The History of Jazz (54 page)

Among the major white big band leaders, Charlie Barnet was the first to draw on the emerging modern jazz style. The band’s 1939 hit “Cherokee” would come to serve as an unofficial anthem of the bebop movement, although at the time Barnet’s group stayed fairly close to the model set by Ellington and Basie. But, by 1942, the band had taken on a more modern sound, streamlined and hard-swinging, and incorporating many of the melodic devices of bebop. The arrangements of Andy Gibson and, later, Ralph Burns set a cutting-edge tone for the Barnet band, which was furthered by the addition of pianist Dodo Marmarosa, bassist Oscar Pettiford, trumpeters Neal Hefti and Al Killian, and clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, among others. For a brief period, Barnet even had Dizzy Gillespie in the group. These were bold moves for a white bandleader, and not just from a musical standpoint given the rarity of integration in the ensembles of the day. Yet Barnet had long stood out as a champion of racial tolerance in the jazz world—indeed, rivaling Goodman in this respect—with Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, Lena Horne, Frankie Newton, and Charlie Shavers, among others, serving stints at various times with his band.

These combined influences gave Barnet’s group an authentic bop sound—this coming several months before Gillespie’s combo brought modern jazz to Fifty-second Street. In fact, bop had hardly ventured beyond the doors of Minton’s and Monroe’s at the time that Barnet was presenting it to his audiences. Gunther Schuller, in his masterful study
The Swing Era
, has declared with some justification that with the band’s October 1943 recording of “The Moose”—arranged by Burns and featuring seventeen-year-old Marmarosa in top form—“modern big band jazz was born, or at least baptized.”
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Barnet has long been dismissed as a white imitator of the leading black bands, but this ensemble was innovative by almost any measure. Even the old jazz pieces that Barnet revived during this period, such as his 1944 remakes of Ellington’s “Drop Me Off in Harlem” and Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” were presented in new garb, glistening bop-oriented versions as advanced as anything in the swing repertoire of the time. But Barnet, for all his virtues, struggled to retain the talent he discovered. Where his role model Ellington could hold onto key players for years, Barnet often kept them for only a few months. Despite this steady turnover, his bands continued to flourish for the remainder of the decade.

The main beneficiary of Barnet’s losses would prove to be Woody Herman, a bandleader with an unfailing knack for continually reinventing his sound. Herman’s performing career had passed through virtually every style of popular music by the time he found himself leading a bop big band. Born in Milwaukee in 1913, Herman started performing at age six, singing and dancing in his hometown, and went on the road for the first time at the age of nine. As a youngster he played the vaudeville circuit, where he was billed as the “Boy Wonder of the Saxophone.” The next phase of Herman’s career found him plying his trade in society and sweet bands, most notably the Isham Jones ensemble that Herman joined in 1934. When Jones disbanded in 1936, Herman drew on its members to form his own group, known for a time as “The Band That Plays the Blues.” The group also dabbled in other jazz styles, including Dixieland, and eventually gravitated toward swing numbers, such as the riff-based blues “Woodchopper’s Ball,” which became Herman’s first hit in 1939. Follow-up records such as “Blues in the Night” and “Blue Flame” also sold well, and by 1942 the Herman band had established itself as one of the leading swing orchestras of the day. At this unlikely point in his career, Herman began deviating from the formula that had brought him success and, ever restless, gradually came to embrace the new bop idiom.

Herman’s evolution from sweet music to traditional jazz to modern jazz is almost unprecedented in the history of music. Few bandleaders of his generation could consider such a wholesale change, and even fewer would have been capable of it. Yet, when understood properly, this dramatic shift provides a telling insight into Herman’s unusual, perhaps unique, relationship to his musical milieu. For Woody Herman is best understood not as a bandleader or even as a musician, but as a catalyst. His talent lay not primarily in what he did, but in what he enabled others to do—spurring those around him to tap their deepest creative currents, inspiring them, letting them “loose,” so to speak—so much so that it is easy to lose sight of his own considerable skills as an instrumentalist and vocalist. Hence Phil Wilson’s apt quip: “Nobody does what Woody does as well as Woody does. … If we could only figure out what it is he does.”
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With his sure instincts for recognizing talent, Herman quickly sought out the leading lights of the modern jazz movement. In 1942, he hired Dizzy Gillespie to write for the band (some decades later Gillespie introduced Herman to the crowd at the Monterey Jazz Festival as “the first person ever to pay me fifty dollars for an arrangement”), and he brought a large number of enthusiastic young modern jazz players into his ensemble, many of them former members of Barnet’s band. The rhythm section was galvanized by the addition of bassist Chubby Jackson, guitarist Billy Bauer, and hard-swinging drummer Dave Tough; and in 1944, two musicianarrangers who had also worked with Barnet, pianist Ralph Burns and trumpeter Neal Hefti, joined the exodus to the Herman band and gave further momentum to its progressive leanings. The trumpet section included Sonny Berman, a masterful soloist who might have established himself as one of the leading brass players of his day had he not died before his twenty-second birthday, as well as Pete Candoli, a fiery instrumentalist with a penchant for high-note dramatics. Two other 1944 additions to the band, trombonist Bill Harris and tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips, were outstanding improvisers and equally at home in either swing or bop settings. Harris’s fresh approach to the trombone was so deeply personal that, in the words of pianist Lou Levy, it “circumvented style. … It wasn’t bebop. It wasn’t Dixieland. It was his own.”
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Later additions to the First Herd, as this band came to be called, included vibraphonist Red Norvo, trumpeter Shorty Rogers, and pianist Jimmy Rowles.

This was a rare breed of modern jazz ensemble. It drew on the most progressive currents in jazz but did so without taking on the self-serious and aloof, at times pretentious, demeanor that prevented many bop groups from gaining favor with the general public. Here again Herman’s savvy and people skills played an important role. Often cited as the name bandleader who was best liked by his musicians, Herman bred a high-spirited enthusiasm among his players, encouraged their (often outré) senses of humor, and added to their emotional commitment through a collective ownership arrangement rare in the music world. The bandleader’s tolerant attitude was not without its costs—for one, drug and alcohol problems would bedevil the band for a time—but it also gave the Herman Herds a carefree attitude that audiences found engaging. The initial Herd, in particular, stood out not only as a pioneering band, but also as the most popular and financially profitable ensemble Herman would ever lead.

The First Herman Herd was also one of the most versatile bands of its day. Its exuberance shines through in uptempo recordings such as “Apple Honey” and “Northwest Passage.” At other times, the band might take an unabashedly romantic turn with dreamy renditions of “Laura” or “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.” The group’s comic side came to the fore in novelty vocals such as “Caldonia,” oddball instrumentals like “Goosey Gander,” or surprising midsong twists such as Sonny Berman’s bitonal interjections in “Your Father’s Moustache.” It is hard to believe that this same loose, unrestrained band was the one Stravinsky selected to debut his
Ebony Concerto
—which quickly disappointed any listeners who had expected the Russian composer to embrace Herman’s laissez-faire swing. Instead the Herman band was the party that had to adapt the most, doing their best to excite skeptical jazz audiences with Stravinsky’s distinctly unswinging piece (surprisingly so, given the rhythmic vitality of many of his other compositions). This was an infelicitous mixture, as even the composer soon learned, discovering that he needed to have the piece rescored so that the players could handle its unusual (for a jazz band) metrics. More idiomatic, and popular with Herman’s fans, was Ralph Burns’s extended work
Summer Sequence
, a richly melodic piece performed by the band at Carnegie Hall alongside Stravinsky’s composition. Other memorable efforts by this edition of the Herman band include Burns’s chart “Bijou” (once described by Herman as a “Stone Age bossa nova”) with a moving solo by Harris, “Sidewalks of Cuba” with its noteworthy Sonny Berman solo, and Hefti’s musical conversation (hear Phillips’s give-and-take with the brass) titled “The Good Earth.”

The First Herd came to a halt in December 1946. Both personnel and personal problems spurred Herman’s decision to disband. Exhausted by a demanding schedule, troubled by his wife’s substance addictions, and witnessing the departure of many key band members—only the previous month he had lost the core of his trumpet section when Berman, Candoli, and Rogers all left—Herman saw that the time had come for a hiatus from the road. But just nine months later, he decided to regroup with a new band featuring a largely different crop of soloists. Matching the excitement level of the earlier Herd, one of the most popular bands of the day, would have seemed an almost impossible task, and adding to the challenge was the inhospitable atmosphere for big bands in general during these postwar years. An end-of-an-era ethos permeated the music industry, and though almost a decade would pass before the electrified sounds of rock and roll would drown out the competition, it was clear to many that the old formulas no longer held sway. Herman confronted these obstacle head on, and did so in the grand style, bringing together one of the strongest big bands of the decade, and capturing an entirely new sound in the process.

The heart and soul of the Second Herd, or the “Four Brothers Band” as it is often called, was centered in its sax section. The basic concept of the “Four Brothers” sound was simple enough: its foundation was tight ensemble writing for three tenor saxophones and a baritone sax. But the key to this section work lay in the distinctive approach of the saxophonists in question. Adopting a light, airy tone reminiscent of Lester Young, and combining it with the melodic pyrotechnics of modern jazz, these horns mastered a novel formula, merging the excitement and intricacy of bop with a sweet-toned lyricism. Just a few years later, this mixture of modernism and melodicism would come to be known as cool jazz.

A number of premier saxophonists would play in this section during the Second Herd’s existence from 1947 to 1949—including Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Herbie Steward, Jimmy Giuffre, Serge Chaloff, and Gene Ammons—but the most celebrated soloist of the Four Brothers period would prove to be the youngest member of this group. Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, barely out of his teens when he joined the Herman band, had already served stints with Jack Teagarden (with whom he recorded when only sixteen years old), Benny Goodman, and Stan Kenton. Born in Philadelphia on February 2, 1927, Getz spent most of his early years in the Bronx, where his father worked as a printer. A precocious talent, Getz dabbled at a variety of instruments— including harmonica, string bass, and bassoon—before settling on saxophone. He finished only one year of high school but already had earned a spot on the coveted All New York City High School Orchestra (as a bassoonist), and his school conductor predicted that a scholarship to Juilliard lay in his future. Instead, Getz ventured on the road at age fifteen with Teagarden, who eventually had to sign guardianship papers to keep his underage saxophonist. Other high-profile gigs followed, but Getz showed little inclination for staying in one place for very long. He left Kenton, after the bandleader made disparaging remarks about Getz’s idol Lester Young, then stayed for a brief spell with the Jimmy Dorsey band before joining Goodman, who reportedly fired him—all this while Getz was still a teenager!

The Herman association, although it too ended after only a few months, would prove to be a turning point for Getz. Two other future Herman saxophonists played a central role in setting the stage for Getz’s eventual stardom: Herbie Steward encouraged Getz to adopt the lighter, Lester Young–inflected tone and relaxed phrasing that would eventually become his trademark; Jimmy Giuffre would help popularize the “Four Brothers” sound, learned from arranger Gene Roland while he and Getz were working in Tommy DeCarlo’s band in Los Angeles. When Herman hired Giuffre (first as an arranger, later as a saxophonist) and Getz, he also brought on board the new sound. Giuffre’s “Four Brothers” chart served as a spectacular showpiece for the saxophone section’s novel approach. Even more important for Getz was his hauntingly delicate solo on Ralph Burns’s “Early Autumn,” adapted from “Summer Sequence (Part Four),” the recently added epilogue to the composer’s popular
Summer Sequence
. Getz had already left the band by the time this recording was released, but its popularity created a receptive audience for his ensuing work as a small-combo leader.

But Getz, despite his renown, was far from the only major saxophonist in Herman’s Second Herd. Another Lester Young disciple, Al Cohn, joined the band shortly after the “Four Brothers” recording. Cohn had little opportunity to solo with the Herman orchestra during this period, but in time would establish himself as an inventive tenor saxophonist and a talented composer. Zoot Sims, who worked with Cohn both in the Herman band and in a later long-lived two-saxophone combo, also showed an allegiance to Young, enriched by Sims’s unflagging sense of swing and impeccable taste. Jimmy Giuffre may have been a less distinguished soloist than these peers at the time of the Second Herd, but his later career demonstrated the most pronounced evolution of any member of the group. He worked for a time with the Lighthouse All Stars and Shorty Rogers’s Giants in California, where he became a leading exponent of West Coast jazz, later released a series of eclectic, intensely creative recordings for the Atlantic and Verve labels, and, by the close of the 1950s, had embraced atonality—a progression that none of the other Brothers, a conservative fraternity when it came to musical values, could match. Gene Ammons’s stint with the Herman band would be brief, but in time he too would come to establish himself as a major player, popularizing the “soul jazz” idiom with a style that drew heavily on blues and gospel roots. Serge Chaloff showed the deepest allegiance to bop among the Herman saxophonists and earned praise for his skill in adapting many of Charlie Parker’s innovations to the baritone. Ill health aggravated by drug addiction would sideline Chaloff for much of the 1950s, and at his death in 1957 he was only thirty-three years old, but his work with Herman, as well his various recordings in smaller combos, reveal an expressive, technically accomplished instrumentalist. But this was more than just a band of up-and-coming saxophonists. The Second Herd also benefited from the eventual return of Bill Harris to the band, the maturing of Shorty Rogers, who blossomed into an excellent composer during this period, and the contributions of a number of new composer-arrangers, including Giuffre, Cohn, and Johnny Mandel.