Last of a Breed
BY FRANCIS DAVIS
WOODY HERMAN BEGAN his career as a big-band leader opposite the Count Basie Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom, in Brooklyn, on November 3, 1936. He was only twenty-three, but he had already been in show business for fifteen years, having started off as a tap dancer in his native Milwaukee while still in grade school. A half century later, at an age when most of his contemporaries are enjoying contented semi-retirement or resting in peace, the old vaudevillian is still barnstorming with his Thundering Herd, still crisscrossing the map six months out of every twelve for one-nighters at jazz festivals and stare fairs, swank nightclubs and boondock colleges. During the rest of the year he is usually in New York or Los Angeles, leading small groups composed of alumni from his big bands, and playing his three instruments—clarinet and alto and soprano saxophone. In effect he is working for the government now, paying off back taxes he owes as a result of a former business manager‘s double dealings in the 1960s. But chances are that he would still hit the road even if he didn‘t have to, because he has been there so long it must seem like home.
In 1981 he opened his own nightclub in the New Orleans Hyatt Regency Hotel, intending to establish a residence for himself and his men. A year later, when the club folded and he became a widower after forty-six years of marriage, he was on the move again, and he hasn’t slowed down since. “I don‘t care what anybody says about the hardships of the road,“ he told me when I interviewed him in 1983. “As long as you‘re on the road, you have musical freedom. If you stay put long enough, you’re going to wind up playing music somebody else wants you to play. And I‘m too old and stubborn for that.“
As Herman‘s golden anniversary as a bandleader approaches, plans are under way for a gala concert this summer at the Hollywood Bowl. It is to include a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, the showpiece for jazz orchestra whose premiere the Herman Herd gave at Carnegie Hall in 1946. If all goes according to plan, the clarinetist Richard Stolzman and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis will perform the demanding parts originally written for Herman and for Pete Candoli. There will be other honorary concerts and new works commissioned for Herman. He figures to be the subject of adulation all year long, and it is difficult to think of anyone in jazz more deserving of it.
IT IS ALSO DIFFICULT to explain to an audience unfamiliar with jazz exactly why Herman merits such adulation. What songs he has written and what instruments he plays are not the pertinent questions. Unlike Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, Herman was never a virtuoso soloist, though {at least until embouchure problems caused by advancing age reduced his sonority to a shriek) he was a decent enough clarinetist and a better than decent alto and soprano saxophonist in a passionflower style reminiscent of Johnny Hodges. His singing, however endearing some of us might find it, is what is called an acquired taste. Herman is not a composer; the orchestra is not a canvas for him, the way it was for Duke Ellington. But a case can be made for him as a big-band auteur who elicits a trademark sound from countless different arrangers (much as Count Basie and Stan Kenton did).
Herman’s genius lies elsewhere, and it is not easy to name. In interviews Herman frequently likens himself to a coach—a John Wooden or an Adolph Rupp turning out an unbroken succession of winning teams. It is a fitting comparison, because all of Herman’s bands have been well drilled in the fundamentals and his best ensembles have been of championship caliber. But following the analogy through leads to the conclusion that the Herd has suffered a losing record these past few years, which brings up the question of whether the coach has lost his touch. It isn’t as though Herman has failed to keep up with the times. No bandleader of his generation has been more receptive to moderate change, no long-established band (with the possible exception of the curiously underrated Lionel Hampton Orchestra) quicker than the Herd to absorb elements of hard bop, cool, and post-John Coltrane modality. Herman even survived a prolonged dalliance with fusion in the 1970s (unlike Maynard Ferguson, who never recovered once smitten). He takes pride in noting that the men now in his band, most of them recent graduates of college music programs, are approximately the same age as the men in his first outfit. “The younger musicians today are so much better equipped than when we were starting out, it isn’t even funny,“ he told me. “We had to learn from each other.“
A more detached observer might note that while it is true that the new recruits are better educated in music than their predecessors, they are green by comparison in ways that count more. A studied facility in running chord changes is quite different from the ability to tell a meaningful story in a few choruses, and storytellers have been in short supply in recent editions of the Herd. The famous saxophone section that once sheltered Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, and Serge Chaloff is no longer an incubator for star soloists. The new arrangements tend toward the formulaic, and the old favorites are tossed off in a perfunctory manner. “That’s the way it was,” Herman will sometimes say after the band honors a request for “Caldonia,” “Woodchopper’s Ball,” “Four Brothers,” or “Early Autumn.” And you find yourself thinking, No, it must have been better than that.
Still, it is a pleasure to watch Herman in action. Despite the steady transfusion of new blood, it is clear that whatever vitality there is in the ranks emanates from the leader, who will turn seventy-three this May. Keeping a big band afloat for fifty years is a remarkable achievement, to be sure. But what is even more remarkable is that Herman has done it on his own terms—the Herd has always been primarily a jazz band, not a dance band, and its leader has never had much patience with nostalgia. In recent years Herman has come to be his band’s patron as well as its conductor. It is obvious that he treasures the subtle section work of a big band as much as anyone in the audience, if not more. That’s why it is so easy for his fans to identify with him.
THE CAPRICIOUSNESS OF American record companies is a recurring lament in jazz criticism, and it is necessary to raise it one more time in connection with Woody Herman. Many of his finest recordings are currently out of print in the United States, although some are obtainable from Europe and others will probably be reissued this year in order to capitalize on Herman’s anniversary.
Still available domestically is The Best of Woody Herman (MCA 2-4077), a tworecord compilation of the work of Herman’s first band, a rough-and-tumble quasi-Dixieland outfit that was dubbed The Band That Plays the Blues and was a cooperative venture among Herman and four other members of the Isham Jones Orchestra. Although this set is valuable for including the original versions of “Woodchopper’s Ball“ and “Blue Flame” (Herman’s signature theme), it contains far too many period items, such as “Who Dat Up Dere?” and “Big-Wig in the Wigwam.“
The Herman bands that set the tone for all others to follow were those he led from 1945 to 1949—the First and Second Herds, as they were called. The Second Herd also came to be remembered as the Four Brothers band, in recognition of one of its hit recordings, an exhilarating flag-waver that showcased the blithe voicings of the unique saxophone section, which included three Lester Young—inspired tenors and a baritone, instead of the standard two altos, two tenors, and baritone. These bands sponsored a number of impetuous young soloists: the saxophonists Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, Serge Chaloff, Flip Phillips, and John LaPorta; the trumpeters Sonny Berman, Red Rodney, Shorty Rogers, and Pete and Conte Candoli; and the trombonist Bill Harris.
Some of these players were early masters of bebop phraseology; others went on to play seminal roles in the formulation of West Coast cool. At various times the crack rhythm section included the pianists Ralph Burns and Jimmy Rowles, the vibraphonists Red Norvo, Margie Hyams, and Milt Jackson, the guitarists Billy Bauer and Chuck Wayne, the bassists Chubby Jackson and Oscar Pettiford, and the drummers Dave Tough and Don Lamond. The fertile arrangers were Neal Hefti, Rogers, and Burns; Burns’s four-part “Summer Sequence” was arguably more successful than Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto in combining classical tonalities and jazz rubato. “SummerSequence,” “Four Brothers,” and such other landmarks of the period as “Apple Honey,” “Northwest Passage,” “The Good Earth,” “Bijou,” “Wild Root,” “Everywhere,” “Keen and Peachy,” and “I’ve Got News for You” (with its orchestrated Charlie Parker riffs) were included in The Thundering Herds, a three-record box set that belongs in every jazz library but has long been unavailable domestically. It was recently reissued in France, however, as CBS 66378, and may be ordered from North Country Distributors, Redwood, New York 13679-9612. The Three Herds (Columbia Special Products JCL-592) and Woody Herman’s Greatest Hits (Columbia PC-9291E) are more readily obtainable single albums containing some of the same material, though the latter, foolishly rechanneled for stereo, should be avoided.
The Herman Orchestra of the mid1950s, which was admirable for its ensemble polish and its fine book of arrangements, recorded a number of albums for Capitol, all long our of print domestically, although last year French EMI issued a facsimile edition of Road Band (Pathé Marconi 1565511), with Burns’s lovely Ellington evocation “I Remember Duke” and a vigorous reading of Horace Silver’s “Opus De-Funk.“ It is available from Roundup Records, Box 154, North Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140.
Big bands were supposed to be inimical to sanctified hard bop, but the juggernaut that Herman led in the early 1960s, with Sal Nistico blowing up a storm in the tenor section, successfully transformed such classics of bebop as Silver’s “Sister Sadie” and Charles Mingus’s “Better Git It in Your Soul.” In retrospect this was one of Herman’s best bands, but unfortunately none of its albums are currently available. On Giant Steps (Fantasy F-9432), recorded in 1972, the Herd struggles manfully with material by Coltrane, Chick Corea, and Leon Russell. The best Herman bigband record of the present decade is Live at the Concord Jazz Festival 1981 (Concord Jazz CJ-191), with cameos by the veteran tenor saxophonists Getz and Al Cohn. But the choice item in Herman’s recent discography is Four Others (Concord Jazz CJ-180), a relaxed small-group session reuniting him with Herd tenor alumni Cohn, Phillips, Nistico, and Bill Perkins. Now that Ellington, Basie, and Stan Kenton are gone, Herman is the last of an extraordinary breed. The records give a sense of his amazing longevity and of his steadfast commitment to jazz over the decades. They show him at his best. □
