albums for Xanadu in 1976 and ‘77. Since then, his own recordings—for such labels as Dire, King, Electric Bird, SteepleChase, and ProJazz—have been less readily accessible than the work he has done with other musicians, including Steve Gadd, Mike Mainieri, Frank Sinatra, Lee Konitz, the J. Geils Band, Paul Simon, Donald Fagen, Dr. John, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, Curtis Mayfeld, and the Saturday Night Live Band.

All of that adds up to the proverbial Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, a Down Beat award that the reed virtuoso won early in his career; the release of his Milestone debut, The Scene Is Clean, should refocus that recognition on this hard-working, relentlessly creative musician.

Cuber’s musical odyssey began in Brooklyn, where he was born on Christmas Day, 1941, into a large family in which virtually everyone was a musician. His uncle played drums and violin, his mother played piano, and his father played accordion at Polish weddings. At the age of seven, Ronnie was learning clarinet, leading to training at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. He switched to tenor saxophone in high school and took up baritone almost by accident in 1959, when he auditioned for the Newport Youth Band. The orchestra needed a baritone player and director Marshall Brown felt Cuber could handle the job, so he bought the young musician his first bari and settled him into a band that also featured Eddie Gomez, Nat Pavone, and Larry Rosen (later the “R” in GRP).

“I didn’t begin with a strong identification with the instrument,” Cuber recalls, “but it wasn’t like I had a powerful association with the tenor at that time, either. When I did get the offer to play baritone, I had been hanging out with kids who were all into the hard-bop, Blue Note kind of sound—Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins, early John Coltrane, Pepper Adams with Donald Byrd—so I kind of modeled myself after Pepper. It was a couple of years later on down the line that I realized that I had my own thing going, that I was developing my own voice.”

Cuber’s baritone gifts were immediately in demand. In the early ‘60s, he hit the road with the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Maynard Ferguson. He was jamming frequently with such players as Dannie Richmond, Henry Grimes, Chick Corea, and Walter Davis, Jr., when the invitation came to play with George Benson, who had just brought his organ trio from Pennsylvania to New York. “There were a lot of organ groups with tenor, guitar, and drums,” Cuber remembers, “but it was different to have a baritone in the front line. I was getting more solo space and much more freedom than I’d had playing in the big bands and I kind of stood out.”

After two years with Benson, Cuber forged a pair of affiliations with lasting impacts on his career. His association with soul tenor giant King Curtis not only put him on stage with the contemporary giants of R and B, but led to consistent studio recording work, a bread-and-butter facet of Cuber’s career ever since. And his close relationship with Latin music legend Eddie Palmieri imparted an indelible influence on Cuber’s music, an influence that can be heard throughout The Scene Is Clean—in the crackling Latin percussion of Manolo Badrena and Milton Cardona, and on the authoritative version of Palmieri’s famous composition “Adoración.”

Throughout this eclectic history, Cuber was always honing a style that has given him a unique, identifiable sound on his main horn, including an unusual facility in the upper “altissimo” register. “A lot of my blowing actually comes less out of Pepper Adams and other bari players and more out of a mixture of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane,” be explains. “Some of it even goes back to Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis.” Because of Cuber’s virtually nonstop work with other people (add Bobby Paunetto, Mickey Tucker, Sam Noto, Rein de Graaff, and innumerable commercial sessions to the credits mentioned above), his sound has only occasionally exploded onto his own recordings. “Back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s,” he says, “disco was at its height and I was in the studio six or seven hours a day, and a minimum of three times a week. Disco drying up kind of forced me into doing more of my own thing, including getting a group together to play the Newport Kool Festival in 1980, and touring Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong.”

Although he still answers the calls for his highly sought-after studio skills, Cuber relishes the idea of making his presence felt again as a recording and performing artist in his own right. He conceived of The Scene Is Clean as “a combination of everything that I like to do,” from the return to the organ combo sound (with Joey DeFrancesco appearing on “Flamingo” and the Richard Tee tribute “Tee’s Bag”) through the updated hard-bop jazz bossa of “The Scene Is Clean” (“I did a lot of research to find a tune that had not been overdone from that era and I happened to hear it on an old Max Roach–Clifford Brown album”), to the impassioned “Song for Pharoah” and the bountiful servings of Afro-Cuban rhythms and colors, as on Eddie Palmieri’s “Adoración”: “It has a very beautiful melody that I always thought would be great to play on my horn as an instrumental,” Cuber says. “It turned out to be a great tune for the album.”

And The Scene Is Clean will undoubtedly turn out to be another big boost for Cuber’s identification as a major figure in modern jazz. “If I had gone straight ahead and done my own thing and turned down all the studio work that came my way,” he acknowledges, “I probably would have been much further along the way as a leader. So I’ve kind of picked up where I left off, and it feels great.”

Here's Ronnie's interpretation of Eddie Palmieri's Adoración. I dare you not to shake your booty on this one.

Woody Herman: The Early Herds [From the Archives}

 © -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

I think one of the great tragedies in the field of writings about Jazz is that Gunther Schuller never completed his promised third volume on the development of this music.

Or as Frank J. Oteri put it in the introduction to a recent interview that he did with Mr. Schuller:

"I've long been awestruck by the seeming omniscience of his two exhaustive volumes of jazz history—Early Jazz and The Swing Era. Like many readers of these books, I've also been immensely frustrated that no third volume was ever published."

Though regrettable, perhaps the reason for this incompletion is that is difficult to sustain the kind of meticulous research associated with producing omnibus volumes of the nature of Early Jazz and The Swing Era.

Having done it twice, unfortunately the third time wasn’t to be the charm for Mr. Schuller or his devoted readers.

Instead, he decided to apply his considerable talents as a composer, arranger, and conductor, as well as his significant abilities as a researcher and a writer, to other areas of interest within the realm of music.

For those of you who have not read either of Mr. Schuller’s Magnus opuses, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles, in its infinite wisdom and compassion, thought it would bring forth a sample of what you have been missing in the form of his essay on big band leader Woody Herman with particular emphasis on what made Woody's music so unique as exemplified in his Early Herds. 

© -Gunther Schuller, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

WOODY HERMAN

"If it is true that perception often is more "real" then reality, then the discrepancy between perception and reality - especially as it affects the lives and assessments of artists - ought to be a fascinating subject for the cultural historian. In that complex of feelings, opinions, assumptions, assertions -and, alas, prejudices -  from which human judgments are constructed, reality can easily be suppressed or altered to suit certain preconceptions. And in these respects Woody Herman's place in jazz history, particularly as viewed by most critics and jazz historians, does not seem to square with the reality of his many remarkable achievements.

For Woody has rarely been accorded appropriate recognition for his consistently fine work as a clarinetist, as an alto saxophonist, and as a singer - he is generally dismissed as beneath discussion in these three areas - and even the many fine orchestras Woody has led through the years, his First Herd included,  have been treated - at least until recently - rather casually by most jazz historians. Somehow his accomplishments are not deemed quite central to the main tradition(s) of jazz and therefore of minor consequence.

The fact that Herman is an excellent, at times superior clarinetist, saxophonist, and singer- certainly never less than professional - and that his 1944-46 band was as exciting and influential an orchestra as jazz has seen is generally ignored or suppressed. Had Herman and his orchestra been black, the verdict would be quite different. For it is Woody's dilemma that, being white but knowing and deeply feeling that all the important innovative and creative impulses in Jazz have derived from black musicians and sources, he has received little appreciation for striving to pay tribute to those sources, whether it was the blues or the emerging bebop of the early 1940s, or individuals like Webster or Hodges or Gillespie.

And it seems to me that what Woody has embraced he has always treated with a certain humility and integrity, and without self-aggrandizement. Nor has he merely taken and imitated without giving something back; his (and his arrangers') adaptations of their influences of others have always been assimilated, digested, and adopted with a significant amount of personal creativity.*

[* The questions of what is black and what is white in jazz, and what influences affected which musicians and when, are enormously complex ones, generally defying detailed, precise answers that is, beyond the uncontestable reality that jazz originated with black Americans and that all of its major developments and innovations have derived from them. It is when one probes beneath that general truth that one may encounter vexing and virtually unanswerable questions of artistic pedigree and authorship. To what extent cross-fertilizing influences may be considered on the one hand as constructive, creative, genuine, honest, or on the other hand as simply derivative, spurious, parasitic, and merely commercially motivated is a question constantly before us, as crucial today as it ever was in the past. Inevitably, in a music which from its outset was a cultural hybrid, fused from both African and European stylistic/formal elements, artistic pedigree is hard to prove. The infinitely complex network of influences that connects, for example, the work of just the following almost randomly chosen collection of names-Duke Ellington, Will Vodery, Paul Whiteman, Isham Jones, Don Redman, Bubber Miley, Joe Nanton, Fletcher Henderson, Ravel, Debussy, Willie "The Lion" Smith, James P. Johnson, de Pachman, and Rachmaninov --- every one of these names links up with one or more of the others in significant ways--offers a tiny glimpse of the futility of assigning unequivocal artistic precedence and superiority in these matters. ….]

To say this is not to argue that Woody belongs in that pantheon of original creative artists of caliber of Armstrong, Ellington, or Parker; nor even to argue that he is a virtuoso performer at the level of a Hines, an Eldridge, a Benny Goodman, or a Norvo. But it is to suggest that Woody Herman ought to be given credit where it is due (and in the measure it is due) as an outstanding figure in jazz, whose contributions to the music have often been important and never less than honest.

Herman belongs to that category of musicians who are not creative in the largest sense, who are not capable of being "unique" or "original", but who nevertheless succeed at very high levels of technical perfection, taste, and to musical integrity. And if Woody based some aspects of his work as a performer and bandleader on other models, he always chose the best ones to emulate, through them aspiring to the highest ideals of perfection and craftsmanship.

Certainly, he derived the essentials of his clarinet style from Goodman and one of Goodman's own major influences, Jimmy Noone. And yet Herman’s clarinet playing is immediately identifiable as his, by the warmth and expressivity of his tone, by the distinctive turns-of-phrase he favors, and by the modest role he assigns himself in any orchestral or ensemble context.

Similarly, Herman's adulation of Johnny Hodges can be heard in all of his alto work. And yet there is an intensity and personal warmth beneath the outward manner in Woody's alto-playing that is undeniably his own.

His work as a singer is perhaps the least appreciated of his performing roles. This is all the more surprising since Woody really sings remarkably well, indeed better than the vast majority of those who think of themselves as professional singers. Again, Woody makes no pretenses as a vocalist, but the fact remains that in three particular vocal idioms - ballads, blues, and novelty songs - Woody has few equals. Listening to his ballad singing on records, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, one is constantly surprised to find that we aren't listening to a famous established singer but simply to Woody Herman. His control of pitch, timbre, diction, and phrasing is never less than commensurate to the assignment at hand, and often times quite inspired and original. One tends to forget before becoming a bandleader Woody had had a long career as a successful vaudeville singer and performer, going back to his teens; and that he was hired by that arch perfectionist of dance music, Isham Jones, primarily as a singer.

But clearly Herman's greatest contributions to jazz are as an orchestra leader, in 1945 producing one of the finest orchestras jazz has ever known and through it causing the creation of a body of works that stand to this day as classics of post-Swing Era. [Emphasis mine] Woody has also been an uncannily successful spotter of major talent, as the personnel of his various orchestras through the decades clearly demonstrate -from Nell Reid and Bill Harris to Urbie Green, from Stan Getz and Zoot Sims to Sal Nistico, from Joe Bishop to Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti.

In many respects the standards of excellence and professionalism Woody maintained throughout his career were instilled in him in his early years in vaudeville and with the bands of Tom Gerun and Isham Jones. The latter especially was a major influence, not only in that Woody inherited the nucleus of Jones's fine band (when disbanded in 1936) but that Jones's skills as an orchestral leader and his zeal for musical perfection were impressed upon Herman at a formative stage of his career. We tend to forget that Woody was barely twenty three when he took over the leadership of the Isham Jones band, and that he inherited along with some of its personnel many of its best qualities of musicianship and discipline. These were still influentially formative years in Herman's career, and it is to his credit - and typical of his whole approach to band-leading - that he not only preserved the high standards of musicianship that Isham Jones had established but did so whilst accepting the band's titular leadership in he context of a "cooperative" orchestra. Herman has always been exceptional among bandleaders in appreciatively acknowledging the contributions of his sidemen.

For a better understanding of Woody Herman's early development we must digress briefly to examine the work of one of the most remarkable musicians to grace the American popular music scene, Isham Jones. [ I confess that while writing Early Jazz I was not quite aware of Isham Jones's outstanding accomplishments, or of his remarkable influence. Though he led a "dance band" rather than a jazz orchestra, I should have included mention of his pioneering work.]

Isham Jones, like his contemporary Paul Whiteman, led one of the finest dance bands of all time - some would argue the finest - for some seventeen years from (1919 to 1936). Jones managed to combine the highest musicianship with a desire to present the best popular repertory in the most pleasurably danceable form. To that end, like Woody Herman after him, he always surrounded himself with the finest musicians available, thereby according dance music a professionalism and class it rarely enjoyed, especially in the 1920s. Jones was also a highly successful songwriter, the author of several hundred songs, a good two dozen of which were major hits and became standards that are still heard to this day - It Had To Be You, I'll See You in My Dreams, No Greater Love, Swinging Down the Lane.

Jones was, in addition, a first-rate arranger, as witness his outstanding work with his early 1920s' band. From the very outset Jones brought a sophisticated sense of variety (of orchestration, timbre, texture, and dynamics) to his dance band, literally unheard of in those days. One can listen to virtually any of the two hundred-odd sides Jones recorded, for example, between 1920 and 1927, and scarcely discover any repetition of instrumental combinations and devices. Unlike other bandleaders, both then and later, who searched for a formula or gimmick and then rigidly held on to it for the rest of their days, Jones eschewed formularization. His first criterion -that a piece be perfect for dancing - was combined with a high degree of creativity and resourcefulness in exploiting the necessarily limited instrumentation at his command (originally ten players, then enlarged to eleven and in the 1930s to fifteen and sixteen).

Indeed, Isham Jones was, along with Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman, one of the three prime innovators in determining the basic instrumentation and character of the modern American dance orchestra. But whereas Whiteman continually enlarged his orchestra and increased the number of doubling instruments, striving for "symphonic" proportions, Jones found ingenious ways of using his mere half-dozen melodic instruments to maximum varietal effect. He was particularly inventive in the use of his band's three reed instruments: soprano saxophone; alto saxophone doubling clarinet; and himself, in the early days, mostly on C-melody sax, doubling occasionally on tenor, and by the mid-twenties,, switching more and more to tenor. By constantly varying ways of combing the reeds in duets and trios and in turn combining them, singly or collectively, with his two (later three) brass instruments and a violin (played by the excellent Leo Murphy), Jones was able to create an astonishing diversity of timbres and textures that no other bandleader in 1921 or 1922 even dreamt of, let alone realized. Virginia Blues, High Brown Blues, Farewell Blues, My Honey's Lovin' Arms (all from 1922) may serve as excellent examples of Jones's resourcefulness, matched perhaps only by Jelly Roll Morton in his 1926 Red Hot Peppers recordings (with only seven players!) ….

[As an example]Jones's recording of Farewell Blues is … startling in its innovative use of instrumentation, dynamics, and contrasts of texture and mood. Aside from requiring unusual expressive swells in the theme statement and a (for the time) uncommon low-register clarinet solo, followed by a sobbing brass trio (led by Louis Panico, Jones's star trumpeter),  Jones builds the last several choruses to a climactic ending by the triple device of a) a well-paced continuous crescendo, b) adding more and more instruments, c) in increasingly higher registers - similar to the techniques used, for example, by Maurice Ravel in his 1928 Bolero. These final stanzas of Farewell Blues are also notable for their amazing swing, years ahead of others' capabilities in this regard, especially if one takes into account that it was never Isham Jones's intention to create a jazz orchestra, merely a superior dance band.

Just as astonishing is Jones's ability to adapt, as early as 1920, the often frenzied and inane collective improvisational style of groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Louisiana Five to a more musical and balanced conception. In this Jones was no doubt much influenced by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the former the finest jazz and dance orchestra in Chicago, the very city in which Jones formed his band in 1919.

Notable, too, is Jones's copious inclusion of blues or blues-like pieces in his repertory, hardly typical for a white dance orchestra in the 1920s. This is especially significant in view of the fact that Woody Herman's early band, as mentioned a direct descendant of the Jones orchestra, had a heavy component of blues in its repertory, and was in fact known as "the band that plays the blues." Many of Jones's early 1920s' blues were, of course, more ragtime than blues, or at least retained many of the rhythmic and stylistic characteristics of late ragtime. But here again Jones was a master at blending these two style elements with his own adaptations of the New Orleans collective improvisational idioms, all assimilated into an unerringly successful dance music.

And dance music is what Jones called it, even though much of it is clearly jazz or leans heavily in a jazz direction. It is, in fact, for the most part, truer to the spirit and rhythmic energy of Jazz than many of the self-proclaimed Jazz bands of the period, both black and white. (There is no question, for example, that the Isham Jones band of the early and mid-1920s swung much more than Fletcher Henderson's or Duke Ellington's bands in their early years. And that wasn't because Jones wanted to play jazz, but rather because he wanted to provide the ultimate in rhythmic dance music, music that would simply compel people get on the dance floor and dance.)

Later, when Jones felt obliged to give up playing and arranging and just lead his orchestra, he engaged two excellent composer-arrangers, Joe Bishop and Gordon Jenkins, to maintain the previous high levels of creativity, along with outstanding players like trumpeter Johnny Carlson, trombonist Jack Jenney, reedman Milt Yaner -and in 1934 Woody Herman.

In the thirties, Jones was able to maintain a striking balance between old and new, combining traditional elements with some of the more advanced directions of the period, especially in his highly effective blending of both a two-beat and 4/4 rhythmic pulse.**

[** Jones's retention of the tuba well into the mid-1930s should not, however, be construed as evidence of a conservative penchant on his part, or of a longing to maintain an "old-fashioned" rhythmic feeling. On the contrary, it was Jones's desire to strengthen the bass lines by using both tuba and string bass (pizzicato) in order to provide a stronger harmonic foundation and rhythmic pulse, as well as a depth of sonority which orchestras like Tommy Dorsey's, for example, didn't discover until the very late 1930s, but which Whiteman on the other hand had already pioneered in the twenties and maintained well into the Swing Era.]

One simple device Jones used to produce a strong rhythmic momentum was maintaining a constant four-beats-to-the-bar accompaniment on the guitar (played expertly by Jack Blanchette), regardless of whether the rest of the rhythm section was in two or in four. With its emphasis of a steady swinging beat, Jones's orchestra could even make a waltz swing compellingly, as witness their 1932 I'll Never Have To Dream Again. (Other outstanding at times strong I swinging Jones performances are Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia (1932) and Georgia Jubilee and Blue Room (both from 1934.)”

[At this point in Mr. Schuller’s narrative, he jumps from his discussion of the origins and development of Isham’s Jones and his orchestra, including Woody Herman’s place in it, to a resumption of Woody’s career in 1936 without explaining how the transition from one to the other came about. To better explain these circumstances, what follows is an except from Gene Lees’ Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman, New York: Oxford, 1995, pp. 56-57]:

“For all his success, according to Woody, Isham Jones was always talking about "quitting the business." There have been any number of musicians-and other artists, for that matter-who have abandoned careers at their peak, including Rossini, Sibelius, and later, another clarinet-playing bandleader, Artie Shaw. We can only speculate that Jones, who, like Shaw, hated audiences, simply had had enough of the business. Aside from the money he had already accumulated, there was much more that would come willy-nilly in royalties from his considerable catalogue of songs. The ASCAP logging of radio performances of his songs alone assured him a life of ease.

Woody always insisted that, for all his musical sophistication, Jones was essentially a country boy. Woody said, "He bought this ranch a few miles outside of Denver, and, oh, he had books of instruction, and he set up a great plant for turkey raising, and I don't know how many eggs he bought. It takes a fantastic amount of care, particularly in a climate of that sort. He sent a brother out there to oversee it and hire people and run it."

Thus, a year after the Goodman breakthrough at the Palomar, in the summer of 1936, while the band was in Tennessee, Isham Jones, only forty years old, gave his musicians notice. In 1940, when his memory of the incident was comparatively fresh, Woody described how Jones did it:

"It was in Knoxville, Tennessee, that he called us all into his room. He was very simple and straightforward about it. 'I've got a ranch near Denver,' he said. 'I'm going there to write music and take it easy. We've had a good outfit, and it was nice while it lasted, but I'm retiring. We're breaking up.' He paid us off, rather nicely, too, shook us all by the hand and wished us luck. And we were in Knoxville without jobs.

"Most of us were ready to pack it in and look for other jobs, but there were those of us who felt that we were a pretty good outfit, and that we ought to stick together and keep on being a pretty good outfit. It takes a long time for musicians to 'work into' each other, and it seemed a crime to break up our now-excellent outfit."

A small group of the musicians, comprising Woody, Saxie Mansfield, flugelhorn player and arranger Joe Bishop, bassist Walt Yoder, arranger Jiggs Noble, and a violinist and arranger named Nick Hupfer, whom Woody had known in Milwaukee, held a series of meetings. Woody had always admired the Ben Pollack band. When Pollack retired, some of the men from his band decided to stay together in a co-operative, with singer Bob Crosby, Woody's erstwhile San Francisco roommate, as their elected leader. There was another precedent for a co-operative in the Casa Loma orchestra. Woody and his friends decided to follow the pattern, forming their own group, with members holding shares in the band. The Isham Jones Juniors had recorded for the Decca label, and Woody had been doing studio work for the company. He quickly arranged a contract with Decca.

Two or three of the other musicians joined the Ray Noble band at the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center in New York. The remaining six men - Yoder, Mansfield, Bishop, Herman, Hupfer, and arranger Gordon Jenkins - discussed which of them should be the leader. Jenkins said in later years that the discussion centered on himself and Woody, but Jenkins got an assignment to orchestrate a Broadway show and finally the men elected Woody their nominal leader because of his wide show-business background, though he was the youngest among them-twenty-two years old. Jenkins contributed a number of arrangements, which, Woody said, “were more or less gifts, because we couldn't afford them."

Where the discussion that led to Woody's election as leader occurred is unclear. Woody said in a 1940 interview, "We argued about it all the way from Knoxville to New York, and by the time we hit the big town, we were Woody Herman and the Band That Plays the Blues."

In New York, the men began auditions to find seven more musicians to make up a complement of twelve. Woody at last had his own band, even if he was only an elected leader. ..."

“But to return to Woody Herman, the years 1936 to 1944 were for the Herman band a lengthy (and often economically precarious) period of growth and search for stylistic identity. Ironically, it was the orchestra's exceptional versatility that hindered it in readily finding a large sustaining audience. It excelled in not one but a number of stylistic areas and was unwilling to abandon any one of them, thereby undoubtedly fragmenting its potential audience. "The band that played the blues" also did very well with romantic ballads (especially those by the excellent songwriter-arranger-pianist Gordon Jenkins), also with dance numbers, Dixieland-style instrumentals, even "novelty" tunes, on which Herman and the band lavished a high degree of musical skill and entertainment know-how - again the twin legacy of his own vaudeville background and Isham Jones's philosophy of treating all manner of material with respect and high craft. In all of these eclectic endeavors Herman managed to keep commercialism to a minimum, more so than most bands of the period, including many black ones. Even Herman's solitary commercial and popular success, a 1939 hit called Woodchoppers' Ball, was in essence a jazz piece: an "original" and an instrumental, featuring Woody's blues clarinet, Nell Reid's swing trombone, Steady Nelson's Cootie-Williams-style trumpet, and some nicely swinging riff-ensemble choruses.

The transformation into the orchestra that startled the music world in 1945, known as the First Herd, was very gradual, almost imperceptible. Some of the effects of these changes could be heard as early as 1941 in Lowell Martin’s excellent (but too short) Woodsheddin' with Woody, his Ten Day Furlough, Robert Hartsell's Hot Chestnuts -all hard-swinging jazz instrumentals that not only matched the best that other leaders in the field, like Benny Goodman, Shaw and Barnet were turning out, but already captured some of the drive and excitement of the 1945 Apple Honey, Caldonia and Northwest Passage. Starting with a fairly strong rhythm section of Hy White (guitar), Walt Yoder (bass), and Frank Carlson (drums) and such players as trumpeters Ray Linn and Cappy Lewis, tenor saxophonist Herbie Haymer -only transitionally in the band - Herman by 1943, was hiring Ellington sidemen such as Ben Webster, Johnny and Ray Nance to sit in on his record dates (as well as performing and/or recording, in 1942, two of Dizzy Gillespie's earliest compositions and arrangements). Ben Webster's richly florid solos can be heard to good advantage on such Herman recordings as The Music Stopped (also notable for being singer Frances Wayne's first recording with Herman), Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, and Who Dat Up There. But even speedier and more dramatic changes were in the offing.

Between late 1943 and late 1944 - a period when the recording ban was still partly in force - Dave Tough joined the rhythm section, the remarkable trombonist Bill Harris came over from Bob Chester's band, tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips (playing in a manner that combined all three major tenor styles: Hawkins, Webster, and Young) joined up, and arrangers Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti began revolutionizing the Herman band's style by moving it firmly forward in the direction of the new bop frontier, the first major white band to do so unequivocally and consistently.

But perhaps the most influential addition to the Herman band was bassist Chubby Jackson in 1943, not necessarily as an all-that-outstanding bass player (although by adding a fifth string to his bass, pitched at high C, a fourth above the usual upper G-string of the bass, he explored some new frontiers of his own in his walking bass lines and solos), but as an energetic catalytic force in the rhythm section, and -perhaps even more important - as a kind of self-proclaimed associate-leader to Woody, ferreting out new young talent and maintaining a lively contact with all that was new in jazz at the time.

What is so remarkable about the Herman band's stylistic transformation, from an eclectic all-purpose ensemble to the best "bop" or "modern jazz" orchestra in the land, is that this metamorphosis resulted from a thorough fusion of several specific early-1940s' style ingredients: the feel and swing of Basic's rhythm section; the fresh streamlined and linear virtuoso conception of brass-writing already articulated by Dizzy Gillespie [We can hear such lines as early as 1942 on Herman’s recordings of Gillespie’s ‘Down Under’] ; and the new harmonic language previously explored by Ellington, Eddie Sauter, Sy Oliver, Buster Harding, and Ray Conniff. The primary synergistic agent in all this was the new post-Swing-Era technical skills possessed by the best young players, relentlessly energetic and virtuosic. This made possible a level of sheer instrumental excitement that was simply not available earlier, except in isolated instances.

These new qualities were effectively captured on a surprisingly large number of Herman recordings, starting with the up-tempo Apple Honey and Caldonia (1945), on through Northwest Passage, Bijou, Blowing Up a Storm (although in the last title the Carnegie Hall performance of March 25, 1946, is superior to the commercial recording in all respects), and Your Father's Moustache, Wild Root, Fan It, Back Talk, Non-Alcoholic, and finally to Ralph Burns's 1946 four-movement orchestral suite Summer Sequence.

On the lyric and ballad side there were also major contributions to the genre, invariably arranged by Ralph Burns: notably David Raksin's superb Laura (how well Woody plays and sings on this!); I Surrender Dear, a fine vehicle for Red Norvo's creative artistry; Panacea; Bill Harris's lyric masterpiece Everywhere; and, above all, Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe, with Frances Wayne's sublime singing, surely one of the dozen most memorable vocals of the entire Big Band and Swing Era. The singer captured the haunting bittersweet quality of Harold Arlen's song with a maturity, vocal imagination, and taste that avoids all cloying sentimentality - even in her copious use of portamenti [singing a sliding pitch to the targeted note] - and that belies the fact that she was only twenty at the time. Ralph Burns's sensitive arrangement, subdued in pastel-colored muted brass and soft saxes (except for dramatic 4-bar double-time outburst), provides a well-nigh perfect underscoring.

This extensive repertory, primarily the creation of Burns and Hefti - there more, of course, some of it at not quite as high a level, and some of it not recorded commercially at all - has hardly dated in retrospect. It is as fresh exciting now - even when played today by younger orchestras as "older repertory”  - as it was then, over forty years ago. The reasons are obvious: the Burns/Hefti pieces were really new and original at the time, a striking amalgam of first rate jazz solos (by the likes of Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, trumpeter Sonny Berman,[Berman, one of the earliest Dizzy Gillespie disciples, was developing into an important soloist of increasing originality when his career was cut short in a fatal auto accident at the age of twenty-two] and Red Norvo, supported by a dynamic and indefatigable rhythm section, and orchestral writing derived from these very same fresh improvisatory styles. Secondly, the musicians played this material, night after night, with infectious exuberance, an almost physically palpable excitement and a never-say-die energy. As I say, this partially represented the sheer pleasure of frolic in such high-level instrumental virtuosity. But the band also played with a lot of pride in its individual and collective accomplishments. And it appreciated, indeed relished the newness of their style's harmonic and melodic language. rich advanced harmonies, the lean, sleek bop lines. The musicians also they were playing for a leader who deeply appreciated their talents and contributions to the cooperative whole.

Some four decades later we tend to forget how new this all was. As a result of the constant recycling since the late 1940s of that genre of big-band style by dozens of orchestras, we tend to take much of it for granted today. We should not forget, however, that there has been very little substantively new in big-band styling since Woody's First Herd, and that the ultimate perpetuation of that style during the last thirty years fell to Count Basie (for whom Hefti arranged for many years).

On the other hand, lest I appear to be overstating the case for the importance and influence of the Herman band, two points should be clarified. It was not the full sense of the term a true bop band. Though Hefti, Sonny Berman , Chubby Jackson were enthusiastic disciples of Gillespie and Parker and brought much of the new bop concepts into the Herman band, other players like Phillips, Harris, and Tough (and of course Woody himself) could not be readily aligned with the bop movement. They were "modern jazz" players with roots firmly ensconced in the late-thirties' swing styles. Thus the 1945 Herman band was only intermittently and/or somewhat exteriorly in a genuine bop mold.  The distance between it and the pure bop-styled orchestras -Billy Eckstine's of 1944, Dizzy Gillespie's of 1946, and Oscar Pettiford's short-lived eighteen-piece of early 1945 -can be measured by comparing Herman's Apple Honey, Caldonia, or Back Talk with such pieces as Gillespie's Things to Come and Emanon, Pettiford's Something for You, Eckstine's I Stay in the Mood for You or Blowing the Blues Away.

…, the Herman band was not only an early innovator in the new bop or bop-tinged orchestral style, but it committed itself to it with a perseverance and consistent quality not equaled by any other white band of the time. This was due in large measure, as we shall see, to Ralph Burns's arrangements and compositions, and the fortuitous coming together of a young, dynamic, exceptionally talented group of players. Although all the other major white bands of the 1940s -Barnet, James, Shaw, Kenton, Raeburn, and a lesser extent Goodman - also drew on a whole fresh generation of arrangers and players, they all adopted the new modern jazz language well after the Herman band had made the change-over. Barnet, James, Shaw, and Raeburn were the first to follow suit, with Kenton and Les Brown trailing by a year or more. Moreover, except for Herman - and James with his 1945-46 band - all those orchestras retained a high proportion of pop and purely dance repertory. Their conversion and commitment to the idiom was not as deep as Herman's and his Herd.

As to the question of who got there first, clearly Eckstine's recording of I Stay in the Mood, with its exciting unison bop lines in the brass and Dizzy's concluding solo, takes precedence chronologically; it was recorded in April 1944 when Dizzy was just organizing the Eckstine band. On the other hand, the Herman band's Apple Honey  and Caldonia , basically head arrangements with some of their bop-ish brass figures supplied by Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti, were performed as early as the summer of 1944 (but not recorded until February 1945). Unquestionably, Gillespie and Eckstine's arranger Gerry Valentine inaugurated the new style on records (already explored with the Hines band in 1943, however not recorded - presumably because of the 1942-43 ban). But Woody Herman, with Jackson's and Hefti's ears close to the ground, picking up the new vibrations from Harlem and Minton's was certainly not far behind.  It is also a fair assumption that Herman's enormous commercial success with Columbia Records in 1945 - along with Eckstine's - helped pave the way for the establishment in 1945 of Dizzy's prophetic band (it however did not record tm mid-1946).

I have mentioned Herman's appreciativeness of his musicians' talents. But Herman was also a consistently accurate critical judge of talent, and allowed only his most creative players to solo. None was more gifted than Bill Harris [Emphasis mine],  probably the most astonishingly original trombonist of the early modern-jazz era.  Blessed with a seemingly unlimited technique, range, and endurance, Harris was at all times completely unpredictable, relentlessly original creatively. Yet he could always be relied upon to capture the essential mood or character of any given work or arrangement. A typical Harris solo could be passionate (Northwest Passage), eccentric (the 1946 Woodchoppers' Ball), quirky (Nero's Conception), suave (Bijou), intensely lyrical (Everywhere), fantastical (Fan It), and bop-ishly driving (Apple Honey). Harris's solos were like recitatives, based on some private scenario of his own invention, which at the same time provided his personal commentary -occasionally a mite garrulous - on the work in question. In all of his playing there was an underlying hard-edged humor, a sharp wit which could instantly break out in the most startling utterances. His seemingly unmoving, tough, taciturn outward expression - surely a mask hiding a highly complex serious persona - kept Harris from ever descending to mere sentimentality – save perhaps to parody it. Even Harris's most extravagant musical expressions can usually be grasped in the light of his strange sense of humor and his penchant for the caustic and the sardonic. His control of musical content was as awesome as his control of technique. His often outrageous use of vibrato, for example was by no means an uncontrolled aberration.

It was on the contrary a finely calibrated, specifically embellishmental, expressive technique, always at the precise service of his musical intentions. It could cover the entire continuum from a searingly intense straight tone (no vibrato) to various extremes of vibrato (in both speed and pitch variance) and all gradations in between.[I know of only one other artist who has such consummate control of vibrato, and that is Sarah Vaughan – more precisely Sarah Vaughan of 1987 and the last 15 years or so] Harris also adapted with great effect the so-called "terminal vibrato" (Andre Hodeir's term), developed by Louis Armstrong and trombonists like Jimmy Harrison and Dickie Wells. Harris often carried this effect one step further by stopping notes with abrupt "ripped" kind of release, thereby adding powerful rhythmic punctuations to his phrases that heightened their sense of swing. [Harris’s countless imaginative solos really defy notation …. They must by heard to be appreciated fully. The relatively “simple” “Apple Honey” solo and the dazzlingly “extravagant” one on ‘Fan It’ are two examples of Harris’s art, suggested for the further-interested reader/listener]

Ralph Burns's always outstanding contributions to the Herman book were climaxed in 1946 with an ambitious four-movement twelve-minute work entitled Summer Sequence. Given the precedent in 1943 of Ellington's breakthrough extended-form suite Black, Brown and Beige and Burns's deep admiration Ellington's art, it was perhaps inevitable that, with his composer's (as opposed to arrangers) creative imagination, Burns would be inspired to try his hand at a similar large-scale work.

Summer Sequence was mostly composed in the summer of 1946 while on a Long Island vacation sojourn. Its four movements (played without pause) comprise a lively scherzo-like second movement, a quieter lyrical third movement, both enclosed by two outer movements whose central portions use an attractive rhapsodic 32-bar ballad theme. First stated by the guitar (Chuck Wayne) and further proclaimed by Bill Harris's trombone, this more or less traditional symmetrically formed theme contrasts strikingly with the two inner movements' many “asymmetrical" phrase structures (many of them an uncommon seven bars in duration). In addition, these latter sections abound with a constantly varied instrumentation, resulting in an unusual degree of textural and timbral variety. In these respects Burns was further surveying territory previously explored only by Ellington, Eddie Sauter, and (occasionally) Sy Oliver. In turn Summer Sequence, although never a large popular success - until, that is, its last movement was re-worked into Early Autumn, featuring Stan Getz's famous solo - exerted a considerable influence, in differing ways, to be sure, on such bands as Kenton's and Raeburn's, through their composer-arrangers Pete Rugolo, George Handy, and Eddie Finkel.

Summer Sequence is not without flaws. Some of its transitional passages are commonplace and seem stuck together out of extraneous material not intrinsic to the work; and its ending is weak indeed. But at its best, the work amply displays the potential for extended-form composition of the modern jazz orchestra, beyond the requisites of dance music.

The other work that radically broke through the confines of the traditional jazz-orchestral repertory, Herman's as well as any other, was Igor Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, premiered by the Herman orchestra in Carnegie Hall, on March 25, 1946, and recorded by them with Stravinsky conducting, in August of that year. The work was scored for Woody's eighteen-piece orchestra plus horn and harp, in effect in a wind-ensemble piece.

Ebony Concerto, like Stravinsky's earlier "ragtime" pieces, remains one of the master's more elusive scores, partly because it occupies a no-man's land halfway between jazz and Stravinsky's mid-period neo-classic style; and partly because, due to its stylistic ambiguousness, it is rarely performed convincingly or with much understanding of its special performance needs. Indeed, it may well be that its fundamental performance problems have yet to be resolved, since even to this day players who can meet the technical demands of this work and at the same time infuse it with the jazz feeling and rhythmic vitality the work cries for - which Stravinsky undoubtedly heard in Bijou, Goosey Gander, and Caldonia - are still extremely rare. They are even more rarely assembled in one place to perform the work.[ In some respects the finest performance of ‘Ebony Concerto’ I can recall to date, including my own attempts as a conductor of the work, was one given in the mid-fifties by Kurt Edelhagen and his orchestra of the South West German Radio (an orchestra, incidentally, which was later led for several years by Eddie Sauter).

Certainly the Herman orchestra was not quite equal to the task, typically becoming very tight and inexpressive when, as in this case, the composition seemed to eliminate the basic explicit beat and standard jazz feeling. Woody, with his characteristic honesty and modesty, stated on numerous occasions that the Herman band was not ready for this performing assignment. "We had no more right to play it than the man in the moon," he said.

The critics have never dealt fairly with Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. Most jazz critics at the time of the premiere and recording were incapable of comprehending the work, casually dismissing it with comments of "not jazz" (or "inept jazz”) and other profoundly intellectual pronouncements, never realizing that what they heard was not Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto at all but rather a poor performance of it. The classical critics, too, for the most part belittled the work as minor Stravinsky fare, generally unable, it seems, to savor its jazz allusions and at the same time apparently even incapable of appreciating its impeccable craftsmanship. (This seems to be the usual critical fate of category or style hybrids).  Ebony Concerto certainly does not deserve the status of an inconsequential trifle which most writers have accorded it. Nor could one argue that it ranks with Stravinsky's major works, like Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Symphony of Psalms and The Rake's Progress.

It is beyond the scope of this study to attempt to assign the work its ultimate “resting place"; let history and the future render that final verdict. What is relevant here, however, is that Stravinsky, with his usual unerringly sharp ear, composed a work which relates precisely to the more experimental, progressive side of the Herman band's mid-1940s' repertory, albeit in unmistakably Stravinskian terms. I am referring primarily to his consistent use of a) major-minor harmonies and melodies-an integral part of Stravinsky's musical language since around 1905-and b) of cross-rhythms and asymmetrical rhythmic patterns. The major-minor ambivalence relates quite naturally to the blue-note tradition of jazz and some of its more modern harmonic expressions, such as "raised ninth" chords or bitonal harmonies, especially the tritonally related ones. [The raised ninth chord is actually a dominant seventh with a flat or “blue” third on top.] This was one aspect of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto the Herman musicians could hear - or at least should have been able to identify with. ….

In Ebony Concerto, as in other Jazz-related works by Copland and Milhaud, Stravinsky was more interested in some of the music's externals, i.e. the sounds of jazz - its sonorities, the fascinating mutes (Harmon, plungers) and the “effects" jazz musicians could get with them - than its substantive essence and rhythmic spontaneity. It was Stravinsky's loyalty to ragtime that undoubtedly influenced, for example, his life-long inability to understand that jazz was primarily an improvisatory art (ragtime being non-improvised). Nor did he fully comprehend that swing, freedom of rhythmic inflection, and rhythmic spontaneity were all keyed to the creation of a steady underlying beat and pulse.  I suspect that Stravinsky in Ebony Concerto abstracted, and used only those aspects of jazz performance that fascinated him. Nevertheless I am convinced that he also felt the drive and rhythmic energy in the Herman recordings he heard, and that he would dearly have loved to incorporate those elements in his work. But he realized, I am sure, that these are precisely what cannot be captured in our notation, and which - I might add - must be supplied in performances of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto before we can fully appreciate and asses this unique work.

Much more in the central tradition of evolving modern jazz was the work of Herman's small group, The Woodchoppers, formed in 1946, to a large extent to accommodate the talents of Red Norvo, who had just left the Goodman Sextet. Indeed, Herman appointed Norvo as his associate leader of the First Herd band, and put him musically in charge of the Woodchoppers. The group recorded ten sides, of which three were composed by Norvo (in collaboration with Shorty Rogers) and all arranged by him and Rogers. Rogers had worked with Norvo before in his 1945 Nonet and apparently was an ideal creative partner for Norvo, judging by the excellence of the Woodchopper recordings. The Woodchoppers were … progressive in their outlook, aware of advances in both recent jazz and contemporary classical music (especially the works of Stravinsky) without fawning over it, capable of superior and - in the case of Bill Harris - outrageously inventive solo work, all in a true chamber ensemble conception.

The best sides, compositionally, are Steps, Igor, Nero's Conception, and in terms of performance the hilarious Fan It and I Surrender Dear, the latter a major solo vehicle for Norvo's vibraphone. Although virtually all the solos in the entire set are, as mentioned, of a high order and, more importantly, neatly integrated into the compositions, Harris is clearly the most provocative soloist. He contributes imaginatively on every track, endlessly inventive, full of surprises and protean versatility, obviously inspired by the freedom the small-group format provided. Among the many startling, yet effective contributions, perhaps the most daring occurs near the end of Fan It. Coming after a solo which Harris begins with a four-octave (sic!) upward leap, then continuing in a mad-gallop of running eight notes-Fan It is played at a breakneck speed of about - quarter note = 270 -the final ensemble chorus breaks into fast-moving bop-ish riff figures. But Harris, unpredictable as ever, breaks through the ensemble mold, zanily braying out long-held notes in atonal dissonant opposition to the rest of the band. As the ensemble ritards and comes to a musical standstill, Harris lets out one more slithering two-octave yelp, punctuated by Don Lamond's final drum "bomb." It is hard to know what Harris was thinking, but it makes for one of the most hilarious yet musically valid endings in all of jazz.

Both Rogers and Berman play exceedingly well in their various assignments, albeit in a considerably more orthodox manner than Harris. Herman pays moving tributes to three of his reed idols: Barney Bigard (on Steps), Jimmy Noone (on Nero's Conception), and Johnny Hodges (on Pam).

Beyond that, except for guitarist Billy Bauer's struggling solos, all hands contributed handsomely to these sides. In their youthful exuberance, musical sophistication and taste, they were a bright spot in the early development of combo jazz, forming a bridge between such groups as the Goodman and Kirby Sextets and the new in-coming bop combos.

But by late 1946 the Herman Herd's popular success was so immense that, inevitably, the commercial interests began to move in on this potentially lucrative

target. Recording executives, agents, managers, and sponsors pressed Herman to broaden his appeal to gain an even larger audience. Temporarily succumbing to some of these pressures, Herman began to play more pop tunes even adding a vocal group. But some higher instinct told him that that was a not way for him to go. In December 1946 he disbanded his great orchestra, planning to take a long rest after more than twenty years of virtually uninterrupted, vacation-less toil.

But Herman's "retirement" lasted less than a year. By the end of 1947 he organized another orchestra, soon to be known as the Second Herd or the "Four Brothers" orchestra, referring, of course, to one of the most conspicuous successes of the modern jazz era, Jimmy Giuffre's Four Brothers, featuring a saxophone quartet (in ensemble and solos) of three tenors and baritone. With this and other works like Keen and Peachy (an updated re-working of an earlier Herman recording, Fine and Dandy), Chubby Jackson's and George Wallington’s Lemon Drop, Shorty Rogers's Keeper of the Flame, Herman rekindled the flame of orchestral jazz at a time when the big band was otherwise a virtually extinct institution.

Herman has continued to lead successive Herds through the years since end of the big-band era, and is active to this day. [Woody died in late 1987, while this book was still in production.] While his orchestras have been in the importantly creative forefront since the 1950s, Herman has nonetheless remained a vital force in music, not only by remaining true to the spirit and essence of jazz, but by providing in effect a kind of "traveling conservatory” in which untold numbers of fine musicians have been able to acquire their advanced professional training. The list of Herman alumni reads like a Who’s Who of modern jazz. Few have not been touched by Woody's musical/professional integrity and benign leadership.

Now and then there are such things.”