HARLEM PIANO - Luckey Roberts and Willie "The Lion" Smith [Addendum]

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

In re-posting this piece, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles took the opportunity to amend the text with some excerpts from Willie “The Lion” Smith’s autobiography Music on My Mind [1964; George Hoefer] and with the videos which you will find at the end of this piece.

It is the Jazz World’s good fortunate that the late, Les Koenig, who founded Contemporary Records and recorded a great deal of Jazz on the West Coast in the 1950s, was also a devotee of traditional Jazz, including Harlem/stride piano and created another label – Good Time Jazz – for the express purpose of immortalizing this form of the music.

As Nat Hentoff points out in the a following insert notes to the album, had Les not been such an enthusiast of early forms of Jazz, we would have much less of the recorded music of Luckey Roberts. Even with these sides, there is far too little of Luckey’s playing on record. Fortunately, such is not the case with Willie “The Lion” Smith, who joins Luckey on this album.

If you are looking for an introduction to Harlem piano, you need look no farther.

This one is a peach!

© -Nat Hentoff, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

HARLEM PIANO, New Orleans jazz, and country blues have this in common: once the giants are gone there can be no me to replace them. This album contains the work of two of the major creators of Harlem piano. Luckey Roberts became the dean of the school - teaching and influencing James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, and even a ringer, George Gershwin. Luckey was also the Liszt of the field in his vivid command of technical bravura, As James P. Johnson described the Luckey of 1913 "Luckey had massive hands that could stretch a fourteenth on the keyboard, and he played tenths as easy as others played octaves. His tremolo was terrific, and he could drum on one note with two or three fingers in either hand. His style in making breaks was like a drummer's; he'd flail his hands in and out, lifting them high,"

Willie 'The Lion" was always one of the reigning council of the Harlem ‘ticklers;’ and in recent years he has become the best known and most struttingly spectacular of those few who are left. I've seen him at Newport, at private parries, in night clubs, and at concerts, inevitably seizing the audience as soon as he walked on with cigar jutting out of his mouth, Willie strides like Don Juan on the way to an assignation and with a gusto that once provoked Charlie Mingus at Music Inn in Massachusetts to leap in front of the piano and shout, ‘My God, I've got roots.’

In his conversations, with James P, Johnson  - currently being published in The Jazz Review - Tom Davin reports James P.'s conviction that 'the reason the New York boys became such high-class musicians was because , . . the people in New York were used to hearing good piano played in concerts and cafes. The ragtime player had to live up to that standard. They had to get orchestral effects, sound harmonies, chords and all the techniques of European concert pianists who were playing their music all over the city. New York developed the orchestral piano - full, round, big, widespread chords and tenths - a heavy bass moving against the right hand. The other boys from the South and West at that time played in smaller dimensions - like thirds played in unison. We wouldn't dare do that because the public was used to better playing. We didn't have any instruments then except maybe a drummer, so we had to use a solid bass and a solid swing to get the most colorful effects.’

LUCKEY (CHARLES LUCKEYTH ROBERTS) came on the scene early. Born in Philadelphia on August 7, 1893, he still remembers seeing his first show with music-one of the Smart Set revues-when he was four. By the next year, he was a professional  -singing, dancing, jumping out of bamboo trees  -on the national vaudeville circuit. He became an expert tumbler and while still a child, traveled to Europe. Luckey picked out tunes by ear on the piano when he was five, and took a job with a carnival as a pianist when he was six, but could only play in one key-B natural. "I learned," he recalls, "the whole show in that one key, Everybody was hoarse after a day or two,"

He always listened hard to the best ticklers he could find. Jess Pickett, One Leg Willie, Sam Gordon, Jack The Bear, Lonnie Hicks. Gradually, like them, Luckey learned to play in every key. Also, like most of the best ticklers, he became an expert pool player, a way of meeting the rent between engagements, He also wrote several of the first major ragtime hits - Junk Man Rag of 1913 and Pork and Bean. Later came the most lucrative of all, Ripples of the Nile, the main theme of which became a hit when recorded by Glenn Miller in 1942 as Moonlight Cocktail. He wrote for many Broadway shows, and for some three decades headed one of the most successful society orchestras in the East.

Luckey had his own club, the Rendezvous in Harlem, from 1942 to 1954. Everybody -waitresses and bartenders-sang, and Luckey played. In the Fifties, a frequent visitor was modern jazz pianist Red Garland. ‘He wouldn’t go home.  He kept asking me to play things for him.' In recent years, Luckey’s had trouble. He’s been involved in two automobile accidents, and in one, his hands were shattered.  A few weeks before this recording was made, he'd suffered a stroke. Yet Luckey is indomitable. He still doesn't smoke or drink, retains an astonishing amount of energy and optimism, and is one of the very few transparently honest men I've ever met.

Unjustly neglected and under-recorded  - Luckey makes his second appearance on long playing records here, His first was a commercial “honkey-tonk" set, and his only other recordings were on 78 rpm for Circle in 1946. It may be supervisor’s bias, but I think the music indicates quite clearly that these are Luckey's best recorded performances.

THE STORY OF 'THE LION" is much better known than Luckey's. Born in Goshen, New York, November 25, 1897 as William Bertholoff, Willie has been, best characterized by James P. Johnson: 'Willie Smith was one of the sharpest ticklers I ever met  - and I met most of them. When we first met in Newark, he wasn't called Willie "The Lion" - he got that nickname after his terrific fighting record overseas during World War 1. He was a fine dresser, very careful about the cut of his clothes and a fine dancer, too, in addition to his great playing. All of us used to be proud of our dancing. Louis Armstrong, for instance, was considered the finest dancer among the musicians. It made for attitude and stance when you walked into a place, and made you strong with the gals.  When Willie Smith walked into a place, his every move was a picture."

Willie played most of the major uptown rooms before and after the First World War, has toured the vaudeville route, and given concerts in Europe. He's a much more inventive composer than is generally realized  -Morning Air, Here Comes The Band, Contrary Motion, Echoes of Spring, etc. Willie still makes the festivals, a few night clubs, weekends at Central Plaza in New York, records, and is working on an autobiography, He has never lost his taste for choice cigars and the best brandy, His one flaw has been an occasional tendency to over-sentimentalize a number, or more accurately, to make everything below stride tempo into a rhapsody. Fortunately, Willie was not in an especially Douglas Fairbanks mood during this session and the result, I think, is one of his most brisk and functional recitals, The cigar is lit.

AS FOR THE TUNES, all of Luckey's are his own.  Nothin' is at least fifty years old and is an apt two-handed, full-strength introduction to the program. Its climax suggests a dancing line to me -somewhat like an American version of the can-can. Spanish Fandango is one of many indications that 'the Spanish tinge" wasn’t limited to New Orleans. Fandango is also some half century old though it retains an insinuatingly enticing charm. Railroad Blues began almost as a program piece.  When he was a child, Luckey lived by the tracks, and the sounds of the trains kept recurring to him until he wrote this melody. He recalls that the blues then - forty and more years ago - were not considered 'respectable" by many middle-class Negroes, and the music often had to be "prettied up" to get heard.  Complainin,’ with its characteristically rugged bass line, also communicates a floating, compelling pulsation. Note here, as in all his pieces, Luckey's effective use of dynamics. The waltz, Inner Space, gets its title from Luckey's trademark, which is evident here, the use of inverted thirds and sixths. The theme of Outer Space is from the ending to one of Luckey's times, Exclusively With You, and the latter is actually Moonlight Cocktail turned upside down. The ticklers knew a lot of tricks, and Luckey is still inventing new ones.

Morning Air was written by 'The Lion" in appreciation of the way St, Nicholas Avenue near City College looks in September and October. Relaxin’ is further proof of Willie's qualities as a melodist, 'I wanted to show,' he said, 'that you could get a blues feeling without hitting people on the head.’ Rippling Water begins self descriptively, but then the stride breaks through. The Lion turns Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea into autobiography, and Tango La Caprice is his own sweeping Spanish gesture. Concentratin’ is named after a habit of Willie's  -  focusing his attention on particular people while playing and presumably transmitting thereby their singular qualities through his music. No one, however, is more singular than ‘The Lion.’ Luckey too is very much his own man.  Every important tickler is, and these are two of the most important.

By NAT HENTOFF  May, 1960

It’s very difficult for us to conceive of “the world” of Jazz that Willie “The Lion” Smith describes in the following excerpts from his autobiography, let alone to fully understand the colorful language he uses to describe it.

Jazz musicians have always had a language of their own.

And the, there’s Willie “The Lion” Smith vernacular patter or should I say patois?

DOWN  IT, AND  GET FROM   'ROUND  IT,

LOW  IT, AND YOU  CAN'T  OWE  IT,

I'M A  POET, AND  I  KNOW  IT.

WILLIE "THE LION" SMITH

“One day in late 1919 I was strolling up 135th Street, at that time the main drag in Harlem (125th Street was then in a white neighborhood), and ran into Barren Wilkins who hailed me.

"Hi there, Sergeant Smith. My brother Leroy is looking for you. He says he needs a good piano man to take charge."

I decided to play it sharp. "The name is the Lion and you tell Leroy to phone for an appointment if he wants to audition me."

Since getting out of the Army I had been doing a little gambling, drinking, and piano playing in the various bars just like I'd been doing before the big mess in Europe had started. After meeting Barren an old saying of my mother's came back to me, "It is far better for the soul to have a crust of bread and plenty of sleep than to have a turkey and a hundred dollars in your pocket." I decided it might be a good idea to settle down somewhere for a while. The vibrations at Leroy's had always seemed good to me.

I was living at the time at Lottie Joplin's boardinghouse. That was where all the big-time theatrical people stayed and everything was free and easy. Mrs. Joplin was the widow of the great ragtime composer, Scott Joplin, who had died back in 1917. She only wanted musicians and theater people for tenants. The place was a regular boardinghouse but sometimes operated like an after-hours joint. She had the entire house at 163 West 131st Street and it was a common occurrence to step in at six in the morning and see guys like Eubie Blake, Jimmy Johnson, and the Lion sitting around talking orplaying the piano in the parlor. We used to play Scott's "Maple Leaf Rag" in A-flat for Mrs. Joplin. Before she died she took me down in the cellar and showed me Scott's cellar full of manuscripts — modern things and even some classical pieces he had written.

The Lion decided to have himself a big dinner at the Libya [139th Street near Seventh Avenue] and then go over and talk to Leroy. The Libya was Harlem's high-class restaurant of the day; it was the dictyest of the dicty. They served tea between four and five in the afternoon and featured dinner dancing until 1 A.M. The music was furnished by a string orchestra made up of members of the Clef Club. They were hidden in a grove of potted palms and were not allowed to rag it or to beautify the melody using their own ideas—they had to read those fly spots closely and truly. We used to kid them about having to read their tails off.

During supper they served the Lion a muskmelon filled with ice cream doused in champagne. These vibrations were too tony for a guy who had just gotten out of the trenches. Leroy's was gonna look good to this piano man.

Leroy's

When I walked in and announced to Leroy, "The Lion is here ," he glared as per usual and replied, "You know where the piano is at; go ahead and take charge."

Back in those days "takin' charge" meant the pianist had duties and responsibilities. He played solo piano, accompanied the singers, directed whatever band was on hand, and watched the kitty to be sure no one cheated on tips. That cigar-box kitty was very important at Leroy's, since the boss didn't allow any coins to be thrown around. Everybody's tips, including those given to the musicians, singers, waiters, and bartenders, had to go into the box to be divvied up at closing time. The piano man was it! The man in charge.

He had to be an all-round showman and it helped if he could both dance and sing. It was like being the host at the party, you were expected to greet everyone who entered to establish favorable feelings. I used to chat with the patrons at nearby tables in order to get their immediate moods. When I'd run into a noisy, rude one, I'd end the set abruptly, and holler "Man, go get lost!"

The bosses expected you to stay rooted to your stool from nine at night to dawn. Man, if you got up to go to the men's room those guys would scream. Leroy would come up wailing, "What are you trying to do, put me out of business?" And in those days you worked seven nights a week.

Furthermore, you'd rather piss in your pants than leave the piano when a rival was in the house. That was the best way to lose your gig.

Another thing that was different in those days was that you couldn't eat or drink in the joint on an entertainer's discount, yet you were expected to drink all the booze brought to your piano at a customer's expense. To the Harlem cabaret owners, to all nightclub bosses, the money was on a oneway chute — everything coming in, nothing going out.

And that wasn't all. In addition to all this takin'-charge service to the establishment, the tickler was required to build up for himself a big following. It got so that whether or not a place had any business was decided by who the piano man was—and there was no advertising done to help. It was your job to draw in the customers. All the owner had to do was count the money.

For all this, they paid you off in uppercuts. That was a saying we got up in those days; it meant you were allowed to keep your tips, but you got no salary. Sometimes they would give us a small weekly amount—like twenty dollars. That was known as a left hook.

When I started at Leroy's he acted as though he was doing me a big favor by letting me sit at the piano. After I'd been at the club for a couple of weeks I noticed the place was packed. It was time for me to have a little talk with Mr. Leroy. So one night I took time out and sent for an order of southern-fried chicken, the specialty of the house, served with hot biscuits. Instead of the chicken I got Leroy hollering, "What the hell you think you're doin' now, Lion? Ain't you got any food at home? You tryin' to take advantage?"

I looked calmly around the crowded room. "I want a small left hook, man, or else I'm movin' on." It was common practice for a piano player to keep on the go because you weren't considered too good if you stayed at the same place too long a time. It signified you were not in hot demand.

Well, my little move was a success. I wound up with a salary of eighteen dollars a week plus tips — and I was taking home around a hundred a week from the kitty. Old man Wilkins could see which side of the bread had the butter.

At Leroy's they didn't pretend to give out with a fancy show or revue. The show actually consisted of the pianist, occasionally accompanied by several instrumentalists, six or seven sopranos, and a bunch of dancing waiters who also sang.

Our sopranos could sing any kind of music in the book or requested by customers. These gals, like the piano players, worked all the cabarets in Harlem and Atlantic City at one time or another. I recall at Leroy's we had Josephine Stevens, Mattie Hite, and Lucy Thomas, including a cute little Creole girl from New Orleans named Mabel Bertrand — she later married Jelly Roll Morton. All these girls sang at the tables as well as doing their turn on the floor.

On the nights when I had help to keep the music rocking, we had fun. The helpers were usually a drummer, a banjoist, or a violinist. Once or twice we had a tuba player. Most frequently it was just a drummer and we sure had some good ones around New York at that time. Such guys as Carl (Battle Axe) Kenny, George Hines, Harry Green, George Barber, Freddie (Rastus) Crump, Charles (Buddie) Gilmore (the regular drum ace with Jim Europe's Hell Fighters), and a lame guy known as "Traps" (I think his real name was Arthur Mclntyre). Traps could make a fly dance with his ratchets. He and Gilmore drummed most of the time in a show band. He was knock-kneed, and like all those people with crazy legs, he was as strong as a bull. Every time one of the girls moved her eye old Traps would hit a lick. The chicks would tell him, "Just brush me lightly, politely, slightly, and get soft—give me that real low gravy." Man, the women sure did love his drumming. When the gals ran out of songs, Traps and I would take over and make up lyrics for them. And talk about blues, we really had 'em, choruses after choruses. It was like Ethel Waters once said over the radio, "I don't care what you talk about. You can talk all about the modern musics, but when it comes down to feeling the music and interpreting it, that we can do. We have the gift to send the message—the blues—Yeah!"

To GET A SHORT REST from Leroy's, I would sometimes go back to Newark and put in a few weeks at Jimmy Conerton's on Academy Street, Pierson's Hall, or in the dining rooms at the Hotel Navarro or the Robert Treat Hotel.

Several of the times I left to go up 135th Street and help out gambler Jerry Preston, who had just started an upstairs joint called The Orient. I was the first pianist to work for him and talked him into hiring three girl singers to make his place into a regular cabaret. It started him off in the business. I worked again for him years later when he ran Pod's & Jerry's. He was a congenial boss and we always got along. My only complaint was that he hired the damnedest waiters and bartenders—they were a band of crooks. He paid them good salaries but was always firing them for being snooty to the customers. Being a first-rate gambler he had very good connections.

Whenever I would cut out from Leroy's, it was my custom to leave the piano in the custody of a trial horse. In this way I felt I could get my job back when it came time to return. My favorite trial horse was a pool shark named Charles Summers, who had been a pianist at Leroy's before I went in there to take charge. He was a fair tickler, he could only play in three keys, but he made so much playing pool that his piano playing was just for kicks.

But, there came one time when I really goofed and almost lost the job.

That was when I left the stool in charge of a sixteen-year-old fat boy, whose name I didn't even know at the time. He used to hang around wherever there was a piano on 135th Street. I was told they let him play the box at the Crescent dime movie down the street when the regular man was off. (This was long before the time this kid was bugging Maisie Mullins, the pianist-organist at the Lincoln Theater, to let him play the ten-thousand-dollar Wurlitzer pipe organ.)

Yeah, man, I'll never forget how good old Fats, when he was still a stripling, would walk into Leroy's eating one of those caramel-covered apples on a stick. He was never without one.

In Comes Filthy

James P. Johnson brought him down one Sunday afternoon. We were all dressed in full-dress suits and tuxedos and in comes this guy with a greasy suit on, walks down to the bandstand, and says, "Hello there, Lion, what do you say?" He made me furious. I turned around to Jimmy and said, "Get that guy down, because he looks filthy." "Get them pants pressed," I said. "There's no excuse for it." From that day on I called him Filthy.

So he sat down until I got finished and when I got finished he was insistent, very persistent. He insisted he wanted to play Jimmy's "Carolina Shout" and when I got through he sat down and played the "Shout" and made Jimmy like it and me like it. From then on it was Thomas "Fats" Waller. He sat down also and heard me play a couple of strains of something, and then he improvised and the next time I turned around he had a tune called "Squeeze Me."

The Lion was only gone for a few days and when I got back Filthy had built up quite a following for himself. You could tell by the ovation he got when he walked in casual-like. I gave him a listen and made my famous prediction: I said to James P. Johnson, who was in the house again that night, "Watch out, Jimmy, he's got it. He's a piano-playing cub!"

Woody Herman by Steve Voce - Part 2

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

“Nobody does what Woody does as well as he does. If we could only figure out what it is he does . . .”

- Phil Wilson, trombonist, Jazz educator

Woody Herman's main influence on jazz was felt through the effects of the First Herd, the Second Herd and the band of the middle sixties. It is on these bands that I have allowed the emphasis of this book to fall.

- Steve Voce, Jazz author, columnist and broadcaster

STEVE VOCE began writing about jazz in the Melody Maker during the 1950s and it was also at that time that he became a regular jazz broadcaster for the BBC. He has presented his own weekly radio programme, “Jazz Panorama,” for more than eighteen years and has contributed a stimulating and controversial monthly column, “It Don't Mean A Thing” to Jazz Journal International for a quarter of a century!

Here’s the second chapter of Steve’s insightful and illuminating work on the most influential bands of Woody Herman’s illustrious career.

Chapter Two

“From the evidence of his earliest recordings with Isham Jones, Woody Herman's clarinet playing had always been both eloquent and sell-assured. In the early days it was possible to tell which other players had caught his ear. Jimmy Noone, the languid and fat-toned prime mover from New Orleans, was a main influence, and Jimmy's expert use of trills remains an element in Woody's work to this day. Regardless of Woody's devotion to all things Ellingtonian, Duke's clarinet player Barney Bigard would have inevitably been a major source of inspiration for him. Barney's sound was more facile and jazz-committed than Noone's, but he had the same singing New Orleans quality (Barney's nickname was 'Steps', and Woody deliberately emulates him in the Woodchoppers' record of that name made in 1946). Apart from Bigard's specific sound, Woody made use of his methods, and his famous declamatory soaring over the final choruses on many of the Herd's performances echoes the way in which Duke used Barney's sound to fly across the Ellington band ensemble.

In the pre-forties period one can hear Woody occasionally switch onto someone else's style. He was accomplished enough to do a Goodman or a Shaw or even, as we have noted, a Ted Lewis! But by 1940 the elements had come together and, although the Noone and Bigard influences were to remain discernable, Woody had blended them into his own distinctive sound. Perhaps the best example of it from this period is the 1941 Woodsheddin' With Woody, a fast moving Lowell Martin chart to feature Herbie Haymer on tenor and Cappy Lewis on trumpet as well as Woody. Here also the Basie influence is revealed as Linehan, White, Yoder and Carlson open with the familiar tight and sparse rhythm section sound. Although he was never to eliminate them in the way that the genius Barney Bigard did, Woody had achieved an ability to negotiate the breaks between the registers so that not even another clarinettist would notice them. This is a sure sign of a gifted musician, and the solo on Woodsheddin' might have been regarded as a virtuoso display were the listener not side-tracked by the fact that it is a searing hot display of swinging jazz clarinet. It also held another formalised aspect of Woody's style which was to be used to great effect in the ensuing years — the exciting growl from the throat used with random abandon by Pee Wee Russell and honed to exciting perfection by Edmond Hall.

One always thinks of Woody as a clarinet player first, and yet he feels more at home playing the alto saxophone, and indeed his playing of this is far more sophisticated than his clarinet work. At the same session that produced Woodsheddin' With Woody the band recorded Bishop's Blues, a tribute to Joe who by this time had contracted tuberculosis. It opened with a glorious alto solo which at that stage reflected almost as much of Charlie Holmes's playing as it did that of Johnny Hodges. But Hodges was probably Herman's all time favourite, and his later work on alto always acknowledged the Rabbit.

Despite the fact that he was so much in thrall to the Duke, Herman has always been an eclectic listener both to soloists and to bands. (His eagerness to hear the newly-formed Earl Hines band at Chicago's Grand Terrace produced mixed results. Woody was knocked out by the exciting new sounds and then knocked up by a gangster who shot him in the leg shortly after he left!)

Herman's playing, notably on clarinet, has needed little modification with the passing of the years, and it is quite remarkable to hear him soloing, for example, in the same context as Andy Laverne's electric keyboard. But then Woody has never been afraid to follow what his ears tell him, and it's typical of him that after hearing John Coltrane playing soprano one night, he went out the next day and bought a soprano for himself and this third horn has been a feature of his work during the eighties. ‘In the old days when Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges were about the only people who played soprano, it was a terrible horn to conquer,' he said. 'But now you can buy a good horn that stays in pitch and it's much easier to cope with it.'

Woody's qualities as a blues singer have already been noted, but his vocal talents were wide enough to ensure that, had he not been a band leader or horn player, he could have made it as a leading vocalist. As well as the blues and the novelty numbers like Get Your Boots Laced Papa, Who Dat Up Dere? and the famed Caldonia. he had a subtle poise and timing that enabled him to sing ballads to tremendous effect, and the 1941 'Tis Autumn reveals a singer entirely devoid of the cloying histrionics which instantly dated many contemporary ballad performances. Interestingly his voice has dropped over the years, although perhaps not quite by the octave that he claims.

Throughout the years he has recorded many jazz-inspired ballad performances, perhaps most notably Ralph Burns's arrangement of Laura for the First Herd in early 1945. The skilful Burns had written a glorious mattress for the band to place first under Woody's alto and voice, and then under Bill Harris’ trombone for a legato display which showed that when he wanted to Harris could tread with ease the ground usually regarded as Tommy Dorsey's preserve.

But we digress. By 1941 the arrangers were beginning to shape the band sound to a far greater degree. Previously much reliance had been placed on 'heads', but when Deane Kincaide and Jiggs Noble joined Joe Bishop on the arranging team, the emphasis changed. First of all came Noble's re-working of La Cinquantaine, which was a feature for drums and clarinet and a massive hit under the title Golden Wedding. Unfortunately Bishop's health deteriorated and he went into Saranac Lake Sanatorium at the beginning of October 1940. But before going he handed in the score of a new blues, Blue Flame, a brilliant moody 12 bar which the band cut for Decca in February 1941 and which has remained Woody's theme tune to this day.

Jiggs Noble was now Woody's staff arranger and scored the band's more commercial material. There was by this time quite a lot of this, and the erosion of the Band That Played The Blues had begun. The standards of the sidemen were raised appreciably when musicians like trumpeters Ray Linn and Billie Rogers and tenorist Herbie Haymer joined the ranks. Herbie Haymer had quit Jimmy Dorsey's band because he wasn't being given enough solos to play, a situation that Woody was happy to put right.

The band moved west to California in the summer of 1941, and an initial short booking at the famed Hollywood Palladium was extended to three months. Then it moved to the Sherman Hotel in Chicago for a couple more months before fetching up at the Strand Theatre in New York.

The New York theatre bookings were notorious amongst the musicians in the big bands. A band would play up to six shows a day between film showings, starting work at nine in the morning and finishing after midnight.

'It was like doing time up the river,' Woody remembers. 'Some of those engagements would last for about ten weeks and would include the weekends. It was a very difficult and tough existence, and we'd lose one or two guys every week. They became ill or they just became natural basket cases from over indulgence and so forth. Of course there was a lot of panic all the time, because in those days the rule was that the show must go on, and it did.'

It's very easy to see how musicians could take to drink to find some release from such tension, and understandable that they hardly felt inspired to play. Bud Freeman recalls that 'Playing One O'Clock Jump at nine thirty each morning was as relaxing as working in a steel foundry.' Bud played for Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and they must have been much more difficult to work for than the easy going Herman. Dorsey, for example, had a system of fines for his musicians which included a $50 one for being late on the stage. (One night when one of his violin section missed the first three numbers by being late, Tommy called him out in front of the audience and made him play his third violin part for each number as a solo!) And the Dorsey band played up to nine shows a day. Sometimes Tommy would call a band rehearsal as well!

There was a lot of showbiz hokum involved with playing to the fans, or bobby-soxers as they then were. Among the other New York theatres Herman played at were the Capitol, Loew's State and the Paramount. The Paramount had a superior lighting system and of course the familiar rising stage, so that the band would start playing somewhere in the bowels of the theatre and emerge slowly before the audience like some primeval monster from the deep. Woody's band played Blue Flame of course, and as it came up on the riser, as it was known, Herman had his back to the audience. As the point of the clarinet solo entry was reached Woody turned round in the total darkness and began to play with phosphorescent paint covering his hands and his clarinet! He stood it for a week, but after that the paint had gone.

September 1941 saw the recording of Blues In The Night, a major hit which was issued on a 78 with This Time The Dream's On Me as backing. This latter was another good example of Woody's way with ballad lyrics.

Joe Bishop came out of hospital in January 1942 and worked from home as an arranger for the band. His playing days were over, but he wrote for Woody and others until ill health in 1951 forced his retirement from music. That same month the band cancelled a string of 17 one-nighters and returned to Hollywood to make its first movie, provisionally titled 'Wake Up And Dream' but finally issued as 'What's Cookin?'. The band played Woodchopper’s Ball and the Andrews Sisters were among the many variety acts featured. With the film in the can, the band began working its way back from Hollywood to the East when Frankie Carlson was struck with appendicitis. Dave Tough came into the band as a substitute, and it is entirely likely that he was the drummer on the four titles that the band recorded on 28 January. These included A String of Pearls and three ballads, which make it difficult to find any distinctive touch from the drummer, whoever he may be.

In March 1942 Saxie Mansfield finally left the band and music altogether. This was another move away from the Band That Plays The Blues, as Mickey Folus moved in from the Artie Shaw band to replace him. The band spent the spring playing at the Hotel New Yorker before moving to the Paramount Theatre for the summer.

By this time the draft into the American armed forces was playing havoc with the band personnel and it seemed to Woody that there were farewell parties every day.

'Every time you turned round someone else had gone as the guys were drafted out from underneath us. You never knew who was in the band, and at one time it was so bad we were almost halted. There was also this wartime hysteria of trying to do five or six shows a day as well.'

Although it still worked under the tag of the Band That Plays The Blues, the library by 1943 included a number of much more complex charts that made greater demands on the musicians. Still unswerving in his devotion to Duke Ellington, Woody hired Dave Matthews to write for the band. Dave already had a prodigious reputation amongst musicians as a man who could write convincingly in the Ellington style, and he was very experienced, having come through the ranks of the Ben Pollack, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Harry James bands during the previous decade.

But as had always been the case, Woody was ready to open the door to new and untried talent. 'One guy who wrote a couple of charts for us around that time came into the band as a temporary trumpet for a week. When it was over I recommended him to stick to arranging. That was one of my wilder judgements. It was Dizzy Gillespie!'

Gillespie's writing already had the shape of things to come as can be heard on the 1942 Herman recording of Down Under, which Dizzy wanted for some obscure reason to dedicate to Australia. He also wrote Swing Shift and Woody 'n' You but neither went into the library, although it seems likely that Swing Shift appears as a theme on one of the band's contemporary broadcasts.

During the seventies Woody asked Dizzy to up-date these arrangements for the current band, but Dizzy had no interest in going back. Their careers have crossed on occasion. Once when Woody was snowbound in Salt Lake City with his band, Dizzy flew in for a job, but the rest of his band were trapped elsewhere by the weather. So the Herman band appeared as the Dizzy Gillespie Band with Woody in the sax section!

The band was also much influenced by the work of the Jimmy Lunceford and Count Basie bands at this period, and the standards of the men coming into the ranks needed to be higher to cope with the more advanced writing. Surprisingly, since so many musicians were being swept away in the draft, the standards did go up.

In the middle of 1942 James C. Petrillo, President of the American Federation of Musicians, imposed one of his two long bans on musicians recording for the commercial companies. Had it not been for the survival of some of the permitted recordings for radio (and these did not emerge before the public until decades later) a vital period of jazz history would have been lost to us, a period when the Ellington band was burgeoning, when the spores of bebop were taking hold, and when the Herman band was filling up with new talent. More sophisticated charts laid a bigger burden on the brass, and Woody took on girl trumpeter Billie Rogers, thus becoming one of the first leaders to use five trumpets. Billie was featured as a soloist and vocalist as well as working in the section where the extra strength allowed trumpeters to rest in turn.

Woody has recalled how, with the continuing stream of farewell parties in the band at that time, Billie could start the evening as fifth trumpet and by the time it was over have worked her way up to the first trumpet chair as the men got loaded and fell off the stand. Billie was the first girl to sit in the ranks of an American name band, and she was not there merely as a novelty. Her main inspiration was the trumpet playing of Roy Eldridge, and she really wanted to play jazz. Unfortunately the Petrillo ban meant that she was in the band when it was playing better than ever before, but not recording. It was not until the eighties when a collection of her broadcasts with Herman appeared in an album that we were able to judge just how good she was. Later she married the band's manager Jack Archer, and finally left Woody in January 1944 to form her own band. There were some questions about her contract with Woody, and a five month wrangle ensued before the AFM found in her favour.

Other future stars of the jazz firmament began to pass through the sections. Tommy Linehan's health was not good, and his eventual replacement at the piano was Jimmy Rowles, a man who was to return to later Herds and who became a quite outstanding soloist and accompanist. Vido Musso broke up his own band and he and Pete Mondello came in on tenors. One of the most powerful of jazz trumpeters, Nick Travis, made an early but brief appearance. Skippy DeSair joined on baritone and was to stay through the triumphs of the First Herd. Still with the band were veterans Neil Reid, Walt Yoder, Hy White and Frankie Carlson.

The band returned to Hollywood in January 1943 to make a full length film, Wintertime, with glamorous ice skater Sonja Henie. Her spectacular beauty was the main feature, but there was plenty of space for music and the band played four feature numbers including Dancing In The Dawn, later extracted from the film and issued on a V-Disc. This was a long number ranging in mood from the sentimental to the hard swinging by way of an added string section and vocal chorus, vocals from Woody and Carolyn Grey, a tough tenor solo from Vido Musso and a burning clarinet improvisation from the Chopper. The band appeared in heavy furs, overcoats and scarves, and Woody wore ski boots and a lumberjack outfit. Hardly suited to balmy California!

Walt Yoder and trumpeter Chuck Peterson were soon drafted, and Gene Sargent came in on bass. He also wrote arrangements and one of them, Basie's Basement, was later recorded for Decca. Frankie Carlson was one of many to be seduced by the California climate, and he handed in his notice. The band's new singer, a young girl called Anita O'Day, had similar ideas, as did Vido Musso and altoist Les Robinson, and they left. Neil Reid's reason for going was more pressing as he was inducted into the Marines.

The replacements came from somewhere. Woody wasn't a predatory band leader, but he suddenly found himself with two of Charlie Barnet's best men, Barnet's erstwhile and excellent drummer Cliff Leeman and, most significantly, Greig Stewart 'Chubby' Jackson on bass. Trombonist Ed Keifer joined from the Bob Chester band, from whence another trombonist, Bill Harris, had recently gone to join Benny Goodman.

Amongst all this coming and going in the middle of 1943, the fine altoist Johnny Bothwell and, more importantly, one of Woody's best ever girl singers, the late Frances Wayne, came into the band (some years later Frances married Neal Hefti, trumpeter and arranger with the First Herd).

The band crisscrossed the country with one nighters. Wartime conditions made travel difficult, with the trains crammed with servicemen and bus services reduced. Woody, who has always been a keen motor racing enthusiast, travelled by car and enjoyed it, but still the stress of the times got to him and he collapsed from nervous exhaustion in Philadelphia in October 1943 and didn't return for a couple of weeks.

As the AFM was still haggling with the record companies, the band couldn't record for Decca, but it did record some splendid radio transcriptions in November that year. Later Decca was able to issue these and the titles cut before the emergence of the fully fledged First Herd in late 1944 have been unjustly obscured by the incandescent success of the later band. Presumably with Duke's agreement, Woody used some of the Ellington cornerstones on these sessions, notably tenorist Ben Webster and altoist Johnny Hodges. Basie's Basement, among the first titles to be recorded, featured Webster, and Ben joined the band again in New York for a session in January 1944. This produced eight titles including the hit Noah, with Woody's rasping vocal and pungent plunger-muted trumpet from Cappy Lewis. Ben was featured on five of the tracks and blew one of his breathy masterpieces into Crying Sands, a beautiful ballad by the new bass player, Chubby Jackson. This also featured a rare alto solo from Johnny Bothwell, who, like Woody, was obviously a Johnny Hodges fan (Hodges himself recorded Perdido with them in April that year).

The band had a new pianist, a man who was ultimately to change it out of all recognition. He had been with a small group led by vibraphonist Red Norvo and earlier with Charlie Barnet. He was to become one of the great figures in jazz. His name was Ralph Burns.

Ralph was to be associated with Woody for many years, but many other great jazzmen passed briefly through the early 1944 band. Allen Eager, Herbie Fields, Budd Johnson and George Auld all sat in the tenor chairs. Ernie Caceres participated in one of Tommy Dorsey's many on-stage rows and left forthwith to join Woody on alto, and Ray Nance and Juan Tizol joined the Ellingtonians who recorded for Woody. Tenorist Vido Musso came back briefly when the band made the film Sensations Of 1945, where the band shared the music with Cab Calloway and his orchestra. As filming finished Cappy Lewis got the dreaded request from Uncle Sam and left after almost five years with Woody. Guitarist Hy White, the last of the original members of the Band That Plays The Blues, left to become a teacher.

An era ended.”

To be continued ….