Diana Krall: The Price of Making It [From the Archives]

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

“Diana Krall's biggest problem in the jazz world is success.

Singing is closer to the actor's art than the musician's. The real trick of the ballad is not to make the song happen but to let it happen — to get out of its way.

Someone once wrote in the New Yorker that when Mel Torme sang A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, you heard the singer. When Frank Sinatra sang it you heard the song. When Nat Cole sang it, you heard the nightingale.”

- Gene Lees

My Krall Quest was inspired by a friend hipping me to guitarist Anthony Wilson’s solo that begins at 1:47 into the All Or Nothing At All video taken from the 2001 “Live in Paris” Concert which you’ll find at the conclusion of this piece and which is NOT ON the subsequently released CD. [Mercifully, it is included on the DVD.]

Anthony’s brilliant solo just knocked me out, which led me to a viewing of the entire concert and then to do a bit more research on Diana’s early years in Jazz by way of the Alyn Shipton essay and the below piece by Gene Lees.

Of course, since the Shipton and Lees interviews were conducted in 1999, Diana has gone on to become a huge star and I couldn’t be happier for her because as revealed in these earlier conversations she seems like quite a nice person in addition to being an exceptional musician and vocalist.

The Price of Making It

Jazzletter May, 1999

Gene Lees

Diana Krall's biggest problem in the jazz world is success. The first press run on her new album with charts by Johnny Mandel was, reportedly, a million copies. She can fill concert halls around the world, and no one in jazz or even quality popular music, to coin an awkward term, has had anything like the promotional and publicity buildup that she has. It is usually reserved for rock stars.

Her blonde image has been on the cover of seemingly every publication except The Watchtower. Her career has been advanced by such mentors as Ray Brown and John Clayton, and she has studied with outstanding teachers, including Mike Renzi, Alan Broadbent, and, most extensively, the late Jimmy Rowles.

You'd think most jazz fans and critics would be delighted. But she has been the subject of a fair amount of attack. That was to be expected, since many admirers of jazz really do not want it to be popular. It would deny them their claim to special taste. Someone fresh comes along, is acclaimed by press and the fan corps, becomes immensely popular, then suddenly is on the anathema list as having "sold out". It happened to Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley (accused or producing "homogenized funk"), George Shearing. It happened, to a degree, to Dizzy Gillespie. To some extent it even happened to Miles Davis.

It's happening now to Diana Krall. And this raises certain significant issues.

Mel Torme said once that "the trouble with this business is that it's all bottom and top. There's no middle." And whatever middle there ever was has been eroding, along with the middle class of America, as showbiz looks for the blockbuster movie hit, the overnight payoff, seventy-million-dollars the opening weekend.

I once said to Gerry Mulligan, "The trouble with people like you and me, Mulligan, is that we want world fame and total anonymity at the same time."

The truth behind that quip is that without a Name, the corporations are not interested in your work, no matter how meritorious. You are not "bankable," as they say in Hollywood. And nowadays, few are the executives who will invest the time and effort and grooming in a talent that new careers really require. RCA producer Joe Rene told me at least thirty years ago that whereas he had once been allowed five years to build the career of a new singer, now the accountants and lawyers invading and controlling the record industry wanted to see the payoff in one year. Singers like Terri Thornton and Ethel Ennis and Marge Dodson and Marilyn Maye, magnificent talents, got dropped. The business was no longer about music, it was about selling pieces of plastic.

The point of my comment to Mulligan is that you accept the necessity of publicity and the building of a Name, but the very process makes you want to run and hide from it.

Until a few months ago, I had never heard Diana Krall. Terry Teachout had been importuning me about her for two years, and friends among the musicians of Toronto had talked about her.

Then one day Johnny Mandel and I went to pay a visit to Red Norvo in a small hospital in Santa Monica. We both sensed, as we left his room after about an hour, that we would never see him again, and we never did.

When we reached the street, Johnny told me he intended to do an album with Diana Krall. He was astounded that I'd never heard her, and had me drive from one Santa Monica record shop to another until he found the album he wanted to be my introduction to her, All for You, subtitled "a dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio." I was charmed by it. I liked her piano work, and I liked her singing. We listened to it all the way back to his home in Malibu.

By coincidence, Jazz Times magazine asked me to write a profile on her. I was about to spend some time in New York, and thought I might interview her there. But she was doing a gig in Philadelphia at that time. I agreed to see her there.

Before I went, however, I read the thick sheaf of articles about her supplied to me by Rogers and Cowan, the public relations agency that is handling Krall. The redundancy of questions in the interviews was notable. Everyone subject to the pressures of a publicity campaign has been through it. Eventually the process becomes numbing. You begin to recite your answers to the predictable questions.

Mandel said that part of his enthusiasm lay in his delight in encountering a singer under fifty who knew the classic song repertoire. But realistically, she's not all that young. She's thirty-three, Ella Fitzgerald first recorded at seventeen, Frank Sinatra recorded All or Nothing at All with Harry James when he was twenty-four and by twenty-seven was the biggest singer the business had ever seen, Nat Cole was twenty-six when he recorded Straighten up and Fly Right, Gerry Mulligan wrote Disc Jockey Jump for Gene Krupa when he was twenty, Victor Feldman was an established professional at twelve, Woody Herman was twenty-two when he became leader of the Band that Plays the Blues, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker revolutionized jazz before they were thirty, Mendelssohn was seventeen when he launched the Bach revival and died at thirty-eight, while Bizet and Mozart died when they were only a couple of years older than Krall is now. Krall is, in fact, something of a late bloomer, and her work is still evolving.

The question frequently thrown at her — why isn't she writing songs? — is odd. Our best writers have not been singers, Johnny Mercer being the spectacular exception. Al Jolson would seem to be another exception, but in fact his name is on all sorts of songs to which contributed nothing whatsoever: it got there by coercion exerted on the songwriters in a process known in those days as the cut-in. Ella Fitzgerald never wrote a song in her life. Nor did Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Julius LaRosa, or Matt Monro. Frank Sinatra contributed a line or so to a couple of songs, but built his career on the classic repertoire. Frankie Laine wrote the superb lyric to Carl Fischer's We'll Be Together Again. Peggy Lee wrote a few quite excellent songs but nonetheless built her career on the work of others. A few of the good songwriters sing or sang well though not for a living, Alan Bergman, Alan J. Lerner, and Harold Arlen among them, but most sang badly if at all, and to hear some of them demonstrate their wares could be excruciating. Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Rossini, and Bizet didn't sing; or if they did, they didn't do it publicly. Years ago the two professions were considered mutually exclusive. Rock-and-roll changed that perception, and we have now had forty years of double-threat people who can't sing and can't write.

As for Krall's comment about operatic voice, it misses the point. Back when I was singing a lot in Canada, particularly on television, I did a CBC special that starred myself and the great contralto Maureen Forrester. I was reluctant to do it at all, figuring that with her pipes she'd blow me away. In fact she was enormously supportive, because she understood blending. I learned a lot of tricks from her in the downtime between camera shots, and she made a remark I do not forget: "I can sing opera and bounce a note off the back of a concert hall without a microphone, but I cannot sing Cole Porter without one." Maureen began as a band singer, and knew as few opera singers do the difference between the two kinds of voice production.

The late Jeri Southern once told me that each of us has two voices. I disputed this. Then she pointed out to me that Sarah Vaughan had a high, thin, intimidated speaking voice, almost that of a little girl, but a singing instrument of incredible power, darkness, and range. As for herself, Jeri said, she had been classically trained and she belted out a few phrases in an operatic voice sufficient to shatter goblets. She had become a success, she said, when she abandoned that voice and began singing in her speaking voice. It was a revelation to me, and I remembered that my early vocal influences had been Kenny Baker, Nelson Eddy, and John Charles Thomas; then I heard Sinatra. I once could produce a powerful operatic baritone; now I am not in touch with those muscles, and in any event, I don't like the sound. It is not appropriate to songs.

The most important thing operatic singing does have in common with "pop" singing is the breathing, the support.

It's unfortunate that Diana didn't, during her Los Angeles years, take some lessons from Jeri Southern, who taught a lot of people, including some established professionals.

Having read all the material, I went to Philadelphia. Beth Katz, the cordial and effective agent from Rogers and Cowan, had made a dinner reservation for Diana and me. I was there a little early. Diana came in, said hello, a little out of breath from hurrying, sat down, and began the conversation as if we knew each other, which in a sense, through mutual friends, we did. I took an immediate liking to her.

She was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Vancouver Island lies off the coast of British Columbia. Nanaimo (it's a Coast Indian name, pronounced Na-NY-mo) is a small city on the east coast of the island, facing toward the mainland. I went to high school for a year in Victoria, the capital of the province, a few miles south of it; Paul Horn lives in Victoria now. The island is one of the world's great beauty spots, mountainous and covered with Douglas firs, though how long they will last in the face of clear-cutting, the land's ongoing rape by the lumber companies, in both Canada and the United States, is questionable.

She mentioned Wigan, in Lancashire, England. I said immediately, "George Formby."

"How did you know?" she said.

"I not only grew up loving his movies and his records," I said, "but when I was a young reporter, I actually interviewed him." Formby was a Lancashire music-hall man and movie star, who played what he called a banjolele and sang comic songs. Peter Sellers was the ultimate Formby freak. But how did she, at her age, know Formby? Through her father, she said. Her father and mother loved that era of show business, and had recordings of the great radio shows, such as those of Jack Benny. It is not the influence of Jimmy Rowles that made her "look over her shoulder" at the older material. It was her family.

Her father is a chartered public accountant, her mother a teacher with a master's degree in educational administration. Her sister is bylaws officer of Nanaimo. When the two girls were young, they loved swimming and skiing. Diana had a dream of being an astronaut.

"I couldn't have had more supportive parents," Diana said. "The most important thing for me is my family. I'm close to my family. The hardest thing is living far away. I go home once a month."

"That often?" It's a few thousand miles from New York City, where she now lives, to Nanaimo.

"Yeah. I try to."

"And the singing?"

"I sang with my grandmother. I sound like her, a lot like her. My father's mother. She was a real character She was the last person to go to bed Christmas Eve. She'd still be up singing Hard-Hearted Hannah. Knew every tune. I went over to her house every day after school. We'd play the piano and sing. I just sang there, never at home. I didn't think I had a good enough voice. Then I started getting piano-bar gigs. I sang as little as I possibly could. Typical story. You get more gigs if you sing."

A considerable number of women singers began as pianists: Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Meredith d'Ambrosio, Audrey Morris, Jeri Southern, Shirley Horn among them.

She said, "I met Jeff Hamilton when I was nineteen, at the Bud Shank Port Townsend Music Camp. I listened to Rosemary Clooney when I was a kid, and he was on most of her records. And John Clayton, and Monty Alexander. Jeff encouraged me to come to Los Angeles and study, and said they'd make sure I was okay and got a good teacher.

"The next month, I think it was, the L.A. Four came up to Nanaimo. It was Jeff, and [guitarist] Ron Eschete, and Bud, and John. My mom and dad had them over for dinner. There was a jazz club in Nanaimo called Tio's. I heard Dave McKenna there, and Monty Alexander I met Ray Brown in Nanaimo, and since then they've all been very important to me.

"I got a Canada Arts Council grant and went to L. A. to study. I stayed four years. I studied with Alan Broadbent first. I'd like to study with him some more. And then I studied with Jimmy Rowles. Ray said, 'I don't think he teaches.' I talked to John Clayton, who said, 'Here's his phone number.' I called him up and went over to his house and I ended up spending most of my time at his house.'

"What were the lessons like?" I asked. "I can't imagine Jimmy giving formal lessons, saying ‘Do this, do that.'"

"I wish he were still here. I'd like to go over and ask more questions. He'd say, 'Sit down on the couch and talk and ask questions.' We'd talk. He'd tell stories about Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. I just did a tour with Ray. I'd sing about three tunes a night and play piano. It was just as important to me to hang out and listen to stories as it was to practice and play. With Jimmy and with Ray Brown. And still is. A lot of the time with Jimmy was spent just talking. Jimmy wrote out Poor Butterfly for me. It's one of my favorite recordings he's done. I'd come over and we'd talk and there was a piece of music there on the piano, and I knew it was waiting. And he'd say, 'Go take a look at that.' And it always had my name in the corner, Diana. And he'd have things written out for me."

"What was it like? Voicings and such?"

"Yeah. He'd play for me, and then I'd play for him. But most of the time was spent with me listening to him play. And we'd listen to records. We'd listen to Ben Webster, to Duke Ellington. He'd say, 'This was recorded 19-whatever' I admire those guys who know the history, Kenny Washington. The jazzmaniac! He is amazing. We're going to do some dates with him. One thing I couldn't do was play or record Jimmy's tunes. Two weeks before he died, I called him and told him, 'I can't play your tunes. They're so personal to your style that I would have to imitate you to play them.' I thought that way at the time. I don't feel that way now. I'd like to do a lot of his music. I thought, 'Why bother?' He recorded The Peacocks, Bill Evans recorded The Peacocks beautifully. I thought, 'What am I gonna do with that?' He'd swear and growl and say, 'Forget that! Play them!'

"There's a time to emulate, and then you have to do your own thing. There's so much to Jimmy Rowles. It's about attitude. I think the most important thing he ever taught me was about beauty. And I think I was too young even to grasp that. You want to play fast. That's all I wanted to do. He put on Daphnis and Chloe and we'd sit and listen to that. Ansermet's version. That was the recording I had to listen to. And he'd give me the scores. I learned a lot of stuff."

"I hear Rowles in your playing," I said. "But without the quirkiness. Jimmy would do eccentric things just for the fun of it."

"Oh, I do that too, sometimes," she said.

"What else did you listen to?"

"Art Tatum, which I found overwhelming at that age." She gasped aloud.

"I started singing in L.A. I did a lot of piano bar stuff, 'cause that's how I could survive. I moved back to Toronto after L.A. That was '87 to '90."

I said, "I noticed how many Canadians hit the Grammies this year."

"Canadian women," she said. "Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan."

"I'm sorry Shirley Eikhard's album got so little attention. It's a hell of an album. Blue Note just seemed to toss it out the window and did nothing with it."

"Well I'm really lucky," she said, "to have a record company that's been supportive. A record company that has not tossed me aside, but has allowed me to grow and change as an artist publicly, and given me support. I've had tremendous support from Tommy LiPuma and Al Schmidt." They are her producer and recording engineer respectively. "I've worked so hard to be a musician and play what I really want to play."

"Let's get back to this criticism that you don't write your own stuff. When I was growing up and listening to Frank Sinatra, he was doing stuff that was already old, like Night and Day"

"Oh yeahl" she said, with real surprise.

"Sure! Night and Day is from 1934. So was Try a Little Tenderness. A lot of it came out originally before I was born. All that stuff Sinatra did in the 1940s was at least ten years old and a lot of it twenty years old. Sinatra's whole career was largely built on older tunes. So is Tony Bennett's. Peggy Lee and Nat Cole too. All built on classic repertoire."

She said, "I've been misquoted on this point, including this criticism that I don't write my own material. There's this pressure in interviews: 'Do you consider yourself a jazz musician? Are you a jazz singer?' Because I'm not improvising and scat singing, does that make me a pop singer? But I play piano and I improvise in my trio and quartet. So it confuses people. I don't think about whether Shirley Horn is a jazz singer or not."

"No. And Sarah, with whom I worked, and who was my friend, hated the term 'jazz singer' and didn't want to be called one."

"Well, I don't want to be labelled. 'You don't fit, you're not a jazz singer like such and such.' Or 'You don't write your own tunes.' There's a lot to do. I'm writing my own arrangements, I'm playing piano, I'm leading my own band. I'm inspired by Ahmad Jamal and the way he took standards and did them his own way. I find that creatively fulfilling. Songwriters are songwriters. I think of Ahmad Jamal as a great jazz pianist, not as a songwriter."

I pointed out to her that most accomplished songwriters, and many jazz musicians, do not like scooby-dooing "jazz singers. "No one was ever as well equipped to do it as Nat Cole, and he didn't do it. On the contrary, in his singing, he was scrupulously faithful to the melody. The best scat singers have been instrumentalists — Clark Terry, Richard Boone, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Rosolino — and they would always do it in the abstract, not destroy songs by tortured melismatic meanderings.

Diana said, "Can you imagine someone saying to Nat Cole, 'Why don't you write your own songs?'"

"Well," I said, "he wrote a couple of light novelty songs, such as Straighten Up and Fly Right. No ballads that I know of. Donald Byrd once told me he'd concluded that the hardest thing to do was play straight melody and get some feeling into it. I've seen Nat Cole referred to as a cocktail pianist. Bill Evans too."

"There's that fine line. People will say, 'All you're doing is cocktail piano.' I don't listen to that. I don't obsess about it. Things that sound simple . . . it's not the easiest thing. Charlie Parker, Miles, Ahmad Jamal, they were playing standards."

"Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, all the great ones. And John Lewis argues that jazz was built in a kind of symbiotic relationship with popular music during its classic period."

"It's not something I feel I have to defend," she said. "I get that question, like, almost every interview. It's always, 'Why don't you write your own material?'"

Bill Evans once told me that his very unfavorite question in interviews was, "How did you start playing the piano?" Some years later, I was interviewing him for a radio program. I reminded him of what he'd said. "It is my unfavorite question," he affirmed.

"All right," I said. "Then how did you start playing the piano?"

He chuckled and did about twenty illuminating minutes on musical pedagogy.

I had learned from the interviews that Diana was tired of questions about the onset of fame. A boy in a master class asked her what it was like to be famous. She said she hated the question.

I told her I thought the question was legitimate. I have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of power. Why didn't somebody just knock Hitler off? What keeps a killer in power, a Stalin or Pol Pot or Milosevich? Intimidation? What allowed John Foster Dulles to send thousands of Guatemalans to their deaths just to protect his family's interests in the United Fruit Company?

And fame is power. How can one expect a Frank Sinatra to be "normal"? Once at a recording session I heard him make a mild joke and all the executives and minions of Reprise records in the control booth fell about in roaring laughter as if it were a brilliant witticism. And in that I glimpsed his dilemma and the nature of power. Did anyone ever say to him, "Frank, you're full of crap"? I doubt it. Someone who knew him well said to me recently, "Frank was an asshole." But how could he be anything else? Sir Robert Walpole said, "Gratitude, in my experience, is usually the lively expectation of future favors." And those who sucked up to Frank expected future favors.

Lord Acton wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." And fame is, usually, money, and money is power, and all the sycophancy that accompany it. The endless, servile flattery distorts reality. And beyond that, there is the erosion of privacy that fame brings, which can be frightening. Or merely annoying. Once, at a crowded but supposedly private party at Woody Herman's house, I watched Rosemary Clooney having a pleasant chat with friends. And then someone asked for her autograph. She left.

I told Diana "I've seen fame destroy people. Some survive it."

"Is it worse for men or for women?" she asked.

I thought for a long moment, particularly of a singer I have known for many years, a wonderfully funny and down-to-earth person when she was little known and an affectedly phony diva after fame hit her. "Women," I said. "For one thing it puts them in the position of commanding men, and men resent it. You've got to be feeling it. What's it doing to you?"

"Well, I'm embarrassed. I feel like that when I walk out on stage and everybody claps. When we finish a show, as we did night before last in Pittsburgh, and people give me a standing ovation, I feel like saying, 'No, it's okay, sit down, don't bother.' I'm not comfortable with it. I love to make people happy but I'm not comfortable with that. Sometimes because of that embarrassment, it comes out in, I've been told, people saying that I'm aloof."

"Do you think it's a Canadian characteristic?" I said. "Kenny Wheeler's that way. Kenny and I went to high school together."

"Maybe," she said. "I think I put a lot of pressure on myself where it isn't necessary I'm trying to handle it. I'm happy for my success, and I'm trying to enjoy it. Not to be so worried about things. The pressure is learning, learning how to answer questions that may not be directly pertinent. I've got to get used to it."

We got into Canadian stories. I told her a joke: Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle.

There is so much about her that is Canadian. The main element of any singer's style is enunciation, particularly the shape of the vowels. I had a bilingual French Canadian journalist friend who used to say that the Canadian accent, in both French and English, with the tight, closed vowels, develops "because our jaws are frozen half the year." One of the elements of Frank Sinatra's "style" is his New York-area Italian dentalized t's and d's and half-swallowed r's, coupled with almost Oxonian vowels. Krall's "style" is a Canadian accent with excellent time and a voice that is inherently lovely. It has a slight croak in it. So did Sinatra's, though his probably came from smoking.

In several of the interviews I'd read, she'd made the comment that she was shy, which I believe is true. But many performers and public figures are shy, no one more so than the late Woody Herman. "Even me," Steve Allen said, when we were discussing this phenomenon one day.

Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie both told me they were nervous before going onstage. "And it gets worse as I get older," Miles added. Peggy Lee, in her performing days, used to get sick before going on. One of the shyest persons I ever knew was Ella Fitzgerald, and believe it or not, off-stage Sarah Vaughan was quite shy. And Jeri Southern was so shy that she quit singing entirely, devoting her later years to teaching. She refused offers of big money to do just one performance in Las Vegas. I suspect that people become performers not in spite of but because of shyness: it is better to embrace the problem, rather than sitting frightened in a corner, and do something that will garner by indirection the attention one is too timid to seek directly. But it crippled Jeri.

Looking at it another way: an ability to perform is not necessarily accompanied by a taste for it.

The next evening I went to Diana's concert in the Zellerbach Theater at the University of Pennsylvania. She is particularly impressive in person.

I am underwhelmed by the coy salacity of Popsicle Toes. It recalls those yuck-yuck — get it? — elbow-in-the-ribs songs of Belle Earth, and of such 1940s sniggering sophomoric silliness as She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor and Gertrude Niesen singing I Wanna Get Married ("I wanna sleep in pajama tops," oh wow!). Actually, Popsicle Toes would work better if Diana sang it naively, as if she didn't get it; or better yet, dead-pan, as Virginia O'Brien used to sing in movies.

As for When I Look in Your Eyes, the title song of her album with Mandel, I am not enchanted by it. To begin with, the title is grammatically wrong. It should be "when I look into your eyes." But directionality in pronouns is fading fast, as in "I'm really into that." A yearning for structural niceties is a lost cause in the age of lyric-writing theories such as those that disturb Steve Allen (and, I might add, Alan Bergman) and the ubiquity of hopefully, thankfully, upscale, bottom line, the loss of the distinction between fewer and less, and the spread, like the 'flu, of that hideously misused venue. The English language itself is under assault.

Andrew Fletcher wrote in the seventeenth century that he knew "a very wise man" who "believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."

Or who should make its grammar.

Her concert impressed me considerably, even more so than the records. Afterwards we went back to the same restaurant and talked until late. Now it was conversation, not interview.

"After we had dinner last night, I was thinking about it," I said. "It's your legacy now. I knew Arthur Schwartz, I knew Harry Warren, I met Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer was my friend. Just as you sought out your heroes, so did I. Mercer and I would talk about songwriting by the hour."

She said, "I guess I'm very focussed on what I want to hear, what I want to do, and what I like. I made some mistakes along the way. Still makin' 'em. I would have chosen something different now.

"Original music is obviously important. It's like," she said, laughing, "I'm neither for nor against apathy. I'm not against writing my own tunes — if I felt I had something to say. When I do, I will. Now what I'm focusing on is the art of interpretation. It's funny how a lyric can be changed by a tempo, the meaning of the song. I'm studying this art. I've Got You Under My Skin at this tempo — " she snapped her fingers at a Basie-like medium tempo — "tells one story, and if you slow it up to a ballad tempo, it becomes bittersweet. The same words. Tempo is my biggest thing right now. It's splitting hairs, it's lint-picking. I'm learning how to count off the right tempo, knowing where it is in my head. Benny Goodman used to snap his fingers for no matter how long until he got the right tempo. Ray Brown and I talked about Basie, how they would play it until it settled in, and they got it where they wanted it. Tempo changes everything."

"Sure," I said. "It changes your phrasing, for one thing. At a fast tempo, you can breath more words in a phrase. If you do it very slowly, it breaks the line at completely different points, and that changes the meaning."

She said, "Yes! I'm still trying to get the tempo right on Under My Skin. If you get nerves on stage, you'll sing it faster. And things will sound a little nervous. I try to relax so that I'm not rushing, rushing, rushing."

"I'm sure you've noticed that when musicians do a song over the years, the tempo will creep up. I suppose as they get a tune more under control. I don't know whether it's done consciously or not."

"Sure. We do it too."

"I imagine you're careful about keys. Singers have to be."

"Sure. Although sometimes I'll get lazy and instead of doing something in A I'll do it in B-flat or A-flat. Instead of doing Over the Rainbow in B, I'll do it in B-flat. Jimmy Rowles told me that Ben Webster used to do Over the Rainbow in E. It changes the feel of a tune."

"And Fletcher Henderson," I said, "wrote a lot of charts for his band in sharp keys and drove the saxophone players crazy."

"Guitar players and bass players love sharp keys. "There's nothing like a blues in G. That's my favorite key to put a blues in."

"Bill Evans used to run through a new tune in all the keys until he found the one he liked."

"The master. I'm embarrassed to say that I should do that. Geoff Keezer does that. His mind!"

"Warren Bernhardt practiced My Bells through every key, as an exercise in voicings. Don Thompson claims that because of the character of the sonorities, that tune works only in Bill's original key."

Singing is closer to the actor's art than the musician's. The real trick of the ballad is not to make the song happen but to let it happen — to get out of its way. Someone once wrote in the New Yorker that when Mel Torme sang A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, you heard the singer. When Frank Sinatra sang it you heard the song. When Nat Cole sang it, you heard the nightingale.

The packaging of Diana Krall doesn't bother me. Without it, she wouldn't get all this chance to grow. She would be sentenced to a life in piano bars, perhaps in Nanaimo.

Fancy gowns didn't hurt Peggy Lee. As for publicity, I'd far rather see the money spent on Diana than some junked-out rock-and-roller. Indeed, among the encouraging signs in music in recent years are the successes of Shirley Horn, Natalie Cole, and Diana Krall.

To tell Diana Krall that she should be writing songs is a legacy of rock-and-roll. It's a little like telling the late Glenn Gould that he should be composing rather than bringing us brilliant interpretations of Bach and Scriabin. We need excellent interpreters of classic song, and Diana is evolving into exactly that.

I wrote my piece about her for JazzTimes. They put her picture on the cover.

She still hasn't made The Watchtower.”

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.”