Ralph Burns - The Fine Art of Jazz Composition and Arrangement [From the Archives]

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

"I think the greatest aid to me in accomplishing what I was trying to do was the most prolific writer I've ever had, the greatest guy, Ralph Burns. His music is still being played in my book every night of the week. It doesn't sound dated, either, and that's the sign of true artistry.”

Bandleader Woody Herman as told to Doug Ramsey in Jazz Matters [p. 107]

In the 1940s, certain arrangers were associated with certain bands, Sy Oliver wrote for Tommy Dorsey, though he had written for other bands; Jerry Gray wrote for Glenn Miller, though he had previously written for Artie Shaw.

One of the strongest relationships was that of Ralph Burns to the Woody Herman band. Woody used to say, "I'm just an editor,” but this self-deprecation could not hide the fact he was one of the great editors. And he always said that Ralph Burns gave him the courage to change arrangements.

Burns in turn found in Herman and the Herman band the perfect vehicle for his outstanding talent as a writer.

Here's a wonderful essay about Ralph that appeared in the April 2002 edition of the Jazzletter.

© -  Gene Lees, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Ralph Burns was bom in Newton, Massachusetts, on June 29, 1922. The family name was originally Byrnes, but such was the prejudice against the Irish in America that his grandfather changed it to the Scottish spelling. The family was in real estate.

"I was the black sheep," he said. He began playing club dates with older musicians, at which time he discovered marijuana. "That was the time when only musicians smoked grass," Ralph said. "But nobody else in the high school did. The high schools were clean." Ralph attended Newton High School, another of whose students was Serge Chaloff. "I was about a year ahead of him." Ralph was a year older than Chaloff. "I knew him, but I never used to pay any attention to him then, because he was kind of like a nutty kid."

"And he stayed that way," I said. Excepting Stan Getz, Serge Chaloff was the most notorious bad boy in the history of the Woody Herman band.

Ralph attended the New England Conservatory for the year 1938-39 but, perhaps more significantly, he studied piano with Margaret Chaloff, Serge's mother. One of those "classical" musicians who have had a significant but unsung influence on jazz, she trained a lot of excellent pianists, including — after Ralph's time — Michael Renzi, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Steve Kuhn, Richard Twardzik, and Dave Mackay. A characteristic of her former students tends to be a warm, golden tone. Kuhn says that a lot of established major jazz pianists would consult her when they passed through Boston.

Mike Renzi once showed me one of the secrets of what I think of as the Chaloff tone: a way of drawing the finger toward you as you touch the key. "That's one of her things," Dave Mackay said. "And if you use a very light arm, you can execute with very clean articulation and rapidity."

"She was wonderful," Ralph said. "I loved her. She was a great teacher and a wonderful woman, a lot of fun."

Dave lost his eyesight to retinitis pigmentoso when he was in his early twenties.

"I remember that one summer I had a little apartment on the river," he said. "I had just begun to use a white cane. And every morning, four or five days I week, I would walk a few blocks to her apartment. I stopped at a little grocery store and picked up a few things, and she would cook my breakfast while I practiced. She would pop in and out of the kitchen and say, 'No, no!' or 'Yes.' And after my breakfast she would give me a lesson. And she never charged me a penny."

This was one of the formative influences on Ralph: Madame Chaloff, as if have often heard her called .

Ralph left the New England Conservatory to play in a band led by a young man named Nick Jerret, whose real name was Bertocci. He had a sister, Chiarina Francesca Bertocci, who had changed it to Frances Wayne.

In April, 1993, Ralph — by now a handsome man with a full head of white hair, a white mustache, and dark-rimmed glasses — recalled those early days, saying: "We had a job in the Mayfair in Boston, which was the big nightclub then. We had six pieces, and Frances was the singer. I moved in with her family. They lived in Somerville. I loved that family. They were like my own family. I was very close to all the brothers, Vinnie and Cosmo and little Louis and the mother and father. I had a wonderful time living there. Vinnie used to manage us.

"We went down to New York and auditioned at Kelly's Stables one weekend, and got the job. I was eighteen, I believe. A week or so later we all took the bus down and started work. We were there off and on at least a year. We were the relief band, a little jazz band patterned after a John Kirby style, a bit more modern, I think. I started writing for that band. What a thing to be thrown in with! It was great. Art Tatum and his trio and Coleman Hawkins and his group and Thelma Carpenter. Wow! I just used to wait to get through work so I could sit and listen.

"They flew Nat Cole and his trio in from California, the King Cole Trio. Their first record had come out, Straighten Up and Fly Right. I'll never forget. Nat never let me forget. He was a wonderful guy. There were two separate unions in New York. They made thirty-two dollars a week, the black union scale. We were white, so we made thirty-five dollars a week. After he was a big star, Nat would see me and yell across the street, 'Hey, Ralph, I remember when!"

When Ralph wasn't working at Kelly's stables, he'd pick up jobs along Fifty-second Street. One was with Red Norvo.

Ralph said, "Frances Wayne went with Charlie Barnet. Charlie needed a piano player and she got me the job. That's when I started writing for big bands. After that I went with Red Norvo. This was World War II. Red got together a group. We were going to go overseas and play for the troops. We never went.

"Frances then went with Woody. In those days the big bands used to trade off musicians. Chubby Jackson was with Charlie Barnet. Woody offered Chubby a job. Dave Matthews, who wrote Duke Ellington style arrangements for Charlie Barnet, wrote some for Woody. Woody wanted to change the sound of his band. So Frances and Chubby said, 'Why don't you get Ralph? He writes and he plays piano.' On their recommendation, Woody called me up, and I was hired."

Ralph, a slim and sensitive-looking young man when he first wrote for Woody, became an essential element in the evolution of what came to be known, accurately or not, as the First Herd, for a series of brilliant arrangements of popular songs and original compositions, most of which were to remain in the band's book permanently.

Woody said, "I was constantly seeking other colors, you know, as to what it could be and still be able to get a good swinging thing going. And that's why in those years I guess we were starting to use the sound of vibes, clarinet, guitar and piano. And Ralph had the great ability of writing for these odd instrumentations — odd at the time — and making it happen .... Ralph was heavily influenced by Sweetpea" — the nickname for Billy Strayhorn — "and Duke, so we were all shooting for the same thing. We didn't want to be like Duke, but we sure wanted to be good like him. Charlie Barnet did an actual copy of Duke's music, and that to me would have been very distasteful and dishonoring a great man and a great group of musicians. But what we did was try to capture the feeling, warmth, and enthusiasm, and if we could outswing Duke, then we'd figure we'd won the game."

Woody was fond of saying "I'm just an editor," as if this were not an excellent ability in itself. "I concern myself with being a fair editor. I may take letter B and put it where letter A is and put letter C somewhere else. And I may change solos, because it will suit that particular chart better.

"The reason I got that, in the early days, was Ralph, who I thought was one of the greatest talents of all, ever. And the first chart he brought in to me, in 1944, was I've Got the World on a String. Ralph said, 'Here's this thing I made for you to sing.' It was a tune that I liked and used to sing anyway. Ralph said, 'If there's anything you don't like or anything you feel could be changed, go right ahead' He said, 'I've done the best I can, but if you can make it better, great.' I didn't even touch that one, nor did I very often with Ralph, but it gave me the courage so that if I could make something better — mostly by pacing — I would do it. Ralph had given me this freedom to do that, and if he did that, then I believed I could do it as well as anyone else. It was Ralph who encouraged me, and he was much younger than I."

Ralph had never heard that comment of Woody's when I quoted it to him. He laughed and said: "Because I didn't complain." Then he added, "Woody's big thing was simplicity. As a writer, you'd get carried away. I used to make things complicated and Woody would say, 'Let's simplify it.' And it came out better. I didn't get peeved."

The so-called First Herd — the band of Dave Tough, Flip Phillips, Chubby Jackson, Sonny Berman, Pete Candoli et al — had two other outstanding arrangers in Neal Hefti and Shorty Rogers. But to a large extent the color and character of that band was determined by Ralph, who turned in an outstanding string of compositions and arrangements. He was the arranger on Laura, Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe, A Kiss Goodnight, Welcome to My Dream, I've Got the World on a String, Put that Ring on My Finger, Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, I Told Ya I Love Ya Now Get Out, Lazy Lullaby, and P.S. I Love You, with vocals by Frances Wayne, Mary Ann McCall, or Woody. He is the arranger in Apple Honey and Goosey Gander, whose authorship is attributed to Woody, although it is likely that Ralph was co-composer. The writing on Northwest Passage is attributed to Ralph, Woody, and Chubby Jackson.

The whole band was enamored of the music of Igor Stravinsky, Neal Hefti and Ralph citing him as one of their important influences. Pete Candoli would play bits of Stravinsky in his solos. Ralph told Doug Ramsey: "Those were the days when we listened to Stravinsky and Ravel. We used to get high in the hotel room and listen to those symphony records. It was bound to have an effect" And then Down Beat announced that Stravinsky was writing a piece for the band, a piece that ultimately became known as the Ebony Concerto.

Woody told the late British writer and broadcaster Peter Clayton: "A mutual friend introduced our band via records to Igor Stravinsky in California. The man said he was going to get Stravinsky intrigued enough to do something for our band. I, of course, pooh-poohed it and thought it was ridiculous. I didn't believe Stravinsky would get involved with our kind of thing. Fortunately for me and the band, I got a wire from Stravinsky saying that he was writing a piece for us and it would be his Christmas gift to us."

Woody said that reading the telegram caused him "one of the wildest psychological moments I ever had." He said, "Having one of the world's great composers write for me was beyond imagination." He told Peter Clayton that it was "the greatest thing in this man's musical life."

Ralph Burns was told that his composition Bijou was the piece that intrigued Stravinsky. Ralph said, "It sounded like Stravinsky. It was like his sound. Not a copy of any notes, or anything. It was what Stravinsky did that nobody else did. All the grunts and cheeps and everything. Rites of Spring, Petrouchka." It does indeed sound like Stravinsky, once your attention is drawn to its genesis. It is jagged, angular, with notes flicked into it in unexpected and asymmetrical ways.

The premier performance of the Ebony Concerto was given March 25, 1946, in Carnegie Hall. Personnel for the concert comprised, besides Woody, Conrad Gozzo, Pete Candoli, Marky Markowitz, Shorty Rogers, and Sonny Herman, trumpets; Bill Harris, Ralph Pfeffiier, and Ed Kiefer, trombones; Sam Marowitz and John LaPorta, alto saxophones and clarinets; Flip Phillips and Mickey Folus, tenor saxophones; Sam Rubinowitch, baritone saxophone; Tony Aless, piano; Billy Bauer, guitar; Chubby Jackson, bass; Red Norvo, vibraharp; John Barrows, French horn, and Abe Rosen, harp.

Stravinsky could not be there to conduct: he had been booked for a tour in Europe, and as he told Woody, he had to eat. The work was conducted by Walter Hendl, then assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

Also on the program was a three-movement work by Ralph, who recalled: "Woody said, 'We're going to give this concert. Why don't you write a serious piece?' I stayed out at Chubby Jackson's place on Long Island and wrote Summer Sequence in three movements. I called it that because it was summertime when I wrote it. It was written for me on piano, Billy Bauer on guitar, Chubby on bass, and the other members of the band. It was a big hit at the Carnegie Hall concert."

The concert was a sellout, a great success, though Ebony Concerto undoubtedly nonplused many members of the audience. The reviews in the New York newspapers were cautious. Barry Ulanov's in Metronome was not. He wrote that the piece was "more like a French imitation of Igor than the great man himself.... Rhythmically, tonally and melodically it is as dry as dehydrated eggs and far less palatable."

Neal Hefti said, "I loved it. Not all the guys in the band did. Their take was that it didn't swing."

Ralph said, "The concert was wonderful. Then we went on the road with it, and Alexei Haieff conducted it. He was a protege of Stravinsky, and I took orchestration lessons from him."

The band attracted vast flocks of girls. Woody would take them aside and talk to them, telling them to go home, occasionally appalled at their candor in confessing that they simply wanted to be band girls. One girl, in love with Ralph, followed the band from the east all the way to California. Another, according to Terry Gibbs, was an habitue of the Paramount Theater in New York, who would make out with all the members of whatever band played there. The musicians called her Mattress Annie. "She was very pretty," Terry said, "and the funny part of it was that she was a very nice girl She was just a straight-out nympho."

"The way it was in those days," Chubby Jackson said, "is that when a band was leaving town, they'd tell a girl, 'Benny Goodman's band is coming in next week.

Look up so-and-so.' The guys would pass them along that way."

There were legends about how Ralph came to write Lady McGowan's Dream. According to one, Lady McGowan turned up with several trunks apparently filled with belongings at the Ambassador West Hotel in Chicago. She was enraptured by the band, constantly entertaining it in her suite, buying it all the liquor it could drink and putting the expenses on her tab. Then she disappeared, and the management found that her trunks were empty.

According to Chubby Jackson, however, this is how it happened: The band was playing the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, but Chubby was staying at the Ambassador West, sharing a room with the comedian Buddy Lester. One night Chubby ran out of cigarettes. He tried to call the desk to see if any were available and somehow got connected to a wrong number. A woman with an educated English accent answered, and after a short exchange, said to him, "I am intrigued by the texture of your voice. Please come over?" Chubby and Buddy Lester went to her suite.

"The door opened," Chubby said, "and here was this very attractive fortyish woman with a turban on, tight-fitting pants, and a huge white shawl that covered her breasts. We walked in, and this woman, Lady McGowan, was looking to have the two of us get into bed with her. She looked like she was out of history. Picture going back into the Roman era. She went to the telephone and started talking to some guy. She came back and said, 'He's coming over.' And now we thought she wanted to have a foursome."

The third man, when he arrived, shocked Chubby and Buddy. It was the comedian Professor Irwin Corey. "It got 'way beyond anything sexual," Chubby said. "We were throwing one-liners at each other and laughing hysterically.

"We went home. The next evening I told the guys at the Sherman what had happened. And I invited them over. There was Billy Bauer, Steve Condos, the dancer, there was Mickey Folus, there was Lord Buckley, the comedian, Flip, Bill

Harris. We had Mickey Folus enter nude. Within minutes, Lady McGowan was leveling one-liners at everyone. She told Lord Buckley he was full of shit, which I thought he was. Finally she took off her robe, and she was totally bare.

"Now it's getting wilder. She gets into the bathtub. She had a lot of sour cream there. We were taking cupped handfuls of it and throwing it on her, splat! Finally we all went home. The next day we found out that the hotel management had ordered her out. She was taken away to some kind of place.

"A week goes by, and she's out on the dance floor with a guy and waving hello to all of us. We went over to the table and talked to her, and she introduced this doctor. She said, 'I've talked him into coming to live with me. He's left the hospital.'

"None of us little squirts had ever seen anything like this in our lives. Ralph Burns had written one of his gorgeous things for the band. It needed a title. He said, 'Why don't we call it Lady McGowan's Dream?"

This is the way Ralph remembered the encounter:

"We were playing the Panther Room at the Sherman Hotel. She was a jazz fan, she was a nut, she was a psycho, she was a very wealthy English lady. At least I thought so. At that age, if somebody tells you she's an English lady, you believe it. She used to give parties for the band. After we'd finish at the Sherman Hotel, we'd all go over to the Ambassador West Chubby, myself, all of us. It was like a big sex orgy. She loved to have sour cream spread over her whole body and ther we'd eat it off. We were a little stoned. It was a marijuana and brandy trip.

"It may have been hearsay, but I understood that Lady McGowan was in and out of a mental institution. Her family would put her there. Then they'd let her out to stay at the hotel. As far as I can remember, that was her real name. We'c play all night, and then go out and ball all night over at the Ambassador West. Lady McGowan balled practically the whole Woody Herman band."

More than four decades later, composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, in his book The Swing Era, would come to this evaluation:

‘(The band's) extensive repertory, primarily the creation of Burns and Hefti . . . , has hardly dated in retrospect. It is as fresh and exciting now — even when played today by younger orchestras as "older repertory" — as it was then…. 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, Sonny Berman, 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 an infectious exuberance, an almost physically palpable excitement and a never-say-die energy. As I say, this partially represented the sheer pleasure of frolicking in such high-level instrumental virtuosity. But the band also played with a sense of pride in its individual and collective accomplishments. And it appreciated, indeed relished the newness of their style's harmonic and melodic language, the rich advanced harmonies, the lean, sleek bop lines. The musicians also knew they were playing for a leader who deeply appreciated their talents and their contribution 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 ....’

Woody broke up the First Herd at the end of 1946, but he soon grew restless and within a year formed the "Second Herd" — frequently called the Four Brothers band because of its use of three tenors and a baritone in its sax section, instead of the usual two altos, two tenors, and baritone. And what a sax section it was, with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie * Steward (later Al Cohn) and Serge Chaloff. Ralph wrote for this band too.

It was widely said that when Stan Getz joined Woody in September, 1947, he played the book flawlessly at sight and never looked at the book again. I asked Woody if it were true. Woody said, "If he ever did, I never saw it." Chubby Jackson said that while the story might be exaggerated, Stan memorized the book in at most two or three readings.

"I don't know about it," Ralph commented. "But I could believe it of Stan if nobody else. He was a fantastic reader. At that time the musicianship was not the greatest in bands. When Stan came in, it was unbelievable for me that anything I could write, Stan could play immediately. The rest of them would have to woodshed it."

On December 27, the band recorded a piece by Jimmy Giuffre designed to exploit the sound of three tenors and baritone: Four Brothers. The piece would be as strongly associated with the band as Blue Flame, Woodchopper's Ball, and Caldonia.

That same day the band recorded a piece Ralph had written as a sort of fourth movement to his Summer Sequence suite. The first three movements had been recorded more than a year earlier, on September 9, 1946. At three movements, the piece ran 8:36. Each movement had featured the band's principal players in solos.

Ralph recalled: "Woody said, 'Will you write a fourth part?' because it wasn't long enough to put on one side of one of the new ten-inch LPs. Stan had just joined the band, so I wrote this tenor thing because Stan didn't have anything in Summer Sequence. I wrote it in early autumn, so we called it Early Autumn. I think Woody thought of the name."

Comparatively little known in the United States, Early Autumn is one of the most famous American compositions abroad, for this reason:

Willis Conover used Early Autumn as the theme of his House of Sounds Voice of America radio show seven days a week for more than ten years. Thus listeners in other countries have been exposed to the piece more than three thousand times.

The fourth movement, Early Autumn, recorded December 27, 1947, added 3:02 to the suite. The record of it, issued in 1948, instantly established Stan Getz as a major voice in jazz, and he would hold his pre-eminence until his death. And Johnny Mercer added one of his most exquisite lyrics to a slightly simplified version of Ralph's tune, adding it to the American song repertoire. You don't hear it often, however: it's too hard to sing.

Guitarist Jimmy Raney, born in Louisville, Kentucky, on August 27, 1927, was twenty when he joined the band, a few months younger than Getz. He had gone up to Chicago from his home town to establish himself; Chicago was the hub that drew jazz musicians from all over the midwest.

"I had been playing in Chicago," Jimmy said in May, 1993. "Georgie Auld had passed through with Tiny Kahn, Serge Chaloff, and Red Rodney in the group, and they heard me. And I had met Stan Getz somehow at a jam session around that time. So when the guitar player left Woody, they called Tiny Kahn in New York and said, 'Who can we get who plays in this style?' And he said, 'There's only one guy, and that's Jimmy Raney in Chicago.' And then, I guess, Woody said, 'Anybody know who he is?' And Stan and Serge said, 'Oh yeah, get him.' They seconded the motion. That's how I got hired. I was totally unknown.

"Ralph Burns did a very nice thing for me. In those days, I wasn't such a hot sight reader. As a guitar player, I did as well as most. You never get to read notes. I was trained when I was young, but you get out of practice. There were some parts Ralph wrote for guitar that weren't too easy, things he had written, I suppose, for Billy Bauer. I was struggling with them a little. This was very early, maybe my third day. We were in Salt Lake City, I think. Ralph said, 'Jim, I love the way you play. Would you like me to run over the things I wrote that may cause you a little problem?' He put it so nicely. I said, 'Oh, gee, I'd really appreciate it.' So we went into the ballroom. He got out the charts he'd written that had electric guitar parts. He played piano for me and helped me. And who was I? Some kid they'd picked up in Chicago. Nobody knew who I was, except the ones who'd recommended me.

"It was a wonderful band. Bebop was then new, relatively, and hadn't been translated into the big bands. That tenor lead on that Four Brothers sound was usually Stan. He could play the high register and make it sound like something, which is not an easy thing on tenor."

But Jimmy never really felt he belonged in the band. He carried two guitars, an amplified Gibson for solos and an unamplified instrument for rhythm playing. He said, "There really isn't much for a guitar player to do. Al Cohn took pity on me, and also Ralph and Shorty Rogers. They wrote me a few solos. Al Cohn replaced Herbie Steward the night after I joined the band. I played one night with Herbie Steward, and he left, somewhere in Nevada. Al and Ralph and Shorty made it a little easier for me.

"It was such a wonderful band, but the rhythm section wasn't up to the rest of it, since Walt Yoder, who was the Isham Jones bass player, was playing. He was probably not originally very good, and he was getting old. Don Lamond was wonderful, but I wasn't any big help in the rhythm section.

"Guitar became unnecessary, a fifth wheel, with bebop. I didn't like guitar rhythm behind me myself. But I had to play it because it was traditional. It was out of character with the bebop stuff. Rhythm sections had changed. They became a counterpoint of things. Guitar by then was in a class with rhythm piano."

In the fall, Jimmy gave his notice. "I joined Woody in January of 1948 and left in October of '48."

And the "Second Herd" would not last much longer.

Woody estimated that he lost $180,000 on it. He assembled a septet comprising Milt Jackson, vibes; Conte Candoli, trumpet; Dave Barbour, guitar; Red Mitchell, bass; Bill Harris, trombone; Ralph Burns, piano, and Shelly Marine, drums. It occurs to me that they are all gone now. The first booking was a four-week engagement starting in early December, 1949, at an outdoor Havana nightclub called the Tropicana.

The engagement was to prove nothing short of weird. The floor shows in Havana were famous for being gaudy, loud, and fast, with elaborately costumed chorus girls and Cuban bands heavily populated by conga and timbale players shouting "Arriba, arriba!"

"The Tropicana was unbelievable," Ralph said. "It was the first time we were ever part of any show like that. All of a sudden a cannon would go off and a hundred doves would float up into the air. It was pretty wild."

Audiences were baffled by the septet. Milt Jackson said. "Woody had hits on Don’t Cry, Joe and Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe. Well down there, the Cuban people didn't know anything about an American hit. So when he would sing Don't Cry, Joe and got no hand, he got rather frustrated. One night I just took him aside and said,

"These people down here don't know those songs.' "

So Woody drew on Milt's phenomenal memory for tunes, having him play anything that sounded remotely Hispanic or that the audience just might know. For the most part, however, the group's offerings inspired silences and baffled stares. They got rained out on Christmas Eve. The club owner was taken to a hospital after a heart attack. Rain came again on New Year's Eve, normally the biggest night of the year. The job continued to be an unqualified disaster.

Red Mitchell recalled, "Milt Jackson and I were rooming together. We had cockroaches and Milt used his entire Spanish vocabulary telling the owner about the cucarachas. The owner just laughed. One day we got all the poison we could buy, sprays and all, and did up the apartment. When we came back, the place was crawling with dying cockroaches. I put as many as possible out of their misery."

Then Ralph got into trouble. He said, "One night after the gig, we were in the bar at the hotel. There were a lot of girls around, hookers, especially late at night. Woody and I were pretty loaded. I know I was, and I think everybody else was. This girl was trying to make a deal with me. I didn't want to go upstairs with her. I said, 'No.' She called in the cops. And naturally they all spoke Spanish. None of us spoke Spanish. She told them something like, 'This man stole my fur coat.' It was some cheap old fur wrap." (Woody said it looked like an old inner tube.) Ralph said, "She was Cuban, the police were Cuban, so they believed her and they threw me in jail overnight until Woody could get me out the next morning."

The professional association with Woody came gradually to an end, but not the close personal friendship, and indeed, from time to time, whenever Woody needed him, Ralph would write for the band. But for the most part he worked as a freelance, writing a good deal of orchestration for Broadway shows, to which he brought a jazz sensibility that has not, shall we say, been common in American musical theater. Ralph orchestrated the musical version of Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis Jr., and Pippin, directed by Bob Fosse. He arranged music for many films, including Woody Allen's Bananas in 1971, Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity in 1969, Cabaret in 1972, and Lenny in 1974 (Ralph worked a lot for Fosse and thought the world of him) and Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, for which Ralph wrote an original score. In 1973, Ralph won a Tony for Pippin, an Emmy for the TV special Liza with a Z, and an Academy Award for Cabaret, the only person ever to get all three in one year.

If you ever worked for Woody Herman, you were part of a circle, a sort of family. Woody was one of the most-loved men in the business. I worked for him for about a year in 1959-60, handling his publicity. You soon found out why he was called the Road Father. He was so good to everybody. But the other side of that coin is that from then on, he sort of owned you, and in later years I would do anything he ever asked me to do. At some point in the mid-70s, I got a call from him from somewhere on the road. He said that PBS was going to do a television show about him and the band, taping it at Concerts by the Sea. He said, "I want everybody there," meaning all the alumni in Southern California. He said, "So call Ralph and round up the guys." So I called Ralph and we rounded up the guys. That was quite a gathering of musicians. At another point, Woody did a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall. Ralph was in the band.

I had known Ralph slightly for years when I started work on my biography of Woody, but he became my invaluable support and source in my research. He and Johnny Mandel read manuscript for me. He was a man of exceptionally sweet nature, and we developed a lovely friendship. I still have tapes of our many telephone conversations.

In the days of the big bands, it was not unusual for bandleaders to add their names as co-writers and compositions by their arrangers, and some of the material that also bears Woody's name is fully Ralph's. I once asked Ralph if he resented that. He said, "No, never.  … “

Peter Levinson once asked Woody who was the most talented musician who ever passed through that band.

"That's easy," Woody replied. "Ralph Burns."

Ralph lived his last years with his two dogs in a house in the hills above Los Angeles, on Woodrow Wilson Drive. He died in November, 2001. He was seventy-nine.”

Billy May - The Gene Lees Interview

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

“Arrangers tend to be mystery characters to the public at large. Even music lovers have little insight into the skills necessary to being a professional arranger, how an arrangement is created, the wide latitude in pay scale from a few dollars to a few thousand per arrangement, the lack of copyright coverage, the indignities and tactless behavior of singers, managers, record producers, label owners, and conductors that go with the territory of creating music for hire, the realities of writing quality music and often not being credited or acknowledged for it, and yet the sheer thrill of hearing a piece of music brought to life by skilled musicians before the ink is dry. No one has articulated these ideas with greater understanding and love than Gene Lees….

One of my heroes, Johnny Mandel (to whom Gene introduced me, incidentally), said it best:

"Most people write of music and musicians like they are fish in an aquarium. Gene is always in there swimming with the rest of us."”

Jeff Sultanof

During my research for the piece on the Charlie Barnet Orchestra which recently posted to the blog, I was reminded of Billy May.

Billy wrote the arrangement of Cherokee that became Charlie’s biggest hit and he also scored many of the Barnet band’s other, signature pieces.

When you read the following Gene Lees biography of Billy May, you begin to wonder what band Billy didn’t do some work for as an arranger, composer and/or instrumentalist during the heyday of that era?

Bright laughter: Billy May

• Gene Lees

“Paul Weston used to say that Billy May would be writing the third chart for a record date while the first one was being recorded.

"That's kind of an exaggeration,’' Billy said. There is a bubble of irreverent laughter in almost everything he says. "No. I would time it so that if the date started at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I would finish about five minutes to 4 on the last tune and give it to the copyist. Paul overstated it a little bit. Or sometimes I would leave it there in the capable hands of Heinie Beau or Harold Mooney or someone like that who used to help me out."

Further legend has it that he wrote his arrangement of Ray Noble's "Cherokee" right on the Charlie Barnet record date that made it famous. Is that story true?

"More or less," he said. "I wrote most of it at home and part of it on the way down to the date. I finished it up on the date. Then after that I wrote "Pompton Turnpike" and a bunch of stuff like that for Charlie."

A bunch of stuff indeed. Billy May wrote much of the book of the Charlie Barnet band when it was at its peak; and made not inconsiderable contributions to the Glenn Miller library as well.

E. William May was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 10 November 1916. The bassist and painter John Heard, also a Pittsburgh native, remarked, "What makes Pittsburgh unique is that they never got rid of their coal miner's mentality, people like the Mellons, Carnegie, Frick, Heinz. These people wanted to bring culture in. Thanks to Carnegie, Pittsburgh had the first public library."

Because of the huge endowments left by these industrialists (Andrew Carnegie tried to give away all his money before he died, and failed), Pittsburgh, John says, has always been culturally rich, with young people given exposure to it under excellent conditions: he remembers attending all sorts of free public events as a boy. With unabashed civic pride, he is quick to name the jazz musicians born or at least raised there: Billy May, Ahmad Jamal, Kenny Clarke, Mary Lou Williams, Erroll Garner, the Turrentine brothers, Henry Mancini, Earl Hines, Ray Brown, Paul Chambers, George Benson, Joe Pass, Sonny Clarke, Dodo Marmarosa, Jerry Fielding, Ron Anthony, Paul Humphreys - and, he adds, even Oscar Levant. Gertrude Stein was born in Pittsburgh. So was Gene Kelly, who once told me, "I danced in every joint up and down the river valley.”

"Some of the money must have trickled down,” Billy said. "I first learned music in public school. They taught me, when I was in the second or third grade, solfeggio [the use of the sol-fa syllables to name or represent the tones of a melody or voice part, or the tones of the scale]. I learned to sight-read. And I had some piano lessons, but I didn't practice. Then when I got into high school, I had a study period and I learned the intermediate band was rehearsing. So I went around. The teacher said, 'Do you want to try something? Come after school.' One of the kids showed me a tuba. By the next semester I was good enough to play in the intermediate band. I just went on from there."

He went on to become one of the most admired arrangers in jazz and popular music. He also wrote miles and miles of television music, the royalties from which keep him and his wife Doris comfortable in a large home high on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean at San Clemente, California.

"I did a bunch of music for Jack Webb at Warner Bros," Billy said. "I did a cop show for him, and I did a fire department show. You know how they pay composers for television through ASCAP and BMI - by the minute. You get young producers who are insecure. And they've got a fireman hanging off the building. There's nothing happening, the people are down in the street hollering, and they want you to keep some music going. And it's counting up.

"Somebody just bought a whole bunch of it in Germany. I got a nice fat check about two weeks ago."

Billy's background is substantially German. "My father's father was from the Ruhr Valley and worked in steel mills," he said. "My grandmother was a farm girl from eastern Germany. My mother's people were English and Scotch-Irish. Of all the people in the world, they were all good but the Catholics. That was her attitude.

"My father was in the building trade. He was a drunk, too. I inherited, with my daughter, the same thing. It's passed on from generation to generation. All three of us are sober. My dad was sober for twenty years before he died."

Henry Mancini, Jerry Fielding, and Billy Strayhorn all studied with Max Adkins, who conducted the pit band at the Stanley theater - one of the major stops for bands in the swing era - in Pittsburgh. "I didn't study with him," Billy said. "I met him. But I was too busy making a living. I didn't know Mancini until after the war, when he was writing for Tex Beneke.

"I met Strayhorn in Pittsburgh. Strayhorn understood about classical music. I’ve never lost my interest in classical music. Strayhorn had the verse of Lush Life in Pittsburgh. He used to play it for us. He said, 'I can't think what to do afterwards.’ I knew Erroll Garner in Pittsburgh too. Erroll and Billy were friends.

"In high school I fooled around and watched the other guys in the band and I got interested in why they did what they did. I figured out that the valves worked the same, whether it was a tuba or a trumpet. Then I had a pal who was a clarinet player, and I looked at that. Then I took bassoon one year and I ended up playing second bassoon in the high-school orchestra, and that was good training. And I had a couple of semesters on string bass.

"One of the kids hipped me up to Casa Loma [Orchestra], and Billy Rausch used to hit a high F every night. It impressed the hell out of me: still does! They had wonderful arrangements. Gene Gifford wrote most of them. By the time I got out of high school in 1935, I was writing arrangements, trying to copy Casa Loma. But it was a very stiff band, reminded me of Glenn's band.” He sang the kind of rigid phrasing one heard in Casa Loma's up-tempo work. "'Maniac's Ball' and all that. They were too labored. Tonight we're going to be hot! New Year's Eve hot.

"But swing music should be relaxed.”

By the time he graduated high school, Billy had played something from almost every family of instruments.

"By then I was writing for little bands. In 1935, like now they have rock groups, they had little dance bands. Some of the mothers wanted their sons to become another Rudy Vallee. There were always bands around. The Depression was on, and I was working three or four nights a week, making three bucks a night, playing the trombone.

"Pittsburgh was where Blue Barron got started. Lawrence Welk too, and Sammy Kaye. I got a job with Barron Elliott. Barron Elliott was Pittsburgh's answer to Guy Lombardo. It was a good-paying job -I bought myself a new Chevrolet, 900 dollars, that was 1937 - but it was a shitty job. I was playing trombone, and I had it down so while the guy was singing the vocal, I could write an arrangement. We tried to do some of the hot things. Benny Goodman was making records then, so we had to do things like that. The two trumpet players were great playing Lebert Lombardo ..." He imitated the ricky-tick phrasing. "But they couldn't play shit for chords. 'Gimme a G chord!' So I started doubling trumpet. And that's how come I became a trumpet player, 'cause I could belt it for them. When you're young, you've got good chops. So I slowly diminished my trombone playing and increased the trumpet playing.

"I figured out a long time ago that to be a successful arranger, you had to be a decent player to get recognized. But that's all I used it for. I played enough to be established, so I could write.

"And then Barnet came through Pittsburgh. I heard them on the radio, and I thought, 'Oh boy, what a great band.’ He had six brass, four saxes, the rhythm section, and himself. They were playing a tune called 'Lazy Bug.’ I don't know who the hell ever wrote it. So I went out and asked him one night if I could write an arrangement for him. He said, 'Yeah, we're gonna rehearse tomorrow, if you can get it ready.’ So I stayed up all night and made it and took it out to him and he liked it and bought it and hired me for six or seven more. So I wrote them and sent them in, but he got married then and broke up the band.

"That was in June or July of '38. Then he put the band back together, and I heard him on the air from the Famous Door just before New Year's Eve. I wrote him a letter and asked for my money. So he called me and offered me a job to come to New York and write four arrangements a week for 70 dollars. I took it: it was better than playing for Barron Elliott.

"I checked into the Park Central Hotel with him. I was there for about three weeks. I brought my horns. He said to me one day, 'Do you think you can help me out? One of the trumpet players is sick. Can you work the show?' So I went down to the Paramount Theater and played first trumpet for the shows that day, and that cemented my job with him for ever. I knew the book. I was able to sit in and play it. I went back to just writing.

"But then Charlie always had it in mind that he wanted four trumpets. Basie came in to New York and played the Famous Door, and he had four trumpets. Barnet came back one night and told me, 'We're going to have four trumpets. Get a coat. Get down to the tailor and have one made like the guys.’ We made a new deal for the money, and I said, 'What am I going to do for a book? The book's written for three trumpets.’ He said, 'Well you wrote the son of a bitch, you can make up a part.’ And I did, I just made it up as we went along.

'That was about August. We were playing the Playland Ballroom in Rye [New York], and that's where we did 'Cherokee' and all those things. Right after that we went into the Meadowbrook, and that's where I broke in on fourth trumpet. After that we did one-nighters all the way out to the Palomar in Los Angeles. "We went into the Palomar. The war had started in Europe on 1 September. A couple of nights, Phil Stevens, the bass player, ran over to the curtains with a pitcher of water: the curtain had caught fire from the heat of the lights. The management never did anything about it.

'The night of 1 October, a Sunday night, we were doing a remote broadcast. A fire started, we were off the stand, and there was no one there to throw the water on the curtains, and the whole friggin' ballroom burned down. So it was a good thing I didn't write too many fourth parts, because I had to write the whole library again. Skippy Martin was in the band, playing saxophone. So he and I rewrote the whole goddamn library." Barnet took the fire philosophically, saying, "Hell, it's better than being in Poland with bombs dropping on your head." He recorded a tune called "Are We Burnt Up?”

"After the fire, it took us about six weeks to get the band back together. Everybody lost their horns. We got back on the road and did one-nighters all the way back from California. We played in Boston. That was in November 1939. That was the first time we went in the Apollo theater with Charlie. I think we were the first white band to play the Apollo. We played 'Cherokee' and they loved us. We did a bunch of Duke's things. We played the Lincoln Hotel, and did one-nighters."

Barnet was famous among musicians for his wild behavior. Nor did he discourage it in his musicians. That was, by all accounts, the craziest band in the business, and one of the best. Barnet was born to considerable wealth, defied his family's wishes that he become a lawyer, led a band on an ocean liner when he was only 16 - according to Leonard Feather, he made 22 Atlantic crossings. By 1932, he was leading a band at the Paramount Hotel in New York City. Eventually he became one of the most famous of big-band leaders. He was also one of the handsomest, which helped him indulge his taste for women. Estimates of the number of his marriages run from six to eleven, but six is probably the accurate number.

His sexual escapades were legend. "He liked the dames," Billy said. "We played some one-nighters somewhere around Youngstown, then a one-nighter in Erie, Pennsylvania. The promoter came up and said, 'Now we're gonna have a jitterbug dance.' The contest was going to be between Mrs. So-and-so, the wife of the promoter, and Mrs. Charlie Barnet. We thought, 'Who the hell is Mrs. Charlie Barnet?' And up comes this sleek-looking chick, some broad he got out of a house of ill repute in Youngstown the night before. So she's sitting up there on the stand. She was with the band four or five days. We were working all around those coalfields in Pennsylvania, Middleport, Johnstown, and we ended up in Buffalo, New York. We played a battle of music with Andy Kirk.

"We get off the stand, and we're standing around and Andy Kirk's band's playing, and suddenly I notice there's a whole bunch of guys in overcoats standing around us, they've got us surrounded. And one of them says, 'Which one is Barnet?’ So we said, 'There, right there.' So they surrounded Barnet. That was the last we saw of the lady. She was a whore, she was a good money-maker for them. That's one of his adventures. With Charlie it was New Year's Eve every night."

Barnet acquired the nickname the Mad Mab. Its origin is obscure, but it was so widely used that even the trade magazines used it; Barnet seemed not to object.

Then Billy got an offer from Glenn Miller. This custom of raiding each other's bands for personnel was endemic to the era; Woody Herman ripped Barnet off for quite a number of musicians, including Ralph Burns. There was apparently no resentment, and Woody and Barnet remained friends.

Billy said, "From what I was told, Glenn got wondering about who was doing the writing for Charlie.

"Barnet worked Atlantic City. We were back in New York, then we went to Boston. Miles Rinker was an associate of the Shribman brothers." Cy and Charlie Shribman, based in Boston, booked bands, and backed a good many of them, including Glenn Miller's. Rinker was a brother of Al Rinker, who sang with Bing Crosby in the Rhythm Boys, and Mildred Bailey. "Miles came to me and said, 'When you get to New York, go into Hurley's bar on Sunday night. Glenn Miller wants to talk to you. And don't talk to anyone about it.'" Hurley's was at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street. Its history is interesting. It was a true New York Irish bar whose owner refused to sell it when the Rockefellers wanted to build Rockefeller Center. They were able to buy all the land they needed, except this one small rectangle. All their legal coercions failed, and they had to revise the plans for Rockefeller Center. They built it around Hurley's. It still stands there, an architectural anomaly, and NBC personnel make it their hangout.

"So I went into Hurley's bar," Billy said, "and I met Glenn and his wife Helen, and he offered me the job. I tried to work it out, saying, 'Well I'll let you know.' I was going to go to Charlie and ask him if he would match it. But Glenn said, 'No, you gotta let me know right now.' I gave Charlie my two weeks and joined Miller the night Roosevelt was elected in 1940, for the third term.

"Helen was a real nice lady, though she had that little iron hand in there. I liked her very much. I got to know her pretty well after Glenn was gone. I had my band by then and was playing the Palladium and she came in to hear the band. I thought that was very nice of her.

"Actually, there are two versions of the story. Glenn wanted to hire a trumpet player. He was unhappy and he needed a guy in the section. One version is that he wanted Bernie Privin, who was in Charlie's band at the time. Or he wanted me. And he wanted me to screw up his arrangements. So he hired me. Ray Anthony and I joined the band at the same time - November 1940.

"John O'Leary made sure we were on the train and all that. He was the road manager, and a good one too. John was a good Catholic. He was an old man. We'd be riding on the bus, doing the one-nighters up in New England, and Sunday you'd wake up at 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock in the morning, and the bus would be stopped. A nice bright sunny day in New England. And you're outside a Catholic church. And the bus driver was there, with his hat down over his face. He said, 'John O'Leary just went in for Mass. We'll be going in a minute.'

"Miller was a good arranger. And he was a number one fixer. You'd get at the rehearsal, and the tunes were running too long, or somebody's key didn't fit, he was a demon at fixing things like that. He wouldn't transpose it, but he'd be able to patch it together so that it was presentable for a program. I learned an awful lot from him when we did those fifteen-minute Chesterfield shows. 'Cause he was always adjusting them, or cutting them down, or putting them in medleys - you know, he had a lot of hit records - and he'd make them fit the program, and he'd get as many tunes in as he could. And the pluggers were busy in those days; I'm talking 1940 or '41 now. He'd get all the plugs in he could for the guys, and things like that. He was a demon at cutting here, and putting in a bell note there, and then maybe he'd write a little thing for the saxes - dictate it to them - and it would be ready. He really knew how to run a rehearsal.

"But with Glenn, everything was always the same. You'd come to work, you didn't wear the red socks, Jesus Christ, there'd be a big scene. I learned to live with the routine; I was newly married. We were making good money - 1940, '41, I was making 150 dollars a week guaranteed, but some weeks we'd make four or five hundred, because we were doing the Chesterfield show, and working in New York doing the Paramount Theater, and stuff like that. I bought my first house out here with that. Then I made the two pictures with Glenn, Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives."

The two films often run on television. If you look closely, you can see a young - he was 25 - and chubby Billy May back in the trumpet section.

"After the second picture," he said, "we were supposed to have some time off. Instead, all of a sudden, we take the train back to Chicago. And that was a surprise. We were going back to work. We were working out of the College Inn at the Sherman Hotel. We were doing the Chesterfield show on network radio three nights a week. And every weekend, we'd go out somewhere, working an army or navy base somewhere. And it soon became apparent that Glenn was scouting around for something. Meanwhile, I had some friends who were publishers. I let it be known that I didn't want to play that much any more, I'd rather be writing. And I got a deal with Alvino Key and the King Sisters.

"The Miller band had a couple of weeks off. I went down to Philadelphia, did two or three charts for Alvino, and I got a good deal with them. They gave me 150 bucks a week to write two charts. I went back with Miller. We were playing in Youngstown, Ohio. I went in and told him, I said, 'I've got a chance to stay in New York writing and I won't have to travel any more, so I'd like to leave the band.' He said, 'It's no surprise. I'm going into the service, that's why we've been working all these places. I'm expecting a commission to come through any time. I'd like you to stick it out just until the end. Because I don't want people to think the rats are leaving the ship.’ That's the term he used.

"So I said, 'Okay,’ because he'd been pretty good to me over all. He was a pain in the ass to work for, but the deal was okay. He said, 'I'm going to come out of this war as some kind of a hero, you wait and see.' It came out a little different than he planned.

"I think Glenn was an alcoholic. I think he was a dry drunk. He kept it inside of him. I saw him get drunk a couple of times, and he went completely off his rocker. Just for a couple of days.

"Chummy MacGregor was playing piano in the band. He was the first guy that told me about DTs. Chummy would wake up in the morning and there was nothing there to drink, so he'd have to get down to Plunkett's speakeasy. That was the only place you could get it. He'd run down and get a cab. And when he tried to get in, the back seat would be full of lions and tigers, and he would have to run down on the street. Chummy had been dry for six or seven years when Glenn started the band. Chummy was his friend from way back.

"And I know a couple of times Glenn was drunk when we were working a theater somewhere. And he was staggering, emceeing a show, and Chummy didn't let him up. Every time he'd come near Chummy, Chummy would say, 'Whatsa matter, someone hit you with the bar rag, for Chris'sake?'

"'Dry drunk' is an expression in AA - when a person stays sober but hates it. He wants to let all that stuff out, but he doesn't know how to do it unless he gets drunk.

"He was a terrible drunk. But when he'd go on the wagon, he'd be one of those stiff people. He never learned to be a decent, sober man. He needed a couple of good AA meetings.

"I know other people with the same personality. I knew when I drank and I'd stop, I'd grit my teeth, and say, ‘I’ll stay sober, god damn it!' And then when you'd let go, you went crazy. And AA showed me the way to get over that.

'The rest of the time Glenn was kind of mad at the world. He was bitter about everything. Kind of a down kind of guy. Putting things down all the time." Billy affected a grousing snarl: "'Ah for Chris'sake, Dorsey did that.' "He used to like some of the stuff I wrote. But then he'd get around to Duke: 'Bunch of sloppy bastards.' True, but it was also good.

"When he got the power of being a leader, and got his own publishing company, he got to be a power maniac. He had control of Thornhill, and Spivak, and he controlled Woody, I think. And he controlled Hal Mclntyre. He had a piece of Charlie Spivak and a piece of Thornhill.

"I was in the band about two weeks when I got to know Willie Schwartz, who was playing clarinet.

"I've got to tell you a story. After the war, Willie worked a one-nighter with Tex Beneke at the Palladium. It was a Miller memorial. When the band was off the stand, a guy came up to Willie with a shoe box. He opened it. He had some straw or dirt or something in there. He said, 'Do you know what this is?’ Willie said, 'No.’ The guy said, 'That's the last piece of dirt that Glenn Miller stepped on.’ He asked Willie what he thought he should do with it. Willie said, 'Why don't you smoke it?'

"The one guy who had Miller buffaloed was Moe Purtill. As a drummer, his playing wasn't that good, but we liked him as a guy. He was a good guy, and he didn't take any shit from Miller.

"Miller was cruel to Bill Finegan, he really was. He messed with everybody's charts, but especially Bill's. ‘That introduction, take that out. Start down here.’ Merciless. The intro would be beautiful. 'Take that out.’

"I got that treatment too, but on a smaller scale, 'cause I didn't write that much for him." Billy played solos on "Song of the Volga Boatmen" and "American Patrol," and he arranged "Ida," "Delilah," "Long Tall Mama," "Always in My Heart," "Soldier Let Me Read Your Letter," and "Take the A Train." He was co-arranger with Finegan of "Serenade in Blue" and "At Last." By far the bulk of that book was written by Finegan, including major hits such as "Little Brown Jug" and "American Patrol," with Jerry Gray making large contributions, including "A String of Pearls," when he came over from the band of Artie Shaw.

"I stuck it out until the end," Billy said. "By the time the band broke up, in Passaic, New Jersey, the NBC band in New York was short trumpet players, and they made a deal of Mickey McMickle and me and somebody else who had an 802 card. So I stayed in New York, working at NBC and sending charts to Alvino.

"I played in the NBC house band. I played on The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street with Paul Lavalle. I was working there with a wonderful trumpet player named Charlie Margulis. Charlie was a don't-take-any-crap-from-anybody kind of guy. We were playing along and rehearsing in studio 8-H, and Paul Lavalle was rehearsing the band. He stopped the band because there was a trumpet unison passage. He said, 'Play it alone, trumpets.’ So we played it alone. He said, ‘Try it once more.’ So we played it again. He said, ‘Try it one more time, please.’ And Charlie Margulis says, 'Why!?' Like that. And Paul Lavalle says, 'It isn't together.’ And Charlie Margulis says, 'It's together back here.’ And Paul says, 'Well it's not together up here.’ And Charlie says, 'Well clean the shit out of your ears!'

"What Charlie didn't realize is that up above us is the glass where the twenty-five-cent tours are going through, and they can hear it. That was the last time Charlie worked there.

"Alvino was working around out here. My first wife was a Los Angeles girl, and I thought, 'Well, I'm gonna have to go in the army.’ John Best and those guys were already in the service. John went to the South Pacific with Conrad Gozzo and all those guys, in the Artie Shaw navy band. So I came out to California. I was jobbing here. I put my card in for local 47. When I got my draft notice, they found out I’d had asthma when I was a kid, and they never called me again.

"I worked for Woody in the Palladium. That was '43. He wanted me to go with him. We really got drunk together in the Garden of Allah. I think two or three nights in a row. Woody left. Bing Crosby was going down to San Diego to work at hospitals. They were taking some singers and some dancers and a little Dixieland band to fake everything. Bobby Goodrich was playing trumpet, and Bobby got drafted. They called me to fake on that show, and I did.

"I guess they liked the way I played. I couldn't play Bing's radio show, because I still had some time to wait on my local 47 card. John Scott Trotter, who knew my work, asked me to do a couple of charts. So I wrote for him. I worked some one-nighters with Bob Crosby and Alvino Key. I finally got my card, and kept on working. I started doing some work for Ozzie Nelson.

"It was a good band. They had a roving baritone saxophone against a cornet, and they used that as a counterline against the whole band. I asked Ozzie who thought that up, and he couldn't remember. Some arranger had figured that out. When they were doing The Joe Penner Show - "Nelson played that show from 1933 to 1935 " - they were using that even then. And I was always interested in the arranging. The band had really good writing.’ I pointed out to Billy that Gerry Mulligan liked that band for just that reason. And I liked it for charts such as "Swinging on the Golden Gate,' which I remember from childhood.

"I enjoyed working for Ozzie,’ Billy said. "He was a stickler, but he wasn't a bad guy about it, like Miller was. He was a guitar player, and a bad one. He just said, That's no good, change it.' He was an attorney. But he knew what he was doing. I ended up playing trumpet for him, then writing for him, and finally conducting for him. I wrote the cues and bridges on the Ozzie and Harriet Show on network radio when his kids were so small he had actors playing their parts.

"Meanwhile, I knew the King Sisters, and they were working for Capitol, and some of their husbands were working for Capitol, so I got in there. I knew Paul Weston, and he was music director of Capitol. I did the Capitol children's things, 'Bozo the Clown' and all that.

"Then Capitol needed some foxtrots for an Arthur Murray package, so I wrote four or five instrumentals. They liked them so well they put them out. And that's when I started using the sliding saxophones.

"With the sliding saxophone effect, they attack the note out of tune and slide into it with the lip. And certain pitches work better than others, so you've gotta know that. An E on the alto will work as well as an E on the tenor, but they're different pitches. And I always had good saxophone players. I had Willie Schwartz and Skeets Herfurt and Ted Nash and guys like that. They knew what they were doing and they knew what I wanted.

"I did a bunch of those albums, Sorta May, then Sorta Dixie. They were expensive in those days, but they made it into the black.'

"And I got in the band business," Billy said. "My first marriage was falling apart, and my drinking was getting to the point where it started to get pretty glamorous. So I made an alcoholic decision and I took the band out on the road.

"Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan had a good band. I liked their band. We played a battle of music in Canobie Lake, New Hampshire. My band and the Sauter-Finegan band. When we got there, I remembered a while before that with Glenn when we played there. That was in 1942. And John O'Leary, the road manager, introduced Glenn to the guy who managed the ballroom. Mr. Sullivan, I think. 'Mr. Sullivan owns the park and the lumber yard and everything all around.' Glenn said, 'How do you do?' And the guy said, 'It's ten minutes to nine, you'd better get up to get ready to start.'

"So when I played there with Finegan, I thought, 'Jesus, that son of a bitch, I'd better watch out for him.' We got up and played and the Sauter-Finegan band got up and played, and some kid came up to me and says, 'Hey, Billy, you're off for a while. Come on back into the office.' I went back in the office, and I looked around, and I said, 'Where's Mr. Sullivan?' And the kid said, 'Oh he died about four years ago. He left this place to his kids, and I'm one of them. Have a drink, you don't have to get on the bandstand again.' It was the greatest party we ever had.

"I was out on the road about two years, and I realized it was a losing cause. I don't like to be a bandleader, stand up there. I used to use it in my AA pitch. I said I didn't want to be a bandleader because you had to stand up there and do 'Happy Birthday to Myrtle.' If somebody asked me to play 'Happy Birthday to Myrtle,' I'd tell them where they could shove it. And that ain't the way Lawrence Welk does it.

"I ended up selling the band to Ray Anthony - the name, the personal appearance rights. I didn't want to stay in the band business, I wanted to get the hell out. The agencies and everybody were on my back, 'Go on out, you can do great.' And I did. I grossed $400,000 one year. But where did it all go? To get out of that, I sold it to Ray.

"In 1963, booze had started to create some pretty good problems. I was married for the second time. I was working, I was handling everything, and the finances were okay. But I started to feel bad. One day I got chest pains, and I was lying on the bed, smoking, and I had a drink. This was November of '63. My stepdaughter worked in a doctor's office. She said, 'Do you mind if I talk to the doctor about your chest pains?' I said, 'Okay.’ The next thing I know I hear a siren. And here come two paramedics. They said, Put your cigarette out, you're having a heart attack.’ They took me down to St. John's. This was in the days before they had bypasses. I had to lie in the hospital for two weeks. While I was there, I figured I'd try to stop smoking. I was smoking two or three packs a day. I was able to stop smoking during that period. When I got out, I got to thinking, 'How noble can I get? The least I can do now is drink.’ And about four months later I called Dave Barbour, who was a good friend of mine. He was in AA. I couldn't reach him; but I knew a lady he had helped.

"So through her I arranged to go to a meeting. I had a few inches in the bottom of a vodka bottle, and I figured there's no use in wasting it. So I drank it, and they tell me I really enjoyed that first meeting." He laughed. "The first meeting I went to I met Red Norvo, and a saxophone player I used to get drunk with in New York, Larry Binyon. Good all-round clarinet player. Larry kind of took me over. The guys all called me the next day: that was in July. I didn't actually stop drinking until later.

"The last time I got drunk was at Charlie Barnet's party. Charlie threw a party for his fiftieth birthday, and he hired Duke Ellington's band. It was the night of all nights. It was at the country club in Palm Springs. I remember drinking some Martinis before we went. Seeing Duke and everything. When I woke up the next day, I was lying on the floor in my house in Cathedral City. I knew what I had to do. I had to get to a meeting, and I did. That was it. I haven't had a drink since October 1964."

Some of the finest charts Billy wrote at Capitol were for Frank Sinatra, seven albums in all. "I started working for him, and I started working for Peggy Lee.

"Sinatra was good to me. I got along with him. The reason is I never got too close to him. I went in and did my job and got the hell out of there. My wife Doris and I have been guests of his. He invited us to go to the symphony with him and Barbara. He was very knowledgeable. I was surprised to find he knew a lot about Scriabin. He was a much better musician than people realize."

The Sinatra albums included Come Fly with Me, Come Dance with Me, Come Swing with Me, and four more. Billy worked with George Shearing on Burnished Brass and had hit singles with Nat Cole, including "Walkin' My Baby Back Home."

"Pretty soon," he said, "television came around. The first show I did, or the first you ever heard of, was Naked City. I did that for two or three years. Then I went to work for Lionel Newman, and I wrote a bunch of Batman sequences. Neal Hefti wrote the theme, and on the cue sheet Lionel listed it as 'Words and music by Neal Hefti.’ Lionel was a good cat. I wrote a bunch of Mod Squad episodes. Then when John Williams went to Boston, he asked me to do some charts for the Boston Pops Orchestra, probably 25 or 30 for them.

"I lived up in Cambria for three or four years.’ Cambria is a beautiful ocean-side community up the coast from Los Angeles; in those days it would have seemed quite remote. "I wrote the Time-Life series, for Capitol Records. They remade the swing era. It was a good gig for me, because they gave me the tapes on Tuesday. I'd take them up and write next week's show, send them into the copyist, come down and record them on Monday night. They said, 'Would you do a couple of dates for us?' It ended we did one record date a week, and sometimes two, for over three years. They've repackaged them. That was from '69 through '72. It counted on the musicians' pension fund for the guys and for me.

"I did some work for Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson when they were writing for television together and had that office on Coldwater Canyon at Ventura Boulevard. I ran into Lou Busch - Joe 'Fingers' Carr - and told him I was in AA. He'd quit drinking some time before. I said, 'What's new?'

"And he said, 'I'm getting married again.'

"I said, 'Oh? Anybody I know?'

"He said, 'No, I finally kicked the girl-singer habit too.'

"I told that to Jack and Allyn at their office. Dave Grusin was there. He said, 'Where do those guys hold their meetings?'"

I first met Billy in that office. I was in slight awe: after all, he had been one of the heroes of my adolescence. Jack and Allyn were in the process of founding what is now called the American Jazz Philharmonic to play scores that partook of both jazz and classical music. A score had been submitted by Frank Zappa. Billy was sitting in an armchair, reading it.

He said, "Look at all the percussion it calls for." And he read the list aloud, culminating in "two garbage cans."

Billy paused a moment and said, "Twenty or thirty gallons?" and I about rolled out of my chair writhing in laughter.

"I'm not doing any writing now," Billy said. "I quit. The last thing I did was a year and a half ago, Stan Freberg's The United States of America Volume 2.

"The last couple of things I did were so different from the way I like to record. Everybody's out in different rooms. The drums are out in the men's room. Who needs that? I did a thing for Keely Smith. The only reason I did it was because they offered me a ridiculous amount of money. We did it at Capitol, and everybody's out in different rooms. I said, 'How can the guys hear?' They said, 'They can listen on their headphones.'

"Screw that. And I don't like the CD sounds at all. I think they're terrible.

It sounds to me like all the mixers are young and their idea of a good balance is the Beatles. It's the same thing in symphony; you hear too much pounding."

Billy has had a wispy gray beard for some years now. He has dieted away some weight. He has a sharp sense of life's incongruity, and humor has always infused his writing, whether his compositions or his arrangements, though his ballad writing is always beautiful and sensitive. (The chart on Sinatra's Autumn in New York is his.) This bright laughter is perhaps the reason he has not been given the credit that is his due.

Except of course among musicians, particularly arrangers, none of whom will be pleased to learn he has retired.

As an old expression has it: the cats always know.”

Billy May died in 2004.