"Hear Me Talkin' to Ya'"- Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn," 

- Charlie Parker.

"What is jazz? The rhythm—the feeling." 

- Coleman  Hawkins.

"The best sound usually comes the first time you do something. If it's spontaneous, it's going to be rough, not clean, but it's going to have the spirit which is the essence of jazz," 

- Dave Brubeck.

Originally published in 1955, when recorded Jazz was about thirty years old, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya’: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It [hardcover Rinehart and Company in 1955; paperback Dover Publications in 1966] is even more significant now that recorded Jazz is entering its second century for the testimonies and stories it contains from many of the original makers of the music.

Here, in their own words, such famous jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong. King Oliver. Fletcher Henderson. Bunk Johnson. Duke Ellington. Fats Waller, Clarence Williams, Jo Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, Mezz Mezzrow, Hilly Holiday, and many others recall die birth, growth, and changes in jazz over the years. From its beginnings at the turn of the century in the red-light district in New Orleans (or Storyville as it came to be known), to Chicago's Downtown section and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Chicago's South Side to jam sessions in Kansas City, to Harlem during the depression years, the West Coast and modern developments, the story of jazz is vividly and colorfully documented in hundreds of personal interviews, letters, tape recorded and telephone conversations, and excerpts from previously printed articles that appeared in books and magazines.

There is no more fascinating and lively history of jazz than this first-hand telling by the men who made it. It should be read and re-read by all jazz enthusiasts, musicians, students of music and culture, students of American history, and general leaders. 

A taste of what’s on offer in the book are the following quotations from Chapter 10 - “‘In A Mist’ - the Legendary Bix.”

PEE WEE RUSSELL

I first met Bix I'd say in the latter part of 1926. That was in the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis. Frankie Trumbauer had the band there and he had brought Bix down from Detroit where both had been working with Jean Goldkette. This was a summer job and we worked the season at the Arcadia. After we finished the season we went to Hudson Lake. You see, this was a Goldkette unit. We had the book and Jean was at the office from where he sent bands out. I had heard Bix on records before—those Gennett records with Tommy Dorsey and Paul Mertz and the other guys—and I had heard him in Chicago. There used to be a band at the Rendezvous that Charlie Straight had. Those were the speakeasy days and Bix used to come late and play with that band. It would sometimes go to seven or eight in the morning. But I had never worked with Bix until St. Louis.

Sonny Lee, who later played with Jimmy Dorsey, was playing trombone with this band at the Arcadia, and Sonny used to live at my home. I came home one afternoon and there was Bix with Sonny in the living room playing Bix records. It gave me a kick—a big thrill to have Bix in my home. Among musicians, even at that time, Bix had a reputation. Very few of us understood what he was doing; even in Chicago only a limited number did. In fact, it was the guys like Krupa, Goodman, Sullivan, Freeman, Dave Tough, and Tesch, naturally, that really appreciated him. The other musicians, like in St. Louis, understood what he was doing on a much smaller scale. And as for the management, he wasn't even featured with the band.

The thing about Bix's music is that he drove a band. He more or less made you play whether you wanted to or not. If you had any talent at all he made you play better. It had to do for one thing with the way he played lead. It had to do with his whole feeling for ensemble playing. He got a very large tone with a cornet. Records never quite reproduced his sound. Some come fairly close but the majority don't.

Then there were the men he usually recorded with. He had a hard time with some of those records. I don't mean that the men he recorded with weren't musicians. I mean he wasn't in bad company, but they didn't belong in a jazz band and Bix had been raised in jazz. So it was all due to them that a majority of the records didn't quite catch what Bix could do. But Bix's disposition wasn't one to complain. He wasn't able to say, I don't like this guy, let's give him the gate and get so and so. He was never a guy to complain about the company he was in. Like I say, they were good musicians and they could make it with Goldkette where they were supposed to do certain things. But they weren't for jazz.

Without a doubt, music was all Bix lived for. I remember we used to have a Sunday afternoon thing at the Arcadia Ballroom. Ordinarily the band would complain about the extra work, but Bix would really look forward to it. He said he liked to see the kids dance on Sunday afternoon. He liked to watch them do things like the Charleston, et cetera. He said he liked it because the kids had such a fine sense of rhythm. And, in their way, the kids knew what Bix was doing. They knew he was doing something different because he made them want to dance.

We used to have little head arrangements, written by some of the men in the band. They were good musicians in the band. We had a bass player, for example, from the St. Louis Symphony for a while. We would do little things once in a while so drastic or rather so musically advanced that when we had a damn nice thing going the manager would come up and say, "What in God's name are you doing?" I remember on I Ain't Got Nobody we had an arrangement with five-part harmony for the three saxes and the two brass. And the writing went down chromatically on a whole-tone scale basis. It was unheard of in those days. "For God's sake!" the manager would yell out—and naturally we couldn't explain it to him. That sort of music became more or less of a novelty with the people though. And they'd say at times, "Play those awful things!" Bix was instrumental in things like that. Most of the writing at that time was done by Bud Hassler. He was a tenor player.

As for Bix's compositions, this is the background of In a Mist. Tommy Satterfield, who was working with the Skouras brothers at that time, I don't know if anybody knows this story—Tommy had an office and did all the scoring for the large pit bands. Being an arranger, he took a liking to Bix and what he was doing and he took down In a Mist for him. You see, Bix played it for him on the piano. It was the first time that the song had ever gotten written down. I think Ferdie Grofe helped Bix with Candlelights later and some of the others.

Bix had a miraculous ear. As for classical music, Bix liked little things like some of those compositions of MacDowell and Debussy —very light things. Delius, for example. Then he made a big jump from that sort of thing to Stravinsky and stuff like that. There'd be certain things he would hear in some modern classical music, like whole tones, and he'd say, why not do it in a jazz band? What's the difference? Music doesn't have to be the sort of thing that's put in brackets? Then later it got to be like a fad and everybody did it, but they wouldn't know what the devil it was all about.

We would often order a score of a new classical work, study it, and then request it from the St. Louis Symphony. And we'd get ourselves a box for those concerts when they did a program we all liked. It would be Bix, Hassler, and I. We'd haunt them to play scores that we wanted to hear. Stuff like the Firebird Suite.

Rudolf Ganz was conducting at that time. We got to know him. We had the connection through Trumbauer's bass player. There was a soloist clarinet in the St. Louis Symphony, Tony Sarlie. I used to try to get him to teach me, and I studied with him a little. I wish I had studied more.

Anyway, we'd get those requests in. We weren't exactly like jitterbugs. It was on a different scale. I guess you could call us a different type of jitterbug. At least we were trying to learn something. And we wanted to hear these scores played well. You see, we knew what was supposed to happen because we had taken the scores with us and followed the work with them. Later on, Don Murray, Bix, and I used to go to concerts in New York. Murray was a very, very clever arranger. He and Bill Challis … 

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

And the first time I heard Bix, I said these words to myself: there's a man as serious about his music as I am . . . Bix did not let anything at all detract his mind from that cornet and his heart was with it all the time.

I shall never forget those nights in Chicago, when Bix was with the great Mr. P.W. [Paul Whiteman] and I was playing for Joe Glaser at the Sunset at Thirty-fifth and Calumet Streets. That's when Earl Fatha Hines, Tubby Hall, and Darnell Howard was in the band. It was Carroll Dickerson's band. That's when the Sunset was really jumping.

Bix came through with Mr. P. and they opened up at the Chicago Theatre. I shall never forget that incident because I caught the first show that morning . . . hmm -. . . I had to stay up all night to do it.

But Bix was in that band and this was the first time I witnessed him in such a large hellfired band as Mr. Whiteman's ... I had been diggin' him in small combos and stuff. Now my man's gonna blow some of these big time arrangements, I thought . . . and sure enough he did ... as soon as I bought my ticket, I made a beeline to my seat because the band was already on, and they were way down into their program, when the next number that came up, after the one they were playing when I came in, was a beautiful tune called From Monday On . . . My, my, what an arrangement that was.

They swung it all the way . . . and all of a sudden Bix stood up and took a solo . . . and I'm tellin' you, those pretty notes went all through me ... then Mr. Whiteman went into the Overture by the name of 1812 . . . and he had those trumpets way up into the air, justa' blowing like mad, but good . . . and my man Bix was reading those dots and blowing beautifully … and just before the ending of the overture, they started to shooting cannons, ringing bells, sirens were howling like mad, and in fact everything was happening in   that overture.

But you could still hear Bix ... the reason why I said through all those different effects that were going on at the ending you could still hear Bix . . . well, you take a man with a pure tone like Bix's and no matter how loud the other fellows may be blowing, that pure cornet or trumpet tone will cut through it all ... all due respect to the men.

After the show, I went directly around backstage to see Bix, and say hello to a few of the other musicians I knew personally. After a long chat and when they went on the stage for their next show, I cut out and went straight to a music store and bought From Monday On . . . and put it with the rest of my collectors' items of his.

The recordings from Singing the Blues on down to In a Mist , . . they all collectors' items. . , .

When Bix would finish up at the Chicago Theatre at night, he would haul it out to the Sunset where I was playing and stay right there with us until the last show was over and the customers would go home.

Then we would lock the doors. Now you talking about jam sessions. . . . huh. . . . those were the things . . . with everyone feeling each other's note or chord, et cetera . . . and blend with each other instead of trying to cut each other . . . nay, nay, we did not even think of such a mess . . . we tried to see how good we could make music sound which was an inspiration within itself.

After a while we would sort of rest up and Bix would get on the piano and play some of the sweetest things . . . real touching . . . that's when he was getting ready to record his immortal In a Mist .,. , the tune is still fresh today, as it was then . . . you couldn't find a musician nowheres in the whole world that doesn't still love Bix's In a Mist.” … 

PEE WEE RUSSELL

“As for what caused Bix to destroy himself, well, in that era, naturally where he started, around Indiana, there was that thing with the hip bottle and the gin—the 'twenties and all that stuff. Later, when he had acquired a name, he could get a bottle of whiskey any time of day or night. Now Bix enjoyed a drink but he was human too. Everybody likes privacy. Privacy enough to

sleep and eat. But it was impossible for him to get any. There were always people in his room. They would knock on the door even at six A.M., and it was impossible for him because of the kind of person he was to insult anybody, to say get out of here.

I remember how, at one hotel, he used to leave word that he wasn't in. So some fellows would check into the hotel, take a room on the floor below Bix's room; then they'd come up and rap and pound on the door and you'd have to answer. He even had a piano in the room, and, when he had a spare moment, he'd try to get a composition started, but with all those people always hanging around he didn't have a chance. In a sense, Bix was killed by his friends. But I think the term is being used loosely. Because they weren't his friends. They were the kind of people who liked to be able to say, "Last night I was up at Bix's and oh, was he drunk. Gee, you should have seen his room!" You know that type of people. They wanted to say they were there. I don't think I have to say any more about that type of people. And Bix couldn't say no. He couldn't say no to anybody.

I remember one Victor date we did. Bix was working in the Whiteman band at the time. He had hired me for the date but rather than hurt anybody's feelings he also hired Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and everybody.

Every time somebody would walk into the door at Plunkett's, the bar we hung out at, Bix would say, "Gee, what am I going to do?" So he'd go up to the guy and hire him for the date. He didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. So he went way over his budget and we had to scrape cab fare to get back from the date.

Bix came from a good home life. He had the best. His people were very well-to-do. Anything more I could tell you about Bix is all history anyway and has been written about.”

JMW Turner - "No Sun in Venice" Modern Jazz Quartet

No Sun in Venice is a 1957 French-Italian drama film directed by Roger Vadim. It was entered into the 7th Berlin International Film Festival. The soundtrack for the film was composed by pianist John Lewis, and performed by the Modern Jazz Quartet. The soundtrack album was released in 1957 on Atlantic. The cover art for the Atlantic LP featured a painting by JMV Turner.

Joseph Mallord WilliamTurner lived in London from 1775 - 1851 and was held in low esteem by many of his contemporaries during his lifetime for work that was judged to be sloppy and incomplete.

It has since come to be re-evaluated and highly valued as painting that was a precursor to the French Impressionists.

The following video features many of his paintings of La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic of Venice as set to the Cortege track from the MJQ Atlantic album.

The Woody Herman Big New Herd at The 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival

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

Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Kernfeld, ed., Sarah Velez and Paul M. Laird offer this overview of The Monterey Jazz Festival.

“The Monterey Jazz Festival. Festival is held annually from 1958 near Monterey, California. It was founded by Ralph J. Gleason and the disc jockey Jimmy Lyons, partly at the suggestion of George Wein and Louis Lorillard (the founders of the Newport Jazz Festival). Gleason was an adviser to the festival's organizers during its early years and Lyons was its general manager into the 1980s; among its music directors have been John Lewis and Mundell Lowe. The festival takes place over three days in September (including the third weekend of the month) at three venues on the Monterey County Fairgrounds (seating 7000) and usually offers performances by well-known swing and bop musicians; Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk appeared regularly, as have Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck. A blues concert has also been included in most years.

Proceeds from the festival have been used for educational purposes, including the awarding of grants and scholarships (from 1961) and the administration of the Annual California High School Jazz Competition (from 1971), the winners of which perform on the last day of the festival with its featured performers. The Monterey Jazz Festival was acclaimed during its early years for its innovative programming; in 1959, for example, it included the premieres of works by Jimmy Giuffre, John Lewis, and Gunther Schuller (all performed by an ensemble directed by Schuller) and performances by an all-star band assembled for the occasion by Woody Herman. Later, however, it drew criticism for its indifference towards free jazz and other modern styles.

The tape archive of the festival is held by the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford University.”

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Woody Herman All-Star big band appearance at the MJF and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to look back on the event with these insert notes by Ralph Gleason from Woody Herman’s Big New Herd at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival [Atlantic LP 1328/Koch CD KOCCD-8508].

“One of the most impressive things about the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival (which was in itself a pretty impressive affair, as witness the reviews) was the Festival orchestra put together especially to function as a workshop orchestra during the week preceding the Festival and, during the actual three days of the Festival, to double as the Woody Herman Festival Herd and the workshop band (augmented by various soloists and members of the San Francisco Symphony).

It was a long, hard week of work for the musicians. Rehearsals morning, noon and  night; literally. And when the first evening concert -Friday -began with the Chris Barber band and Ottilie Patterson singng the blues, the latecomers walking down to the Festival arena passed by the rehearsal hall and heard the Woody Herman Festival Herd wailing away through the numbers heard on this album. They had volunteered an extra rehearsal “for Woody.”

On Saturday afternoon the Herman band played under the blazing Monterey sun, interrupted occasionally by the roar of a low-flying civilian plane (the Air Force and the Navy gallantly re-routed their fliers but nobody could control the casual civilian). "I'm beginning to hate him," Woody Herman remarked as the particularly annoying small plane flew over for the umpteenth time during fits set.
                                                          

Part of the program on Saturday afternoon and again on Saturday evening consisted of a set by the Herman Herd ("I wish I could take this band on the road!"

Part of the program on Saturday afternoon and again on Saturday evening consisted of a set by the Herman Herd (“I wish I could take this band on the road,” Woody said, and everyone agreed it was one of the greatest bands Woody had ever stood before). It was recorded by Atlantic, both afternoon and evening, when the Monterey sun was replaced by the cold, foggy breeze from the Pacific and the spectators, who that afternoon were wearing Bavarian shorts and sunglasses, were wrapped in blankets, ski boots and wool caps.

Saturday night the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross Trio sang out an introduction for the Herman band. Woody turned around to the 19 men and yelled, "BOW! BOW! BOW! BOW!" and they roared into Four Brothers.  It was the classic Herman chart written by Jimmy Giuffre for the legendary Second Herd (the one with Stan and Zoot and Serge and Herbie Steward). It’s been in the books over ten years, played practically every night “The sheets are all dog-eared,” [drummer] Mel Lewis noted. But oddly enough this is only the second time Herman has recorded it.  The solos this time (first time around) are by Zoot Sims, Med Flory (baritone), Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca, Then at the end, it's Perkins, Zoot Richie and Med . They follow the short Woody Herman bit (“After all he is our dad our dad,” Jon Hendricks wrote).

Like Some Blues Man is from the afternoon session. You'll hear Woody’s high-flying friend roaring around upstairs. "He'll be gone in a minute," Woody hopefully remarked. He wasn't Vic Feldman starts this one with a vibes solo, you hear some delightful Conte Candoli trumpet, a Bill Perkins tenor solo, Urbie Green on trombone and Charlie Byrd on guitar (he was one of the hits of the Festival) and at the end the airplane buzzes the band again! The tune was written and arranged by Ted Richards whose work shows unmistakable evidence of his close collaboration in the past with Gene Roland.

Skoobeedoobee (“from the picture 'Sal Mineo in Purgatory.’” Woody introduced it) is also from the afternoon session and has Vic Feldman on piano. Vic almost didn't get to play at all at Monterey, At the opening rehearsal he stepped forward to speak to Woody and slipped and fell off the bandstand and hurt his knee. Not too seriously, luckily. Zoot Sims and Urbie Green - and Woody too - have solo spots and I am particularly fond of the explosions by Mel Lewis at the end. Mel, incidentally, never worked with Woody before “although I always wanted to,” he says. Most of the others had, and Conte Candoli, Urbie, Richie, Zoot, Perk and Med Flory especially were veterans of other Herman bands. Don Lanphere and Bill Chase were from Woody's most recent band. This is another Ted Richards opus.

Monterey Apple Tree got a beautifully "in" introduction by Woody. "If s a very old tune of ours," he said, "and this year we're changing the title because I feel it's only fair to the fellas that are going to play it and also the listeners  - this year we're gonna call it Monterey Apple Tree." Almost everybody gets into the act on this one and towards the end there's a fine exchange of statements between tenor Don Lanphere and baritone Med Rory.

Skylark, an arrangement by Ralph Burns, is a vehicle fertile lyric trombone of Urbie Green and Urbie is also featured on Magpie which closes the LP. This was written by Joseph Mark a cousin of [tenor saxophonist] Al Cohn who contributed so many compositions to tie Herman book over the years.

These were exciting sessions and we're lucky they came out so wall on tape and could be preserved for our enjoyment. Recording outdoors is hazardous, but this LP is one of the more successful of this sort of thing, in my opinion. It's hard to separate the memories and listen objectively to the music in a situation like this,

Monterey 1959 was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life and, it would seem, that of a lot of other people.  Musicians to J.J, Johnson, Mel Lewis and Woody Herman apparently feel the same way (“I’ll be back even if I'm not working on it,” Mel says.)

The reviews were almost unanimous in praise. "This one's for jazz,”' Down Beat's Gene Lees said and added, "Monterey.. .made previous jazz festivals look like grab bags, musical potpourris that do not compare with the smoothly purposeful and thought-provoking Monterey Festival." Annie Ross commented, "It's actually inspiring to get out here and find people working like this.”' After reading off list of things to be corrected next year musical consultant John Lewis said, "It's only the best Festival ever!" Gunther Schuller wrote, “The musicians are both pleased and surprised. They are treated with respect warmth and even reverence.”  All of this colors my listening to this LP, I frankly admit.'

Monterey was a gas for musicians and fans alike. That it was, is a tribute to the planning of Jimmy Lyons, the founder and moving force behind the Festival, and John Lewis who served (without fee, incidentally) as musical consultant.

As for me, I was grateful to them then for the exhilarating program, I'm grateful now that Atlantic has preserved this portion of it for our future pleasure. If it gives you one tenth the pleasure it has already given me, it will be a success.”

The band personnel on Woody Herman’s Big New Herd at the Monterey Jazz festival are -

Woody Herman, clarinet and alto sax

Trumpets: Al Porcino, Conte Candoli, Ray Linn, Frank Huggins and Bill Chase

Trombones: Urbie Green, Sy Zentner and Bill Smiley

Alto Sax: Don Lamphere [who also plays tenor on Monterey Apple Honey]

Tenor saxes: Zoot Sims, Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca

Guitar: Charlie Byrd

Piano and Vibraphone: Victor Feldman

Bass: Monty Budwig

Drums: Mel Lewis

I think it would be safe to say that Woody Herman had one of the earliest big bands to play Bebop.

It would also be safe to say that no one ever had a better one.

The Four Freshmen: A Vocal Quartet with Quarter Tones

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

In retrospect, it’s amazing to consider having ever taken The Four Freshmen for granted.

Yet for many years, that’s exactly what I did.

I mean, as a Jazz vocal group, they were still right up there with The Pied Pipers, The Hi-Lo’s, and Mel Torme’s Mel-tones, but I was spoiled back in the days when The Four Freshmen made their first, recorded appearances in the early 1950's.

Good vocal Jazz was everywhere, so one had a tendency in those days to expect marvelous music from a newly arrived group on the scene.

But somehow, The Four Freshmen demanded a closer listening and I kept going back and back and doing just that – listening more closely to the point when it finally dawned on me that something very special was going on in their music.

But what?

Why were The Four Freshmen above-the-line; why did I eventually come to view them as virtually being in a class by themselves?

The reasons for their uniqueness is in The Four Freshmen’s use of quarter tones and the manner in which they “voice” their chords as explained in the following excerpt from the insert notes to The Complete Capitol Four Freshmen Fifties Session, a nine-disc set issued by Michael Cuscuna and his team at Mosaic Records [MD9-203].

At least I had enough of a discriminating sense to jump on a copy of this set when it first appeared. It was issued in a limited edition of 3,500 and my copy is numbered “0079.”

The Mosaic set notes were prepared by Ross Barbour, one of the Freshmen’s founding members. In them, Ross not only describes what gave the group its distinctive sound, but also how the group got its start with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, an association that would continue for almost three decades, and ultimately came to be recorded by Capitol Records.

Ross’s annotations and remembrances are followed with an article by William H. Smith that also touches on the roots of the group and the reasons why The Four Freshmen successfully carry on to this day.

© -  Ross Barbour/Mosaic Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Bob Flanigan and Don and Ross Barbour are cousins. Our mothers were sisters. My brother Don and I are from Columbus, Indiana. Bob Flanigan is from Greencastle, Indiana.

When we were just grade-schoolers, we would go to our mothers' family reunions and at noon the Fodreas would all stand and sing the Doxology before we ate. (Praise God from whom all blessings flow, etc.) In mother's family, there were 10 girls and two boys. They all sang in quartets, choirs and choruses. They sang harmony so right it made the rafters ring. It took our breath away.

The way they sang those notes made a different sound from playing those notes on a keyboard. I never understood why they were so different until I read an article in an old Barbershopper's newsletter. The harmonizer of September 1954, Paul Vandervoort of Hey wood, Illinois, wrote the article, and he got his information from The Outline of Knowledge Encyclopedia, and an article entitled "Sound Physics."

It seems that in about 1700, the musical scale was quite complicated. An octave had 20 or more notes in it. Between F and G, for instance, there was F sharp, G double flat and G flat. That was called the "perfect diatonic scale."

Johann Sebastian Bach came along and changed all this. He formed what is known as the "tempered scale" by choosing 12 of the 20-plus notes, and having his piano tuned that way. It was a lot simpler, but the beautiful quarter tones were left out. People's ears could still hear them and harmony singers knew how to use them to make what are called over­tones, but they were just not on a keyboard anymore.

Bob, Don and I were hearing those overtones or harmonics as kids, and we became addicted to them. We couldn't get enough. I sang in quartets in high school and in college, and I sang with the Four Freshmen for 29 years. I never got enough. I have been a Freshmen fan since I retired undefeated in 1977, and I still need to hear overtones.

In our early Four Freshmen days, we rehearsed without instruments. If a chord we sang couldn't stand up and say its name (I'm a D-ninth or I'm an F-seventh), we would change it until it did.

We used bass and guitar for our background, but they never played the exact notes we were singing. Our harmony could happen almost unfettered by the demand of a keyboard — demand that would channel us back into Bach's 12 half-steps per octave.

If my note was a major seventh, I could sing it on top of the note — sing it sharp, you might say, so it and the tonic note became a little less than a half-step apart. That's what makes it buzz in your ear.

If we wanted a dominant seventh to ring, we'd sing it on the bottom of the pitch — especially if the voice leading was going down through that dominant seventh.

A major third should be sung brightly on top of the pitch, and a minor third should hang on the bottom.

We were singing those notes not because they were writ­ten and the piano said the pitch was "there." We sang them because they harmonized. They made overtones in our ears.

And we didn't discover some great breakthrough in har­mony. Good barbershop singers do it all the time; in fact singers have been doing it since at least the year 1700.

It may be that we were the first modern vocal group the world noticed who put the emphasis on harmony and over­tones, but we won't be the last. Other groups are bound to succeed in doing it because there is something in people's ears that needs harmony. That thing can make your hair stand up when a chord rings. It can make you shout right out loud!

That article about "Sound Physics" goes on to say that Handel, the great composer, "could not stand to hear music played in the tempered scale." He had an organ built that would play all the notes in the perfect diatonic scale. Boy! That would be a bear to play!

In 1947, Hal Kratzsch was 22, Bob 21, Don 20 and I was 18. We were all freshmen at Arthur Jordan Conservatory in Indianapolis. We'd all sung in vocal groups before and singing harmony parts came naturally to us.

Bob had been a member of a Greencastle vocal group that had a radio show in Indianapolis for a while. He went into the service out of high school, and played trombone through his army time in Germany, except when the dance band needed a bass player. He learned to play bass on the job. After the service he enrolled in A.J.C. in 1947.

Don played guitar through high school and a couple of years in Arabia with the Air Force. I had graduated from high school in the spring of 1947. Don and I came to college together that fall.

Hal, who was from Warsaw, Indiana, played trumpet in high school and in the Navy in the South Pacific. He came from the service to Indiana University for a year before trans­fering to A.J.C.

Hal and I met in theory class. He had the idea of putting together a quartet. At that time, we thought a modern vocal group needed a girl to sing lead, so Hal, Don and I rehearsed with a girl named Marilyn for almost a month, before we found out that Marilyn's mom wouldn't let her go sing with three guys in late-night places.

When we got Bob in the group, our sound really started to take shape. Bob's lead voice has influenced generations... strong and clear.

Hal knew from instinct how to sing the bottom part, and he did it his way. He seldom sang the tonic, and often sang the ninth or passing tones through the chords. His pitch was so secure, we could stand our chords up on his note.

Don had such a wide range. We needed his upper regis­ter in his second part, and he came through with it so well and so strong. I was a natural baritone or third voice. It was more natural for me to sing harmonies than to sing melodies. It was up to us to fill in — to color — that large area between Bob and Hal.

With voices like these we could make rainbows of color chords, so we did. In the beginning we chose our own notes — made up our own individual parts, but we didn't do it straight through a song. On Poinciana, we would agree to sing "oh" in unison. Then "poin" was a chord to solve. After we had that one, then we went for "ci" and the notes had to flow from "poin" to "ci", then on to "ana." Okay, let's try it from the top. Are there any chords we can make stronger? Let's try making two chords out of "ci" — when I do this, you do that. Maybe a whole hour goes by and you haven't tried all the ideas. But you should keep trying because the next idea may just make all of you jump and shout.

We were trying to sound like Stan Kenton's vocal group, The Pastels. There were five of them and four of us, but that didn't stop us. Mel Torme had a five-part group with Artie Shaw's band called The Mel Tones. We tried to copy them, too. The way it turned out, we invented a sound by trying to get a five-part sound with four voices. (Other elements to our sound came about serendipitously. At a show in El Paso on December 8, 1951, Don broke a high E string on his guitar, and he didn't have a spare. Well, the show had go on, so Don replaced it with a third string and tuned it an octave lower. From that day on, Don's guitar didn't sound like other guitars. It was great for our sound. The lower string added a density to the range where we sang.)

We went on the road Sept. 20, 1948, working lounges (most of them dingy dives) around the Midwest for a year and a half, honing our music and our stage presentation.

In February 1950, we were working the Pla Bowl Lounge in Calumet City, Illinois. We'd work until 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. and then we would go to jam sessions. The 19th was a Sunday night — the end of our week. Mondays were off. We went to the High Note in Chicago for a session that began about 4:00 a.m. Monday. The place was full of the right people — Marian McPartland, Roy Kral and Jackie Cain, Jeri Southern, and one of our favorites, Mary Ann McCall. She was on stage singing with the Max Miller Trio. It was a song we knew so we got up there, too, and sang "dooooo" with her. It must have sounded pretty good because at the end of the song, Mary Ann said on the microphone, "Hey, Woody, we're ready to go." A guy at the bar stood up and said something back to her. We caught our breath. It was Woody Herman!

In the next few minutes, he and Mary Ann explained how Woody was going to put together a new band in a few months; he would call it "The Band That Plays the Music You Want to Dance To," or some such title. He wanted us four to play in the band, and sing as a quartet a half dozen tunes a night.

We loved the Herman Herds and the way Mary Ann sang. Oh! It seemed that life couldn't get any better. Just one month later, Stan Kenton had us reaching for the moon (our own record contract) and believing it was possible.

Stan heard us in the Esquire Lounge in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday, March 21. He was on tour with the Innovations Orchestra and some disc jockey friends brought Stan to hear us after his show. He must have understood that we didn't usually tremble and sound short of breath when we sang. He knew we were overwhelmed by his presence. It could be that our worshipping his every move triggered some of his devotion to our quartet.

He could tell we didn't know what we were doing. I heard him say in an interview one time that we were doing things by ear that were way beyond our musical education, but we were making sounds he liked to hear.

That night he planned for us to go to New York and meet him and Pete Rugolo. He would see that we made some good audition tapes for Capitol's executives to hear. He would talk those executives into signing us to our own contract, and we would begin making records. Stan made it happen just that way.

He'd later say, "You guys have gotta succeed, you can't fail. You're part of my ego!" Let me pause here in the story to explain that Stan had his managers handle our career. They found us work, and helped us choose uniforms. We received mail at Stan's 941 N. La Cienega address for two or three years, and we couldn't get him to take a penny for it. He didn't even want us to give him Christmas presents. The prestige he added to this quartet by just saying, "Stan Kenton likes the Four Freshmen," was priceless. The helpful care he gave us year after year kept good things coming our way. I have said it before and it always sounds like I am bragging, but Stan treated us like we were his own kids. We were part of his ego.

On April 10, we left Green Bay on the 7:10 train to Chicago. We caught the 2:40 p.m. train to New York and tried to sleep that night, but we were too keyed up. None of us slept. Our dreams were coming true before our very eyes.

My diary says: "Tried to sing in the dining caboose, almost got thrown in the caboose, Yippee Ky-0-Ky-A."

We arrived in New York at 10:30 a.m. on April 11, full of youthful steam. We slept for an hour and a half at the Dixie Hotel before we went to Pete Rugolo's dressing room at the Paramount Theater. He was conducting the orchestra for Billy Eckstine.

We waited in the dressing room while Pete did the show. We could hear the show from there. Does life get better than this? When Pete came back, we sang a couple of tunes for him. Pete was pleased but surprised we sang for him since that's what we were to do the next day in the studio. Later that night, we went to Bop City to hear Lionel Hampton and the George Shearing group with Denzil Best.

The next evening (Wednesday April 12), we ate at the Automat and went to Pete's dressing room again, where we met up with Stan Kenton and his manager, Bob Allison, who gave us $65. This was travel money and we thought, at the time, it was from Capitol records. Now we know that Capitol didn't pay groups to go to New York to record audition tapes. That money must have come from Stan himself, just to make sure that the cost of the trip didn't leave us broke.

We were in good hands, and we were on our way!”

  

© -  William H. Smith/The Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Four Freshman: A Vocal Group at the Top of Its Class

By WILLIAM H. SMITH
August 20, 2008

The Wall Street Journal

“Widely known for basketball, the Indy 500, and a plethora of covered bridges, Indiana also proudly claims The Four Freshmen as its own. The legendary vocal/instrumental group will celebrate its 60th anniversary at a reunion, sponsored by The Four Freshmen Society, of band members past and present -- there have been 23 lineups to date -- at the Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre, Aug. 21 to 23. Commemorative concerts continue to air across the country during PBS fund-raising drives, and a highlight of 2008 will be the Freshmen's Oct. 25 performance before Russian fans at the prestigious Great Hall of the Moscow Performing Arts Center.

Although not the first successful vocal group, The Four Freshmen was, without question, the most innovative. Inspired by Artie Shaw's Mel-Tones with Mel Torme, as well as by The Pastels, a five-voice group with Stan Kenton, the Freshmen soon developed their own unique style of harmony -- singing a five-part sound with four voices and playing instruments as well. Every vocal group that followed -- except for those that sang with no or minimal chord structure -- was influenced by the Freshmen, including The Lettermen, Manhattan Transfer, Take Six, the Beatles and the Beach Boys. (At The Four Freshmen's Jan. 14 performance at Palm Desert, Calif.'s McCallum Theatre, I sat in the audience next to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson -- one of the Freshmen's most enthusiastic fans, who listened to their records as a teenager and wanted to emulate their unique sound in his arrangements.)

The close harmony of this unique quartet had its genesis at Butler University's Jordan Conservatory in Indianapolis, when Hal Kratzch, along with Don Barbour and his brother Ross, formed "Hal's Harmonizers." In an interview at his home in Simi Valley, Calif., Ross Barbour recalled that "we tried a few lead singers, but it was only after our cousin Bob Flanigan, with his strong high voice, joined the group that we started getting that Freshmen sound." The four went on the road in 1948 as The Toppers, but the name was soon changed to The Four Freshmen. (Both Ross Barbour and Bob Flanigan, the only survivors of that quartet, received honorary doctorates at Butler this May.)

Stan Kenton heard the Freshmen in March 1950 at the Esquire Lounge in Dayton, Ohio, and gave them their first big break by introducing the group to his own recording label, Capitol Records. The Freshmen had developed their trademark sound by structuring chords much like the trombone section of Kenton's own band, and Mr. Barbour maintains that the success of one of their biggest-selling albums, "Four Freshmen and Five Trombones," can in a large way be attributed to Pete Rugolo, the arranger the quartet and Kenton shared.

The Four Freshmen's signature tune is "It's a Blue World Without You," released in 1952, a song that continues to send chills up and down the spines of audiences as soon as the first a capella chords resound. But the Freshmen gained their first national exposure when they appeared on CBS's "Steve Allen Show" on Christmas Day in 1950, and their popularity lasted not only through the decade that later gave birth to rock 'n' roll but into the mid-1960s -- the era of Bob Dylan and the Beatles -- and beyond. Despite this generational change, the Freshmen continued playing universities around the country and, according to Mr. Barbour, "the multitude of college kids remained loyal fans."

Over their 60 years of performing throughout the U.S. and abroad, the Freshmen have recorded some 45 albums and 70 singles, and have received numerous honors, including six Grammy Awards. Down Beat magazine awarded the quartet the Best Jazz Vocal group honor in 1953 and again, 57 years later, in 2000, an example of the quartet's timeless appeal. The present lineup placed No. 1 in this same category in the 2007 JazzTimes Readers Poll.

"The Four Freshmen have endured for the simple reason that they are top in their class," said Charles Osgood, anchor of "CBS Sunday Morning," when a profile of the group aired in August 1994. Steven Cornelius of the Toledo Blade put it this way in April 2005: "There is no Dorian Gray youth potion at work, just a healthy retirement system." When a member leaves, he is replaced with an equally talented musician.

The present lineup of this multifaceted, ultra-talented quartet of vocalists and instrumentalists now comprises Vince Johnson, baritone, playing bass and guitar; Bob Ferreira, bass voice, playing drums; Brian Eichenberger, lead voice, playing guitar and bass; and Curtis Calderon, singing second part, and playing trumpet and flugelhorn. Although the other three Freshmen joke about it, Mr. Johnson accompanies his bass with some of the best whistling since Bing Crosby.

Bob Flanigan -- introducing the current quartet on their recent DVD, "The Four Freshmen Live From Las Vegas" -- vows that "this group is the best Four Freshmen of all time." On the DVD, Mr. Flanigan, reflecting on his 44 years with the Freshmen, remembers all the "Bad roads . . . Bad food . . . Good and Bad Hotels . . . and millions of air-miles in DC3s to 747s."

Long live The Four Freshmen. May they never graduate!

Mr. Smith writes about jazz and the big-band era for the Journal

For tour dates and venues, go to www.fourfreshmen.com.”

Blue Skies

Paul Whiteman's Sax - Soc-tette. L-R: Al Gallodoro, Sal Franzella, Jack Bell, Frank Gallodoro, Artie Deringer, Vince Capone, George Ford, Frank Simeone, and Murray Cohen. Here's a recreation of the Nathan van Cleave arrangement for the Sax Sco-tette as performed by Dutch group The Beau Hunks.