The History of Jazz (55 page)

Herman disbanded the Second Herd in late 1949. Although the ensemble had enjoyed great popularity with jazz fans—
Downbeat
readers chose it as their favorite big band that year, with Herman outpolling the second-place Ellington group by a three-to-one margin—it had been a financial disaster. After taking a small combo to Cuba, Herman formed a Third Herd in the spring of 1950. Many earlier Herman associates were hired, along with new faces such as pianist Dave McKenna and drummer Sonny Igoe. Despite the various challenges in his way—including a major reshuffling of the band’s personnel at the end of 1955—Herman continued to work steadily throughout the decade. But the jazz world changed dramatically during these years, as did the tastes of the general public. In the context of a transformed music scene—one that included Ornette Coleman, Elvis Presley, Cecil Taylor, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Coltrane, Little Richard, and Muddy Waters—Woody Herman could no longer demand respect as a major force at the cutting edge. By the close of the 1950s, Herman was working frequently with a small combo. He would come to regroup, a Herman trademark, and though some of the Herds of later years made outstanding music—for example, the powerhouse 1962–65 unit, dubbed the “Renaissance Herd” by Herb Wong—they failed to match the renown Herman enjoyed during his glory decade from 1945 to 1955. Herman would stay on the road almost to the end of his life, playing Carnegie Hall and high school assembly halls with equal enthusiasm. With even greater persistence he was pursued by government tax authorities, who claimed violations dating back over twenty years (due to lapses for which Herman’s manager, not the bandleader himself, was responsible). In later days, Herman’s financial situation was always precarious, with medical expenses adding to the daunting debt owed to the Internal Revenue Service. A few days before his death in October 1987, the ailing Herman was served an eviction notice dismissing him from his Hollywood home. Only a groundswell of grassroots support and donations from friends, fans, and former sidemen—including a bill debated in Congress to wipe out Herman’s tax liabilities—prevented an ignominious end for this important contributor to American music.

For most of this period, Stan Kenton stood out as Herman’s greatest rival in creating an unabashedly progressive jazz big band. These two figures are often mentioned in the same breath—and, true, the similarities between the bandleaders are striking. Both were Swing Era veterans from middle America who came of age at the dawn of the Great Depression, and converted to modern jazz at the close of the war years. But these overlapping biographical facts are merely superficial; the contrasts are overwhelming. The affable Herman, genial and permissive, let his bands discover their own musical identity. The strong-willed Kenton, in contrast, forged an orchestra in his own image: as massive as his six-and-a-half-foot-tall frame, as expansive as his personal aspirations, as varied as his moods. Herman had a knack for making modern jazz palatable for the mass market and would not hesitate to record trite novelty songs to capture the public’s approval. “I think it’s very important to reach that other audience, the larger audience,” Herman once explained. “The guys in the band and I put in a good day’s work over 300 days a year. We deserve a pay-off sometime.”
²⁵
Kenton, in contrast, disdained such compromises—although he was not entirely above them—driven instead by a need to create
important
music, jazz music on a larger scale than anyone had envisioned before. Eventually he established his own corporation and record company, Creative World, to escape the commercial pressures of the music industry. While Herman’s modernism drew inspiration from bebop, Kenton avoided the term with a vengeance. Instead, he continually invented new names for modern jazz. He delighted in describing it as “progressive jazz” or in featuring his 1950 band—which included a full string section—under the rubric of
Innovations in Modern Music
or in dubbing the 1952 edition
New Concepts in Artistry in Rhythm
. Eventually he coined his own word:
Neophonic
music, deriving from Greek roots meaning “new sounds.” Not that Kenton was against bebop—he simply preferred to pretend that it did not exist. His brand of modern jazz was all that mattered.

Stan Kenton was born in Wichita, Kansas, on December 15, 1911, but spent much of his childhood in California. He dabbled at string, brass, and reed instruments before focusing his energies on arranging and the piano. He apprenticed in a wide range of groups during his twenties, eventually passing up more lucrative opportunities to perform his own music with a Southern California rehearsal band. Through sheer persistence, Kenton managed to secure a few local gigs, and eventually parlayed them into an extended engagement during the summer of 1941 at the Rendezvous Ballroom on Balboa, an island retreat catering to a young clientele. Kenton’s band was just as young, perhaps younger—only two sidemen were over the age of twenty-one—and the audience responded with unprecedented fervor to this little-known group of post-adolescents with horns conducted by the statuesque man with a frenzied demeanor, swinging arms, and unceasing motion. The Kenton band soon signed with the Decca label, began performing at the largest ballrooms in the country, and was written up in almost every issue of
Downbeat
.

Kenton had started his orchestra as a way of featuring his own compositions— sweeping themes such as “Artistry in Rhythm,” more indebted to Tchaikovsky and Romberg than to any jazz forebears. But in time Kenton realized that his genius lay in creating an environment in which other musical minds could refine and expand the Kenton sound. He had a taste for combining the most disparate ingredients, as in his postwar band, in which the hypermodern compositions of Pete Rugolo were leavened with the bittersweet alto sax of Art Pepper and the conversational, girl-next-door vocal style of June Christy. For a time, Rugolo served as Kenton’s alter ego, writing or collaborating on a series of ambitious pieces, some jazzy, others with an Afro-Cuban influence, many of them classically tinged. But before long, Kenton was again broadening his scope, drawing on other composers-in-residence. At the same time he was expanding his musical palette, experimenting with new instruments and different textures.

True, there was a trademark Kenton sound—brassy, extroverted, pseudosymphonic, grandiloquent. But Kenton also delighted in undermining this very style by hiring writers and soloists with contrasting musical perspectives. Bill Holman’s smoothly swinging charts, with echoes of Kansas City jazz, were much beloved by the band’s soloists, and he returned the favor by supplying some of the most memorable feature numbers in the band’s history: “Cherokee,” a chart originally penned for Charlie Parker but taken over with authority by Lennie Niehaus; the more moody “Yesterdays,” which evokes a Lester Young strain from tenorist Bill Perkins; “Stella by Starlight,” which takes altoist Charles Mariano through ballad and double-time paces. There is little wasted motion in these arrangements, none of the excesses that weigh down many Kenton band charts. But Holman was capable of more daring reworkings of traditional material, as his deconstructions of “What’s New,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” and “I’ve Got You under My Skin” make eminently clear. Bill Russo’s writing for the band, in contrast, was more firmly rooted in the Kenton/Rugolo tradition. His “Halls of Brass” pushed Kenton’s horn obsession to an extreme in a virtuosic exercise that reportedly garnered begrudging admiration from symphony brass sections. But Russo also harbored a more introspective side, betrayed on his finely shaded version of “There’s a Small Hotel” or the plaintive romanticism of “Solitaire.” Other writers also contributed richly stylized charts, further defying the notion that there was a single Kenton sound: Johnny Richard’s
Cuban Fire
arrangements demand respect as among the most powerful and successful explorations of Latin music in a jazz context; Gerry Mulligan’s writing for Kenton bespoke a relaxed swing and intimacy in tune with the baritone saxophonist’s cool aesthetic. Bob Graettinger’s contributions to the band’s repertoire were at the other extreme: these dense, dissonant explorations—most notably his magnum opus
City of Glass
—are exquisitely disturbing. No jazz composer of his day anticipated the later advent of free jazz with more gritty determination. Kenton’s advocacy of Graettinger’s distinctly unpopular music makes it clear how committed this bandleader was to pluralism and staying at the vanguard of big band jazz.

But this was much more than a writer’s band. Especially during its glory days of the 1940s and 1950s, the Kenton orchestra was rich in star soloists. Art Pepper graced the band during the earliest days of his career, brandishing a before-the-fall innocence that is most notable on Shorty Rogers’s eponymous feature piece for him. He went on to enjoy a substantial career as a leader in his own right, as did trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, who soon drew raves as the most celebrated high-note brass player of his generation. Frank Rosolino was equally admired as a virtuoso on the trombone and demonstrated his facility on such recordings as “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” and “Frank Speaking.” Crediting Rosolino for broadening the technique of the trombone in the 1950s, Bill Russo has recalled: “We were all staggered by what he could do, not only at the speed of his technique and that he played so well in the upper register, but that he had such incredible flexibility.”
²⁶
Lee Konitz figured prominently in the Kenton lineup for a brief period in the 1950s and was featured soloist on a number of performances, including an ethereal rendition of “Lover Man” that ranks as one of the altoist’s finest recorded moments. Zoot Sims also served a short stint with Kenton and left behind a characteristically hard-swinging performance on Holman’s chart “Zoot.”

Stan Kenton was not the only 1950s big band leader who attempted to remake modern jazz in his own iconoclastic image. Sun Ra drew on an equally eclectic mixture of forward-looking jazz styles in the various recordings made with his large ensemble, the Arkestra—a band invariably described by the leader with one or more impressive descriptives attached (e.g., the Myth Science Arkestra or the Astro Infinity Arkestra). A certain extravagance permeated almost everything having to do with this artist. Many jazz players are guilty of distorting or exaggerating the facts of their early years, but only Sun Ra went so far as to trace his origins back to the planet Saturn and claim descent from a race of angels. In truth, Sun Ra was apparently born with the more pedestrian name of Herman Blount in Alabama in 1914. He came of age as a pianist and composer during the Swing Era and worked for a time in the late 1940s in the Fletcher Henderson band. His visionary music, however, did not come into its own until the mid-1950s, when he began recording extensively with his large band, first in Chicago and later in New York, Philadelphia, and other environs.

Sun Ra’s coterie of fans came to expect the unexpected, and were seldom disappointed. The Arkestra’s lineup might include, on a given night, as few as ten musicians or as many as thirty. Dancers, costumes, slide shows, and other “extras” might be included with the price of admission. The Arkestra’s music could be equally changeable. Elements of bebop, hard bop, and swing loom large on the band’s mid-1950s recordings. But over the next decade, the Arkestra would embrace an even broader palette: swirling layers of percussion, spooky electronic effects, disjointed echoes of rhythm and blues, hints of Asian and African music, dissonance, atonality, at times aural anarchy. Sun Ra’s jargon-laden talk of the cosmos and interplanetary music may have sounded like a half-baked script from a Cold War sci-fimovie, but his appetite for the new and anomalous truly spanned a universe, or at least several galaxies, of sounds.

Much confusion has surrounded the dating of Sun Ra’s various recordings. When the Impulse label purchased a number of tapes from him in the 1970s, they released old and new works side by side with little attention to chronology. And Sun Ra himself was equally lax: he would often sell his self-financed records (sometimes produced in quantities of less than one hundred copies) at concert intermissions, during which confused fans could browse through boxes of unmarked, unlabeled LPs. But the incompleteness of our discographical information cannot hide the fact that Sun Ra had a knack for being years ahead of the jazz world. The free jazz explorations of
Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy,
the world music and electronics of
Supersonic Jazz
were pioneering efforts for their time. Sun Ra’s anticipation of later trends seems especially prescient when one compares his deconstructive sound collages from the 1950s and 1960s with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and other Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) efforts from the 1960s and 1970s. But by the 1970s, Sun Ra was already looking ahead again, anticipating the return to jazz roots of the 1980s and 1990s with sweeping excursions that spanned the whole history of the music.

Like Ellington, Sun Ra rarely featured his own piano work—although his few solo recordings, especially the magnificent
Monorails and Satellites
session from 1966, showed that he needed no sidemen to weave his richly textured musical tapestries. And though the Arkestra lacked the depth and cohesion of musicianship that characterized a Basie or Ellington, a Herman or Kenton, the band always boasted an inner circle of topflight players. Especially in tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, Sun Ra could draw on a rugged world-class soloist—one who anticipated and, in time, would influence John Coltrane. Gilmore’s versatility was well suited for the Arkestra: he could contribute heated hard-bop solos or use the tenor to articulate piercing screams, guttural barks, and mournful cries. His affiliation with Sun Ra spanned some forty years, and he maintained his allegiance to the band even after Sun Ra’s death in 1993.

Count Basie’s post-1951 work—the New Testament bands, as many have called them—stands as almost the antithesis of Sun Ra and Stan Kenton’s experimentalism and pluralistic tendencies. Although Basie stocked his bands of this period with outstanding young talent versed in the bebop idiom, the ethos of this latter-day unit shared many similarities with his various Kansas City and Swing Era ensembles. Basie, old or new, would swing his band to perfection—achieving the comfortable sense of forward motion that jazz musicians describe as “in the pocket.” Basie’s unsurpassed instinct for the right tempo was never more inspired than on his hit recording of “Li’l Darlin’.” Rather than playing this piece at the medium tempo that composer Neal Hefti envisioned, Basie slowed it down to a pace only slightly faster than a ballad but somehow maintaining the finger-snapping momentum of a groove tune. The result was magical.