Tony: Winter of a Kentonite

Last night Tony Campise, who played with the band Monday night on wobbly legs, fell in his Corpus Christi hotel room soon after checking in. He never made it to the stage of the Texas Jazz Festival, where he was booked for a couple nights he had stretched to a 4-day hotel stay.

There was certainly nothing wrong with his playing Monday at Ruta Maya. But he was a little more edgy than usual, even accusing me of misrepresenting the hours of the gig. (He subsequently looked in his book and cleared me of all charges.) But, he had to be helped onto the stage and he was having an intestinal struggle.

Tony and I might go back further, I suspect, than anyone in this town. The Kenton band played in Santa Cruz in 1974, when Tony was the alto player and leader of the saxophones. My college band, the Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble, opened the show, and I was lucky enough to hang with some of the guys. I subsequently joined the band, but just after Tony left.

Since I moved to Austin I’ve played with Tony many times, not enough to get alienated by some of Tony’s quirky habits, nor he with mine. He was the first guy I called when I was setting up the recent demo session. I knew he’d cost more than any of the other guys, but I also knew he was worth it. Tony was on his very best behavior at the session, playing a couple torrid solos and helping the band through some rough spots.

I always try to mix generations, because the best results happen musically when the energy of youthful enthusiasm is tempered by the example of experience. That day, Tony was the éminence grise to all of us, and particularly to a young trombonist originally from Houston called Ulrican Williams, who shared with me a story of the day that Tony spoke to the kids at his middle school. That long-ago day Tony filled Ulrican with something that he’s been chasing ever since, culminating with him playing on the same recording as Tony.

I feel like the same thing happened to me, 35 years before, in Santa Cruz.

At 4 this morning it was determined that the fall had caused fluid to fill Tony’s brain which would need surgery to relieve. It’s now 7 pm as I write this, and we haven’t word of Tony regaining consciousness yet.

We have another gig at Ruta Maya Monday, one for which I’ll need to hire a tenor player.

Soon: Appearing in Public!

Slim is out of the country, and in the vacuum steps Austin’s Boogie Big Band, a phrase I thought up while designing this flyer.

I miss InDesign and the process of making stuff up as I work out a design. I used to own a typesetting service where ad guys in nice suits would come in and pay extra for me to do their rewrites. When “desktop publishing” was ushered in and they all went out and got Macs, well, they found out in a hurry why I got paid what I got paid. I do miss it though, like I miss the molar I had yanked 10 years ago, the one I still roll my tongue over. The fonts are Futura extrabold condensed and the Century Schoolbook family.

Anyway, this is a coming-out party of sorts, and we owe it to Slim, who has developed swing night at the Ruta Maya World Headquarters, to the extent that both the Lindy Project and Four on the Floor come out and teach swing dance lessons before the band comes out.

Marilyn will sing a couple tunes (most likely the ones we recorded), Jimmy will do a couple, but my goal is to make the band roar, preferably with about half new material. I have maybe 80 charts we haven’t played yet, but if the recording session is any indication they’ll work just fine.

Some consultation with the dance instructors about the tempi they are teaching might be useful and instructive. Jan brought up the importance of adding a Latin number or two for the sake of variety.

So, to summarize: The most important foot we need to put forward is that we will NOT be a cult of personality, that the music will, unadorned, speak for itself, that the band will play to its strengths, that no problems arise like the restaurants that Gordon Ramsey saves on BBC from their own bizarre instincts to compete for the longest, most complex menu. Useful alliances with the swing dance community must be made.

So far, saxes are me, Tony Bray for the second of the Mondays, Kevin Flatt and Rich Haering on trumpets, Ulrican on trombone, unknown on the rhythm section as Jimmy’s setting that end of the band up. So the band’s sketchy, but there are enough good paying gigs that I don’t feel bad about asking anyone.

In the Can

I’ve had a week plus to consider the consequences of the recording. Here are my thoughts:

The studio, and the engineer who runs it, are every bit as tip-top as Eddie King, who owned and operated the studio where we recorded nearly thirty years ago. It’s a lot easier to handle the vagaries of recording a big band than Eddie behind the wheel of his Neve 3 board, going directly into two channels. The stuff we recorded last week is still in multi-track format, with virtually unlimited tracks we can add or use for experimenting with or clam fixing.

Nonetheless, Mike Hersh has a real respect for the music which shows in just how close the tracks sound now to a finished project. The tendency is to improve those tracks to perfection, which I am not interested in because every iteration seems to lose something, not in sonic quality but in feel. Mike worked great with Jimmy Shortell, who knows how to push the guys by reading the score and gently nudging them toward product.

No complaints about the band I put together. It was a real thrill having Butch (Basie's drummer for many years) and Tony Campise (who left Stan Kenton pretty much the day I joined back in 1975) there. Paul Baker and Tony Bray rounded out the saxes with me. The youth movement was the brass section with Kevin Flatt and Pete Clagett (we were on QE2 together) on trumpets and Ulrican Williams on the slide trambone. It was a bit of a youthful rhythm section too, with Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Angelo Lembisis on piano, Kris Afflerbach on bass, and Jimmy on drums. Marilyn Rucker was the canary.




The main thing a brought away from this session, though was that, despite the fact that I had a coronary and I have an ICD watching over me, I can still write all the charts, select the tunes from our massive and growing repertoire, select from among the many studios in town one that would be most big-band friendly. I selected and hired the personnel at my cost, while using the perfect combination of veterans and young studs.

Many thanks to Noreen and Larry for providing lunch.

In fine and one half hours we recorded 10 tracks, all of which we were sightreading.

Next step the clam fixes, the final mix, and we’ve doubled the size of our nearly 30-year old demo.

Thank you, Eddie King!

From Rebirth of a band

Back in the good old days, just before Reagan got elected, I did something that should have qualified me for the crazy house.

I was living in Santa Monica, working as a music copyist and orchestrator for a small music production company. I decided to risk what was a tremendous amount of money for me at the time, recording a band that had played exactly one gig--and a greensheet one at that (charity gigs that the union pays for, so called because you signed a green sheet of paper and waited three to six weeks for your money).

I had written, and copied by hand, just a handful of reduced big band charts for ten pieces. For no good reason I decided to call it the New Flamingo Swing Orchestra. Bob Ontiveros, a trumpet player in this enterprise, worked at Valle Music Papers in North Hollywood, came up with some folders someone had ordered and gold stamped with a name, but never picked up. Bob wiped the letters off so you could almost not see them, then applied "New Flamingo Swing Orchestra" in gold leaf over the wiped out lettering of the act who ordered them.

That was our first serious identity thing. Then I had Arthur Mortimer, at the time Lynn Carey’s husband, design us a logo. Somewhere in this process the band got booked at the Playboy Club in Century City. As a matter of fact, this picture was taken by a Playboy photographer on the bluff in Santa Monica.

From Rebirth of a band

We needed a demo, because we were doing things backwards. I knew that the Playboy gig wouldn’t last. Every week felt like our last, although we were getting pretty good crowds.

So I went to see Eddie King at Kingsound Studio in North Hollywood with a proposal. I wanted him to mix a demo on the fly down to 2 tracks. The reasoning was that by doing the recording this way we wouldn’t lose anything when we mixed it transferred it to cassettes (!), and we’d keep the cost of the recording down by having no post-production mixing or mastering. Eddie was more than willing to try, and more importantly, he had the musical chops to pull it off.

If memory serves, in 4 hours we recorded 12 tunes, some short, but 8 full-length big band charts. And the band was sightreading! We’d do a runthrough of a chart and do one or two takes, then move on.

You couldn’t do this with ordinary musicians or with an ordinary engineer.

Kudos, then to Berke McKelvey, Harvey Cohen (R.I.P.), and Charles Oreña (and me) on saxes, Bill Armstrong and Bobby Ontiveros on trumpet, the peerless Steve Johnson on trombone, Dominic Genova on Bass, Milton Nelson on piano, and Paul Yonemura on drums. You guys rose to the occasion.

And Eddie King deserves all the credit for manning his Neve 3 board. (My stepson works for Rupert Neve!) When the date was over, you wiped your brow and went on to a lot of other things, but I don’t know if I ever gave you what was due.

Here’s Eddie today:




And here’s the latest genius to record us, Mike Hersch, tomorrow, at Promiseland Studios:

From Rebirth of a band

The Big Recording Rolls Near

As I write this we are just 3 days away from the long-anticipated recording of the Original Recipe Big Band. Come Friday morning we’ll convene at 10 in the morning at Promiseland Studios on the other side of the Meuller development, formerly the Meuller Airport, where I used to fly in to visit Jan when I lived in Los Angeles (actually Costa Mesa). That was some 15 years ago, when I was just getting back into playing. Sister Noreen had set me up with ExpoTech, running their in-house printing operation. ExpoTech got eated by GES, and I went over to them. It was an easy job for me, and I managed to convonce the bosses to let me come in at 6 in the morning and quit at 2:30. Jimmy was in Japan, where Carol was serving her country. Cindy was at her house behind El Modena High School in Orange, working for the Post Office and getting interested in union matters.

Now all three (where are you Marcia?) are in Texas, and all of us will, I think, be at Promiseland for the session. Jimmy of course will be participating, and I guess Noreen will participate too as caterer, or crew services or whatever the nearby film industry calls it. Cindy will be in a comfortable chair out of the drafts from Promiseland’s mammoth air conditioner.

This will be a couple culminations for us all. For me it’s laying my dream on the line, of using a smaller big band for an all-purpose band, one that can do the swing, the funk and the Motown and the rock that all the kids seem to like so much. For too long we were held back by our demo, which is great but has no vocals. In 1980, when we recorded . . . OH SHIT, was it really 29 years ago? . . . you could just be a band, with a demo of instrumentals, without vocals. I’ll have several good vocals ready for Friday, and that should put an end to that as an objection.

For my sisters and my brother, it’s about my dad’s charts, which we’re playing three of. I’m fine with that too, although it was like turning a ship around in a narrow channel to change the emphasis of the session’s intent for me. Now I see that these goals are not at all contradictory. So I have three of my dad’s charts which I have prepared, or actually two, and one of his songs which I wrote a chart for myself.

I Remember Basie is an instrumental chart that’s been following me around all my life. Wherever I go there seem to be big bands which pull it out when they here I’ll be at a rehearsal. Not that that’s a bad thing, understand. It’s one of those charts that plays itself. A blues that starts with a Basie piano lick, followed by an easy blues line harmonized when it reappears a second time, then opens to a trumpet solo. The sax soli follows, and it’s one f those solis that is just so well written that you can’t shake it from your head, especially if, like me, you’ve played it a couple hundred times. A tenor chorus follows, and I added (we’ll try it and see how it goes) a 12 bar drum chorus because Jimmy plays in 12 bar phrases. The other soloists are Angelo Lembisis on piano, briefly, Pete Clagett on trumpet, and Tony Campise on tenor. It’s nice to have guys who bring as much to the table as these soloists. I know that I won’t have to tell Jimmy, Angelo, Pete or Tony–especially Tony–what to play because they know what to play better than anybody, yours truly included. I did this adaptation of my dad’s big band chart, which I think he wrote back when we were still living in Massachusetts, before he went to work for Westlake College in California. It was one of the four charts he used to start Dick Fenno Publications in our garage at 1261 S. Hickory St., in Santa Ana.


My dad’s other chart is based on another of the Dick Fenno Publications original four, No Spring This Year. It’s a ballad that opens with a brief trombone solo. Then the theme is stated by me on alto saxophone. I’ve had a long history of playing this one too. The trumpets play low register bridge, then a quick and loud key change. The theme is restated in the new key by the first trumpet, then the original key returns and with it the alto and the melody. Trombone duties will fall to Ulrican Williams, a very soulful Houston native, and Kevin Flatt will be playing lead trumpet, who’s from Richardson, up by Dallas. Trombone duties will fall to Ulrican Williams, a very soulful Houston native. Kevin Flatt will be playing lead trumpet, who’s from Richardson, up by Dallas. Both these musicians play in the ORB, the smaller, more generalized party band. I adapted this chart from my dad’s original score. It too seems to have been written in Massachusetts, probably for one of the territory bands my dad wrote for there.

The third of my dad’s charts is really my chart–an arrangement of my dad’s song–Pollyanna. It’s the only one that will have a vocal, by Jimmy. I had to write the chart from my dad’s lead sheet. The song is not without its sentimental aspects, because, as discussed elsewhere in this blog (look under the keyword Pollyanna). The song has a nice verse, and a long-form chorus. Tenor solo by Campise ought to be very special. Tony is a real emotional player, and he’s a guy who knows how to play off a back story.



We’ll be recording four short snippets of material which will prove our versatility.

They are Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’, based on the Ray Charles/Count Basie record–a soulful waltz.

Still Diggin’ on James Brown, a funk tune, I’m thinking Jimmy and Ulrican on vocals.

You’ll Never Find, one of those prehistoric disco records, with Jimmy on vocals.

Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You, a pop tune that I’d like Jimmy to split with Marilyn or Jennifer.

Then the real fun starts:

Marilyn Rucker will do two vocals:

Pick Yourself Up, based on an Ella Fitzgerald/Nelson Riddle collaboration, with brief solos for Campise and Clagett, and I’ve Heard That Song Before, based on the Harry James/Helen Forrest record.

Jimmy will be relieved at the drums by Butch Miles, the legendary long-term drummer with the Count Basie band, for All Right, OK, You Win, based on the record by Joe Williams and Count Basie.

So the charts are all set, and I’ll drag the book along, so we can solve any problems as they arise with other material. I just finished chart #226, so there’s plenty of emergency material to choose from.

Ask me how it went on Saturday.

Thanks to Mike Hersch, fellow California ex-pat, for all his help getting this thing off the ground.

Also to Angelo Lembisis on piano, Kris Afflerbaugh on bass, Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Tony Bray on tenor, Paul Baker on bari, and Michael Severino who's tuning the piano. I couldn't have done this without Jan.

I Remember Basie: an Appreciation

From Pollyanna jpegs

The other day I was thinking about Count Basie. Nothing unusual there. When other people whistle tunes–real tunes that can be identified–I’ll bet not many of them can do entire arrangements by the Count Basie Orchestra. But here in my head, Basie plays non-stop.

Maybe some explaining is in order. A few intrepid souls who are not members of my family may have seen pictures of my father and mother getting married. My favorite shot is the one where my dad is happily holding a crystal serving plate of donuts, looking pleased beyond belief in his rented white dinner jacket. The picture–my mother is in the frame too–was taken on April 29, 1950, at my mother’s parents’ house in the center of Fitchburg, Mass., before my grandfather bought an old farmhouse on the outskirts of town. My maternal grandmother, who supplied the donuts and was a bit of a wag, observed when I was born on January 29, 1951, that my gestational period was “nine months and twenty minutes.”

But, getting back to Basie, when the last donut was eaten my mother and father somehow were conveyed (my mother didn’t drive until 1960 and my father stopped driving when he had a rear-ender in 1948) to a Boston hotel, where, if one would infer and amplify on my grandmother’s sideways look of the world, my gestational clock started ticking. That night–for the wedding had taken place in the afternoon–my parents rose from their hotel room, impossibly young at 23 and 19, and took a cab to a night club (look it up in Wikipedia if you are unfamiliar with the term) called Storyville, and heard Count Basie’s band featuring Joe Williams.

My mother told me a lot of embarrassing stories about me and my sister, who was born as soon after me as she could be in the rich Irish Catholic tradition into which she–my mother–married, and one of the thing she tossed out once was that most of my feeding took place while she–my mother–was listening to Joe Williams and Count Basie.

It’s 1961. My dad is an arranger, a part time fill-in drummer at Disneyland, a repeated bandleader trying every desperate measure at his disposal to make the big bands come back. We live in Santa Ana, where thousands of acres of orange groves are being uprooted and replaced with tract housing. My dad converts the garage of our new tract home in the south side of Santa Ana into a teaching and writing studio. He borrows money from a family friend and sets up Dick Fenno Publications to tap into the uncertain waters of the stage band movement which is popping up in odd places like Texas and Lexington, Kentucky. Armed with little more than 4 charts he wrote when he was the arranging instructor at the doomed Westlake School of Modern American Music, a book with all the secondary schools in America and a two-sided flyer with the name BAND DIRECTOR printed as the addressee, my dad had the nerve to take the plunge with 5 kids aged between 10 and 2. One of the charts written at Westlake was called “I Remember Basie.” Above his desk at the garage studio and the incredible second story office which he rented when the charts started coming in from the printer were eight-by-ten glossies of Stan Kenton, Glenn Miller, and Count Basie. The orders come in for Dick Fenno Publications.

My dad plops me down in front of the Basie band at Disneyland (the original, in Anaheim) without comment on my birthday. Basie’s band is playing in Tommorowland, across from the GE house of the future or whatever the place was called. The band members are neatly dressed and wander around talking and smoking while Basie ascends to the piano with Sonny Paine, the drummer. Basie plays a gospel-based tremolo, then another, then 2 bars of eight note triplets. Somehow the band has miraculously gotten themselves onstage and picked up their horns, all within the span of this 10-second introduction–no longer than that. That’s when the band came in, Sonny Paine kicking them. Maybe you know the tune. Imagine the notes, based on the words of the song.

<I> <Can’t> <STOP> BREATHE <LOVING> <You>.

At the end of the third note of letter A, where the pause takes place between the words STOP and LOVING was the most exquisite space. I can still feel it, and when I play the chart now in my band it’s no less a thrill. Back then, when I’d been playing saxophone for six months, most of my practicing taking place in the family sedan, it was a revelation to understand that these guys were showing me that space is just as important as notes. The band was an extension of Basie, and the concept of space was central to his pianistic style. A strand of musical DNA got into my ear that night at Disneyland, sitting in front of the toughest lead alto player in the business, Marshal Royal, who put a hurtin’ on me. I remember the ride home, late at night for me, but feeling emotionally wrung out in a really positive way. Can you imagine a twelve-year-old seeing the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time, with Koufax, Drysdale, Gilliam, Roseboro, Wills? Well, that happened too, but it just didn’t throw the switch like the Basie band did for me.

I went to college a couple years after my dad died, I stuck around after I graduated from a very stuffy university music department, because the local junior college band needed a baritone player. My boyhood buddy Art Baron was actually playing trombone on Duke Ellington’s band, and so I knew that anything could happen. The Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble became notorious for going to jazz pow-wows and, rather than playing the ballistics most bands were playing at the time, digging into “Who’s Sorry Now?” at breakneck speed while exaggerating the dynamics. We left judge’s panels flat-footed and gasping. Thanks Leader Lile Crews, 1st Trumpet Billy Theurer, Bassist Steve Bennett, and most of all Altoist/Flutist Paul Contos . . .

One fateful night the Cabrillo band was to have opened the show at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium for the Stan Kenton band, which was on its usual endless string of one-nighters. When we got to the hall, we found the doors padlocked. A half hour before the show Stan pulled up on his bus and found our band and maybe 50 people who were milling about, wondering what would happen. (Remember now, any recovery of a contract requires the musicians show up at the gig, on time and ready to play.) Stan–in his big booming voice–asked how many people had paid to see the show. As I remember the scene, most of the milling crowd had. “Well, there’s just one thing we can do then. Let’s find out who has the key and open this place up.” Off he went with Jack, the road manager, to find a personage who had the authority and the key.

We opened for Stan Kenton that night. You don’t want to get in a hammer-clobbering contest with Stan’s band. Between the ten brass players and the 28-inch ride cymbal that Peter Erskine was playing, that strategy, especially in the boomy old Santa Cruz Civic, would have been pointless. So Lile took the opposite approach. We did a 40 minute set of straight ahead stuff, liberally leavened with Basie charts, including “Who’s Sorry Now?“. And we knocked the small but eager crowd and the Kenton band on their ears.

I could go on and on about Basie, about trips down to Disneyland from Santa Cruz because on summer nights you could hear 4 sets of the band for $12.50, about seeing Basie the night that Duke Ellington died, at the Paramount in Oakland, about the speculation when Marshal was relieved of his position in the center of the saxophone section, about how Basie returned to the piano chair in a motorized wheelchair, or how sometimes my dad’s classmate at Schillinger House, Nat Pierce, would fill in for him on piano. I’ve seen the band hundreds of times, and it never ceased to gas me!

Now that I’m trying to get this band reanimated, I’m happy to report that we’ll be recording new demo tunes at Promiseland Church on August 21, 2009. Playing first tenor saxophone will be Tony Campise, who played alto with Stan’s band that fateful night in Santa Cruz. The other saxes are me on alto, Tony Bray on the other tenor, and Paul Baker on baritone. Trumpets look like they’ll be Kevin Flatt and Pete Claggett. Ulrican Williams will be on trombone. Piano is a little up in the air, Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Kris Afflerbach on bass, my brother Jimmy on drums of course. Jimmy will supply male vocals and Marilyn will do the part of the canary, with Jennifer Zaveleta.

Especially for this event, Butch Miles will sit in on a takedown I cooked up on a Joe Williams/Count Basie collaboration called “All Right, OK, You Win.” Here’s a very young Butch Miles with the Basie band and Joe Williams doing the chart I took down, one of the recordings we’ll do in the 21st.


Yeah, I remember Basie. As luck would have it, I played with Kenton, the Glenn Miller band and the Modernaires on various bus rides across this and other continents. When I married my ex-wife, her father set the entertainment budget at whatever it takes, so we hired the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut, a Los Angeles-based big band that plays from the Basie book.

I feel lucky that I played with two of the three photos in my dad’s studio.

But no band’s sound floats my boat, or has influenced me more than Basie. That DNA that got into my system all these years ago keeps spinning.

Rediscovering a Genuine Jazz Genius

Lately I’ve been in a funk--the white meaning of funk, if you have to choose. Things are not going so well for me. The folks who used to call me for gigs aren’t doing it any more. (To be fair, our band is one of the few in town that seems to be working, 3-4 times a month.) I was fragging my sorry ass around the house tonight as Jan packs to go to Milwaukee for a week. I’ll be alone, responsible for the pills that keep me going but deprive me of adrenaline, the real enemy of someone like me with heart disease. By the time she gets back I’ll have played a couple gigs and managed to talk to a few people about a business idea I have. In between, I’ll nap and think increasingly about the friends that have been claimed by the Grim Reaper.

From Wedding: Austin Club 7/18/09

But, for better or worse, I am a jazz musician. The first music I heard coming into this world was Count Basie, Joe Williams, Bird, Duke, Lester Young. Like a baseball player, a jazz musician starts young and stretches it as far as she or he can. When it’s done, it’s done. But there are ways of staying in the game--either game, baseball or jazz--like coaching, like playing in increasingly compromised (“square”) bands. Generally lowering the expectations accompanies the onset of middle age, and that’s more of a burden for me than driving a cab in New York City was in 1977. At least then I could park in front of Stryker’s and drive friends downtown after their gigs ended.

I never quite made it to the bigs, what baseball players call the Big Show. I played on road bands at the very end of road bands, when the busses were old and the hops between gigs were long, when the quality of the bands had slipped to the point that the professional touring bands that I played in were dwarfed in power and swing by the college band I was in (Cabrillo College, in Aptos, California) and certainly by the LA Jazz Workshop band that I played in when I moved to Los Angeles in 1979--a crucible of musicians who have since made first-rate careers for themselves. After a series of ignominious bus rides, I moved to New York and drove a cab, then to Los Angeles and, after starting a family, felt the need to withdraw from music altogether. I layed out for nearly ten years and made a career in publications work. In the early nineties, as my marriage started to fall apart, I was drawn back to making music. I had a lot of good friends who helped me get back in circulation, first in rehearsal bands, then working dance bands, then I was drawn like a moth to Jan in Austin. I wanted my kids to know that I was the guy who owned the saxophones in the closet, and I think I was successful to a great degree.

As time passed I explored things as a resident of Austin, not Orange County. I found myself playing a lot of unrelated music, the common denominator being the preponderance of the blues: R&B, Tejano, show bands, pit bands, big bands that swung to a lesser or greater extent. When a certain local bandleader with an overactive thyroid canned me, he left me with a concept that could be rendered into this equation:

R&B + Sinatra + Classic Rock (a few) + Tower of Power + charts for all the parts = wedding band

From Wedding: Austin Club 7/18/09

And so Original Recipe was born. See, this bandleader, who was bald, by the way, had no charts. So everyone who came on board had to memorize the parts, which no one knew. It may sound simple, but it has something of a dialog between Chico Mark and Dr. Hackenbush about it. I READ trivial music and MEMORIZE what I deem to be significant and challenging.

Five years ago I made a cold call to Princess Cruises to see if they needed a guy like me. They did, and I worked for them, playing in the show bands at sea. I left the Original Recipe Band to brother Jimmy when I went to sea. But even when I was in the Baltic for the summer I still wrote charts. The Original Recipe BIG Band is my project now. I’m writing furiously to make a deadline for a demo recording.

From Wedding: Austin Club 7/18/09

The ORB did a wedding last Saturday, which, while not perfect, was pretty damned good, and probably as good an effort as can be expected outside a major metropolitan area like New York or LA. Brendan came down and played some relief drums so Jimmy could line up with the canaries, and I am well and pleased with the kick-ass way he’s drumming.

At every one of these signposts, I think I lost something–the jazz aesthetic. Tonight I reconnected with some of that through the services of the iTunes music store. I had a phrase rolling around in my head from an album by the pre-Rassan Roland Kirk. I “went” to the music store and there was the album containing the tune containing the phrase. It was offered for sale for less than $7. I bought it. As I listened to this Roland Kirk album I hadn’t heard since college, I felt myself relax and bathed in the feelings of sometime in the early seventies. I remembered how it felt be wanted by Selective Service. I felt like I was going to Keystone to hear Kirk, or the Berkeley Civic Auditorium to hear Chick Corea or Gil Scott-Heron.

Really. Music is some powerful ju-ju. Perhaps musicians ought not be trusted with the emotional language that it carries. I feel renewed now, and I am realizing that many of the qualities I like about Roland Kirk are in Tony Campise–specifically their abilities to be able to execute whatever their imaginations dish up from the subconscious. I need to talk to Tony about that. Gotta do some more hanging out with him.

Next time I get in the dumps I’ll know to look at Roland Kirk, who overcame the damnedest obstacles imaginable.

Pollyanna

From Pollyanna jpegs

Of all the motivating things that got me to insist that this band be put back together–and, for that matter, for it to be founded originally back in Los Angeles nearly thirty (THIRTY!) years ago–none is more contradictory than one song that my father wrote back in 1964, Pollyanna. But I wonder how much internal pressure I’ve had and how much is coming from my siblings.

From Pollyanna jpegs

We were living in little more than a shack on the beach in Fairfield, Connecticut while my dad was setting up a partnership called Heritage Square Music Publications with John Bunch (not John Bunch the piano player, John Bunch the adman and part-time drummer).

This much we all agree on. I remember the winter on Lalley Blvd., between Edwards St. and Fairfield Beach Rd. It was a house that should not have been standing, much less occupied in the winter by a family of five children, two adults, and a long-haired dachshund. All around us were the prosperous and well-heeled, some of whom were classmates at Tomlinson Junior High school where my sister Noreen and I were students. We were looked down upon for having a dad in the music business, and for being a big family in a drafty sea cottage. We had our share of conflagrations too. The heater in the house caught fire one cold night and we were saved by the quick response of the Fairfield Fire Department.

The accepted story was that, lacking the means to buy my mother an anniversary gift, my father decided to write a song to the innocence and completeness of his love with a woman, that being my mother.

I remember a few things about this song, because I was working at my father’s office (which spectacularly burned to the ground, along with the entire inventory of Heritage Square Music Publications). I remember my dad telling Lou Fratturo, one of his friends and an amazing alto saxophone player, that he’d written a song with a long form verse and chorus, just like all the songs in the thirties were written. I remember him playing it in manuscript for Lou, who responded favorably.

My dad was trained as an engineer, so his gateway to musical architecture was not emotional. He attended Shillinger House, where Joseph Schillinger’s method of musical composition was taught students to analyze musical works on graph paper.

Dad wrote amazing stuff, and like all arrangers he had a bag of tricks he drew from when he was working.

When I first heard the song that was to become Pollyanna I heard a lot of Duke Ellington influence. Steal from the best, I say. I was 13 at the time, so picking out an Ellington influence may have been calculated wishful thinking on my part or perhaps something my father said that my young precocious ears heard. More than likely, a lucky guess.

I have my doubts about the family legend that this song was a gift of tender affection from my father to my mother, because there was so little affection going around at that time. When I think back to that time I remember a lot of heated arguments, most of them out of the range of the younger children. This could explain why Noreen and I remember this period a good deal differently than our siblings. The song could have been presented as a truce. I don’t know where my mother would have heard it, because we didn’t have a piano at the house and I don’t remember her ever coming to the office. A demo of the song was recorded, just to cloud things up a little bit, by a combo led by John Bunch, the piano player, at the studio in BBDO, the ad firm, where John Bunch, my father’s partner, worked. I don’t know if any of these recordings survived. There were three other tunes on the record with incredible contributions from Toots Thielemans on harmonica and whistling along with his guitar, and Bob Wilbur on soprano saxophone.

My father died in 1967. He was 40 years old.

When my band had a steady gig at the Playboy Club in Los Angeles in 1981 my mother came out to hear us. I had written a very basic chart of Pollyanna, and Laigh Langly sang it for her, but she seemed indifferent to it when we played it. Nevertheless, the myth has grown over the years, amplified in its telling over holiday tables and 4th of July picnics.

A lot of emotional weight has been loaded on me for years about Pollyanna. My sisters always ask about the song, even though I don’t think any of them has a recording of it, or even a lead sheet.

Well, I’ve had enough of this song. I’m going to record it, but then I’m through. I admire it as a work of music, in the abstracted, architectural style that my father favored before his death in 1967. I’m writing a chart right now which ought to, in the words of Slim Galliard, “nail it to the roof.” Jimmy will sing it, I’m thinking, and because this is the way of the world, we will never play this song again. Why? Because we only play what people want to hear, and that’s not on the event horizon for Pollyanna.

From Pollyanna jpegs

But I’ll get the job done. Being the dutiful oldest of his brood, I will do my father’s memory proud. There will be tightly voiced flutes in the verse, the horns will bounce off the melody, never overpowering the singer, then a lugubrious tenor solo (which I hope Tony Campise will play), then back to the bridge and out, with the singer hanging on a sharp eleven just before the final resolution in the coda.

None of the dark times on Lalley Blvd. need to be relived in the retelling of this song. It’s just a song, and if it’s something more for other people, well, I can’t help that. As for me, once I get it out of my “In” box I’ll be better off.

Here are the lyrics:

(Verse)

I’ve heard it said
That a man should love a woman.
Here’s what I heard
From a man who loved his woman:
He obviously adored her,
Why then should he be sad?
She smiled through the bad times,
Few were the good times
That she ever had.

(Chorus)

Smile all the while Pollyanna,
You know what tomorrow will bring.
Our dream of a trip to Vienna
Is real, keeps you young, funny thing.

You walk to the end of a rainbow,
And laugh when you find nothing there.
In spring, when the cold winter winds blow,
Your voice is the sound of a prayer.

I wish old dame misfortune
Would for once turn her head and you’d be
A queen high in a throne dear,
And your most loyal knight would be me.

Oh, don’t ever change pretty pug nose.
You’re warm and you’re real, you’re alive.
As sure as the moon in the sky glows
Things have to look up, we’ll arrive.

And then, your special magic,
Showered on me every day,
Will shine like a light from our window at night.
“They’re in love,” all the world will say.

Words and music by Dick Fenno (ASCAP), copyright 1964 by Heritage Square Music Publishers.

Plugging Along Through a Very Hot Summer

It’s been a whirlwind month.

Five weeks ago, Jan and I have sailed on the beautiful Sapphire Princess, a very happy ship, from Vancouver to Whittier, Alaska and returned to Vancouver. We brought our folding bikes to throw off the shackles of ShoreEx and generally go our own way. That made a real difference in our enjoyment of Alaska. I did a small website here on the mechanics of bringing our bikes on board.

We are getting closer to having a recording made at Promise Land Church with the locals, especially the two Tonys.

We got back from Alaska just in time to do the first big band gig of the modern era, June 6, at the Becker Vineyards in Stonewall. The band played great! Saxes were RF, Tony Campise, Tony Bray, Chris Kapral; trumpets were Kevin Flatt and, in one of his last gigs in Texas, Pat Murray; Matt Walker played trombone; rhythm section was Angelo Lembisis, Ulrich Ellison, Kris Afflerbach, JF. Canary was Jennifer Zavaleta.

This gig is the reason I’ve abandoned plans to go to LA--that and the remoteness of it all. Schlepping all the stuff required 1600 miles is daunting. And now that I know we can get a fine local result, I’m going for it.



Here are ten--TEN--charts I’ve taken down since we got back here in June:

Skyliner (Charlie Barnet), All Right, OK, You Win Joe Williams/Basie), Chattanooga Choo Choo (GMO), Walkin’ My Baby Back Home (Billy May/Nat Cole), Still Diggin’ on James Brown (Tower), The Very Thought of You (Nelson Riddle/Ella), Stella By Starlight (Nelson Riddle), Cut the Cake (AWB), Corner Pocket (Basie), Save the Last Dance for Me (Michael Bublé).

Tune List for 6/6/09 Wedding Gig in Stonewall, TX

89        Just the Way You Are
50        Li'l Darlin        
100        The Way We Were
112        Little Brown Jug
113        Sophisticated Lady
        Jen 1        
        Jen 2        
139        Witchcraft        
27        April in Paris        
34        What's New        
4        Serenade In Blue
103        Moonlight Serenade
177        I Just Called to Say I Love You
199        "Godfather" Theme
108        String of Pearls
28        Take the "A" Train
32        Candy        
33        I Got It Bad        
80        Three Little Words
58        In The Mood        
83        Do the Hustle        
91        Can't Take My Eyes Off of You
205        Zoot Suit Riot        
187        Into the Mystic        
152        Shiny Stockings
123        Fly Me To The Moon
210        Car Wash        
111        Stompin' at the Savoy
176        Bye Bye Blackbird
204        Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody
185        Beauty & the Beast
92        Signed, Sealed & Delivered
        Jen 3        
42        Blue & Sentimental
29        Jumpin' at the Woodside
209        Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire
39        The Magic Trumpet
117        Mack the Knife        
208        Rock Lobster        
188        Domino        
105        Begin the Beguine
128        Jump Jive & Wail
        Jen 4        
90        Soul Bossa Nova
11        No Spring This Year
19        Cherokee        
40        Come Back to Sorrento
57        When Lights Are Low
106        Perdido        
107        Cheek to Cheek
142        Perfidia        
178        Brazil        
180        Day by Day        
201        In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
203        Harlem Nocturne

Newest of the new

#200: Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night in the Week

#201: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morining

#202: I’ve Got a Lot of Livin’ To Do

#203: Harlem Nocturne

#204: Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody

#205: Zoot Suit Riot

#206: That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas

#207: Peg

One tube of medicine = Mark VI alto?

I just bought a tube of medicine for a skin condition which would have cost me $659 if I weren’t covered on my wife’s insurance. With a coupon supplied by my doctor the net cost was zero. It was a manufacturer’s coupon covering up to $50 in copayment costs.

Just to gain a little perspective on this, my Selmer Mark VI, which was bought for me in 1967, retailed at the time for $630. It was my first exposure to the crazy world of music store prices, and we ended up paying half that. If I sold that horn now, it’d go somewhere between $4500 and $5000.

But still, buying a 100g tube of medicine for nearly the same price . . . this is crazy business. No wonder something’s got to change.

Curiouser and Curiouser

My brother had to drive pretty far out of town to patch things up with the owner of a venue where the full band’s been hired in June to play a wedding. Now there’s no trouble between us and the couple being married, nor with their respective families. This is the owner of the place summoning Jimmy and telling him that we are too much for his room, which is the size of a barn.

People in “The Business” ought to know better. This is a place where 4-piece Country bands play week in and week out, and the long-suffering owner just thought that we, who will consist of 12 players (11 musicians and a singer) for that particular wedding will be three times the volume of the average Country band. What he didn’t know is we will be ONE THIRD the volume of the 4-piece Country band, unless we choose to. We use a lot less amplification, but the Wire Choirs have made these drives necessary by making an arms race out of volume. My guess is that, when we play in his barn, there will be 400 combined years of working the musical vineyard up on the stage, and enough common sense to keep the volume down.

Jimmy patched things up with the owner and left him with assurances that we knew what we were doing.

Such are the things that musicians have to put up with, and no one seems ready to ask the real question . . .

What country?

Adding More to the Books

I am about to add my 200th chart to the library. When I get to #201 I think I’ll back down and concentrate on getting gigs and making a system of order within the folders. When I started hewing this out of the existing NFSO books, I put everything in a database on my Mac called Bento, so that I can make sorts, pull up all the waltzes (I could use another--my guess is the Ray Charles chart of Oh What a Beautiful Morning), so that I don’t have two charts with the same number, or two version of the same chart because I thought I didn’t have one and wrote it twice. Don’t laugh. It’s happened.

The latest additions to the library are some special ones:

Disney Ballad Medley is what I choose to call a chart I got from Jaxon Stock, one of the best trombone players/arrangers alive. He wrote it for a band I played with in California led by an orthodontist who played trumpet. Two tunes, featuring the flugelhorn: When You Wish Upon a Star, Some Day My Prince Will Come. I did a reverse reduction of Jack’s score, adding the “extra” tenor saxophone that we have.

Young and Foolish, a piano feature arranged by Frank Mantooth. I bought a Xerox copy of this chart from Frank in 2001, because Hal Leonard had pulled it from their catalogue. Frank’s no longer with us, sadly, but music like this guarantee he’ll be around for generations to come. John Groves, who plays piano with us usually, has worked up this chart for another band, and he studied with Frank in college. Can’t wait to play it. I’ve never thought of this as a profound piece of music, except for the versions Bill Evans recorded. He seemed to coax a lot out of relatively simple material, especially the version with Tony Bennett. Frank recorded this arrangement with Ashley Alexander’s big band in Los Angeles, with Frank playing the piano solo and several of my old associates in the band. It’s haunted me for years, and now I have a reduction that I am hoping will work for our instrumentation. Kevin Flatt is also doing the lead trumpet part with another big band, so when the scream comes it’ll be a good one.

Into the Mystic and Domino, from the ORB book, very close to Van Morrison’s recordings.

Lowdown, also from ORB, although we never seem to play it.

Peanut Vendor, or El Manisero, and I have a long history. Stan Kenton was the longest-running mambo band ever. He was also my first solid employment after college. But you can’t adapt 5 trumpets, 5 bones, 5 saxes, 5 rhythm into our more modest resources, so I tried to pull it together as best as I could with what we’ve got.

Sister Sadie is a Horace Silver tune, up tempo, and “funky” in the original sense of the word.

Feeling Good . . . well, every boy singer on Princess Cruises wants to be Michael Bublé now, don’t they? Written for an ORB wedding, played once, deserves more.

What Now My Love? Moves up in whole steps, boy singer.

Beyond the Sea & The Summer Wind, boy singer, wrote it for Michel Chartier on QE2.

Good Morning Heartache, speaking of singers on ships, I wrote this for Casey Daniel when we were both on Grand Princess out of Galveston. It’s not the kind of material that goes over on a cruise ship, though.

The Godfather Theme adapted from a chart written by an older tenor player with Roy LaVance’s band, which I played in (when I was a YOUNG tenor player) at the revolving restaurant at the Ventura Holiday Inn in the early eighties. The chart starts with a jolly tarantella and ends with the theme from Dragnet. In the middle it’s a 2-beat that we used to call “Businessman’s Bounce,” a tempo and feel combination that is easy on the feet when dancing.

I’ve been setting up a fan page in Facebook. I thought it was pretty cool when we had as many fans as the band--11. But now we’ve got over eighty. Thanks everybody. If you’re wondering how to look at our fan page, enter Original Recipe Big Band in the search box at the top of any other Facebook page.

Oh, and I’ve decided that we are a Hybrid Big Band, because of our genre-hopping. Hmmm.

Genre List April 6, 2009

Tampering with the notion that all big bands play is standard big band music:

Title Voc_Inst Genre

Since I Don't Have You Vocal Male 12/8 Rock
Feeling Good Vocal Male 12/8 Rock
'S Wonderful Instrumental 2 Beat
Bidin' My Time Instrumental 2 Beat
Song of the Volga Boatman Instrumental 2 Beat
Marie Instrumental 2 Beat
Dancing in the Dark Instrumental 2 Beat
Birth of the Blues Instrumental 2 Beat
Tribute To Helen Dell Instrumental 2 Beat
Sentimental Journey Instrumental 2 Beat
Western Medley Instrumental 2 Beat
Deep Purple Instrumental 2 Beat
When Lights Are Low Instrumental 2 Beat
Night & Day Instrumental 2 Beat
Swanee River Instrumental 2 Beat
I Got a Right to Sing the Blues Vocal Male 2 Beat
Lullaby in Rhythm Instrumental 2 Beat
Cheek to Cheek Vocal Male 2 Beat
Little Brown Jug Instrumental 2 Beat
Mack the Knife Vocal Male 2 Beat
How Little We Know Vocal Male 2 Beat
Learnin' the Blues Vocal Male 2 Beat
Pennsylvania 6-5000 Instrumental 2 Beat
My Kind of Town Vocal Male 2 Beat
Mood Indigo Instrumental Ballad
Serenade In Blue Instrumental Ballad
No Spring This Year Instrumental Ballad
Tenderly Instrumental Ballad
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered Instrumental Ballad
Stardust Instrumental Ballad
I Got It Bad Instrumental Ballad
What's New Instrumental Ballad
Autumn in New York Instrumental Ballad
DC Farewell Instrumental Ballad
Blue & Sentimental Instrumental Ballad
The High & Mighty Instrumental Ballad
Li'l Darlin Instrumental Ballad
Good Bye Instrumental Ballad
Dream Instrumental Ballad
Moonlight in Vermont Instrumental Ballad
I'm Getting Sentimental Over You Instrumental Ballad
Pollyanna Vocal Male Ballad
Try a Little Tenderness Vocal Male Ballad
I Cover the Waterfront Instrumental Ballad
My Shining Hour Vocal Male Ballad
Unforgettable Vocal Either/BothBallad
The Way We Were Instrumental Ballad
Moonlight Serenade Instrumental Ballad
Sophisticated Lady Instrumental Ballad
Don't Worry 'Bout Me Vocal Male Ballad
Young at Heart Vocal Male Ballad
Dreamsville Instrumental Ballad
My Funny Valentine Vocal Male Ballad
Beauty & the Beast Instrumental Ballad
Tell It Like It Is Vocal Either/BothBallad
Into the Mystic Vocal Male Ballad
Disney Ballad Medley Instrumental Ballad
Young and Foolish Instrumental Ballad
I Just Called to Say I Love You Instrumental Cha Cha
Day by Day Instrumental Cha Cha
Do the Hustle Instrumental Disco
Lowdown Vocal Male Disco
I Just Want to Celebrate Vocal Male Funk
Down to the Nightclub Vocal Male Funk
What Is Hip? Vocal Male Funk
You're Still a Young Man Vocal Male Funk Ballad
Song of India Instrumental Jump
Opus One Instrumental Jump
Don't Be That Way Instrumental Jump
Jumpin' at the Woodside Instrumental Jump
In The Mood Instrumental Jump
I Can't Stop Loving You Instrumental Jump
I've Got You Under My Skin Vocal Male Jump
You Make Me Feel So Young Vocal Male Jump
Bugle Call Rag Instrumental Jump
Jump Jive & Wail Vocal Either/BothJump
Rockin' in Rhythm Instrumental Jump
Sing Sing Sing Instrumental Jump
Sugar Foot Stomp Instrumental Jump
Well, Git It Instrumental Jump
Choo Choo Caboogie Vocal Either/BothJump
One O'Clock Jump Instrumental Jump
Back Bay Shuffle Instrumental Jump
Four Brothers Instrumental Jump
Speak Low Vocal Either/BothLatin
Tango Medley Instrumental Latin
You'll Be There Instrumental Latin
I Wanna Be Like You Instrumental Latin
Green Eyes Instrumental Latin
Que Rico El Mambo Instrumental Latin
Perfidia Instrumental Latin
Something for Cat Instrumental Latin
Mambo #5 Instrumental Latin
Peanut Vendor Instrumental Latin
Over the Rainbow Instrumental Med Swing
Pennies from Heaven Instrumental Med Swing
That Old Black Magic Instrumental Med Swing
Cherokee Instrumental Med Swing
I Get a Kick Out of You Vocal Female Med Swing
All of Me Vocal Either/BothMed Swing
Moten Swing Instrumental Med Swing
I Remember Basie Instrumental Med Swing
Route 66 Vocal Male Med Swing
April in Paris Instrumental Med Swing
Take the "A" Train Instrumental Med Swing
Candy Instrumental Med Swing
Caravan Instrumental Med Swing
Jive at Five Instrumental Med Swing
Come Back to Sorrento Instrumental Med Swing
I'm Beginning to See the Light Instrumental Med Swing
Can't Get Out of this Mood Instrumental Med Swing
Miss Fine Instrumental Med Swing
Eager Beaver Instrumental Med Swing
Look for the Silver Lining Instrumental Med Swing
Sunny Side March Instrumental Med Swing
Broadway Instrumental Med Swing
Three Little Words Vocal Either/BothMed Swing
Let's Face the Music & Dance Vocal Male Med Swing
The Curley Shuffle Vocal Male Med Swing
South of the Border Vocal Male Med Swing
L-O-V-E Vocal Either/BothMed Swing
I Love Paris Vocal Male Med Swing
The Tender Trap Vocal Male Med Swing
You're Nobody Vocal Male Med Swing
Begin the Beguine Instrumental Med Swing
Perdido Instrumental Med Swing
String of Pearls Instrumental Med Swing
(Our) Love Is Here to Stay Vocal Either/BothMed Swing
Let's Dance Instrumental Med Swing
Stompin' at the Savoy Instrumental Med Swing
Have You Met Miss Jones? Vocal Male Med Swing
She's No Lady (She's My Wife) Vocal Male Med Swing
The Lady Is a Tramp Vocal Male Med Swing
You'd Be So Easy to Love Vocal Male Med Swing
Fly Me To The Moon Vocal Male Med Swing
I Won't Dance Vocal Male Med Swing
Just In Time Vocal Male Med Swing
The Best is Yet to Come Vocal Either/BothMed Swing
Come Fly with Me Vocal Male Med Swing
Witchcraft Vocal Male Med Swing
Nice & Easy Vocal Male Med Swing
Minnie the Moocher Vocal Male Med Swing
I've Got the World on a String Vocal Male Med Swing
The Mooche Instrumental Med Swing
Bye Bye Blackbird Instrumental Med Swing
Shiny Stockings Instrumental Med Swing
I've Heard That Song Before Vocal Female Med Swing
Rocks in My Bed Vocal Female Med Swing
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Vocal Female Med Swing
Splanky Instrumental Med Swing
I Get a Kick Out of You (Sinatra Version) Vocal Male Med Swing
Ain't That a Kick in the Head Vocal Male Med Swing
Always Vocal Male Med Swing
Puttin' on the Ritz Instrumental Med Swing
Bye Bye Blackbird Instrumental Med Swing
Theme Song Medley Instrumental Novelty
The Magic Trumpet Instrumental Novelty
Cocktails for Two Instrumental Novelty
Glowworm Instrumental Novelty
Soul Bossa Nova Instrumental Novelty
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life Vocal Male Novelty
You're the Boss Vocal Either/BothNovelty
It Ain't the Meat Instrumental Novelty
Front Page Rag Instrumental Novelty
Say Si Si Vocal Female Novelty
Can't Take My Eyes Off of You Vocal Female Pop
Signed, Sealed & Delivered Instrumental Pop
Domino Vocal Male Pop
Just the Way You Are Vocal Male Pop Ballad
Adios Instrumental Rhumba
Brazil Instrumental Samba
Let the Good Times Roll Vocal Male Shuffle
Stray Cat Strut Instrumental Shuffle
Sister Sadie Instrumental Up Swing
Waltz Medley Instrumental Waltz
Better Than Anything Vocal Female Waltz

Breaking Some Boundaries

Don’t get me started . . .

I’m putting this band together, making a thousand and one decisions, and I get some “suggestions” from a comrade in Atlanta (you know who you are) about expanding the tune list into areas that are decidedly non-big band.

I’ve been writing for the 4 horn band since 2000, pretty steadily, using Mustang Sally as the central focus and going outward from there. The result is a book of about 350 tunes that cover a lot of territory, from Asleep at the Wheel (Choo Choo Caboogie) to Tower of Power to Elvis to Sinatra to Motown and on and on. This book is based on what we’ve been asked to play over the years, and it seems like it hit the spot for certain folks having weddings.

When I decided to revive the old big band, formerly the New Flamingo Swing Orchestra, I had no intention of expanding the genre list into some of the Original Recipe areas. Gradually, however I realized that with all these horns it just makes sense to take some of the OR charts and, regardless of genre, fold them into the mix for the big band. Lately I’ve done this kind of upgrade for Tell It Like It Is, What Is Hip, Always Look at the Bright Side of Life, even Mustang Sally.

The idea is to have a great dinner set, ballroom dance kind of stuff, then sneak in a few post-big band things as the evening goes on.

On one level it is truly insane to set up an 11-piece band with singers additional in this tanking economy. On the other hand, I keep reminding myself that the Depression of the thirties was the golden age for musicians, because those who could hire them hired lavishly. Here are last month’s additions to the book:

It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion--Benny Carter wrote this chart for Maria Muldaur in the late seventies, and the innocent Miss Marilyn degenerates when she sings it.

I Just Want to Celebrate--Rare Earth!

You’re the Boss--Brian Setzer doing Elvis and Ann-Margaret

Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You--Four Seasons, before it was a hotel

Signed, Sealed & Delivered--Recently popularized in some political campaign

The Curley Shuffle--Back in the Saddle Band, surely you must remember

and the holy trinity of Tower of Power tunes:

Down to the Nightclub

You’re Still a Young Man

What Is Hip?

-----------------------------

Now if I were hiring a wedding band, I’d go with the most versatile tune list and hope they can pull it off. (I’ve heard enough rock bands try to swing to Satin Doll to know that this is the direction we have to go rather than the other way.)

-------------------------------

In other news, we are recording in Los Angeles. Best cats for sightreading, best studio rates, and an opportunity to record with some of the cats who did the demo recording at KingSound Studios back in 1981. Still active are Tom Scott (who was not on the demo but played most of the gigs afterward on lead trumpet), Steve Johnson on trombone, Charlie Oreña on baritone. My brother Jimmy on drums, who was in the Navy back then I think, who will play a kit supplied by the great Jimmy Ford. Going to nail down some dates when Steve gets back from Bay Area gigs next Monday.

Thinking about Kenton

I found this clip on YouTube and it might explain why, fight it as I will, I’m just a tiny satellite that once orbited Planet Stan. I was always convincing myself that I wanted to play in the Basie band, but I never got close. Kenton was another story.

I was at a concert where Stan expressed an interest in my father’s work, back when I was 14. (My dad finished the spec chart a month before he died.) Kenton expressed a passing interest in my alto playing and gave me enough encouragement to really set me on fire. I practiced more than ever, did a few gigs with my dad’s friends playing baritone, and listened to a lot of music constantly.

That was when we were in Connecticut, and we were to go back to California soon after the Kenton concert, then back to Connecticut, where my father died.

It was only later that I learned that my dad had a big band that used to rehearse when I was 12.

So, on this YouTube clip there are Quin Davis, Kim Frizell, Willie Maiden, all three of whom had played in that band, back in Orange County.

Mike Vax, the lead trumpet player, was the leader of the band I played in at the 1970 Kenton clinic in Redlands. Ray Brown, one of the jazz trumpeters, was the only arranging teacher I ever studied with besides my dad, at Cabrillo College, outside Santa Cruz.

Ramon Lopez, the guy playing congas, was my roommate when Dick Shearer, the lead trombonist and band wrangler, called me for the gig on high baritone. (Unlike most big bands, the Kenton band had one alto, two tenors, and two baris, one of whom used to double on bass sax.) Dick had heard me at a concert in Santa Cruz where the Cabrillo Band opened for Stan. The year was 1974. Stan died in 1979.

And of course, though he’s not on this clip, Tony Campise lives right here in Austin, and doesn’t get nearly the respect he ought to for all he’s done.

I think I’ll listen to “Live at the Tropicana,” one of the most straight-ahead of the Kenton recordings. Then maybe a little Basie.

Found on Google Earth

I've been thinking a lot about QE2 and what her faith will be now that Dubai's economy is crashing.

Here's a shot from Google Earth, taken about three weeks before I joined, at the Malaga pier.

You can also see her at across from the Sydney Opera House, also on Google Earth.

Anybody want to hazard a guess what'll become of her?

You never know where the music business will lead you.

Last night I played a gig in Houston with The Pictures, a band that I work with sometimes when they need to beef up the horn section by adding a baritone sax (that’s me!) and a trombone. Jimmy Shortell and I drove in a rented Hyundai to the Toyota Center, not really knowing what the event was that we were playing for. When we got there, it turned out we were playing Yao Ming’s charitable foundations annual fundraiser for Chinese disaster relief.

There being only one stage in the Arena, we shared the stage with Yao Ming. Let me tell you folks, you have no idea how big this guy is until you park alongside him and look up.

To prove my point, here is a picture of Chris, the singer in The Pictures, who is not the tallest of men (but one of the best singers in the business). As you see he goes up to Yao’s belt buckle and no further.

Yao struck me as a very gentle guy: soft-spoken and humble. He’s done a lot for earthquake relief--building schools, dealing with the ramifications of 70,000 dead. He’s a credit to the human race.

Three Little Words (no vocalist)

Here we are sightreading a vocal arrangement of Three Little Words, a song as old as dirt, which I wrote last week.

You'll have to whistle the melody after the intro, because we're still hammering out the vocal responsibilities.

The tenor solo is Tony Bray, a recent transplant to Austin from Long Beach, California. Piano solo by John Groves.

How We Spent Our Valentine's Day

We worked! ORB at Wells Branch community center. And Jan used our Flip camera to make this, which turned out to be the last tune of the night.

We'll be at their July 4 party again this year. Last year I had my implant for 3 whole days. I played, though.

Sightreading Rehearsal, and Our Flip Camera!

We had an excellent rehearsal last night, playing stuff that no humans had played before. Until now, the notes were in Finale and I was depending on the playback sounds in QuickTime. Plenty of stuff was plowed through, all of it found to be worthy of further attention. Now all we need is a place where coffee or beer is served. I’m afraid Jimmy’s music room, while it sounds nice, is too small for folks to come and hear us.

Participating: Paul Baker and Tony Bray on tenors, Chris Kapral on baritone, Kevin Flatt and Jimmy Shortell on trumpets, Ulrican Williams on trombone, Ulrich Ellison on guitar, John Groves on piano, Kris Afflerbaugh on bass, and Jimmy on drums. We ran several vocal charts, but no canary. I want to hear the band parts first. The gentlemen did an outstanding job. Here’s the first read of my adaptation of Billy May’s Front Page Rag, from the movie of the same name. Not an easy piece.

. . . And that brings to mind that Jan and I bought a Flip movie camera. I am a very happy adopter. I have a Canon HD movie camera, but I seem to always have too few arms and legs to operate it. This Flip is just a point & shoot, but sometimes that’s all you need. It’s a cinch to capture video and it records sound pretty well, although I could have presented something better than my back when I was playing clarinet on Front Page Rag.

Why 3 Corgis Remind Me of Playing Dixieland

This is a video of our 3 dogs--2 Cardigan Corgis and a Corgi Mix (guess who has all the brains).

The mixing in of Dixieland music is intentional. As anyone who's ever played it knows, Dixieland is about weaving in and out of personality types.

Charts charts charts

Wonderful news! We booked a gig through Gigmasters (I think, I haven’t been dealing with clients since my cardiac problems). Anyway, in addition to all the gigs for the 9 piece band (Original Recipe) our website declares that we have another band (Original Recipe Big Band) with a link to another site.

I’ve been a busy little chart writer, and have added to the heap Celebrate, 3 Little Words, Green Eyes, Stray Cat Strut, Do the Hustle and No Spring This Year, a ballad my dad wrote when I was a couple years old for Lad Carlton’s band back in Fitchburg. (I got an email from Lad’s daughter. He wants to know what’s going on with Dick Fenno’s kids. Maybe we’ll have something more concrete to report now.)

I got a CD from Bob Bastien, who played alto in Lad’s band in 1954. How he tracked me down I’ll never know.

The demo has S’Wonderful, No Spring This Year, Sunny Side March, and a theme song dad wrote for Lad. Three out of 4 arrangements live, in slightly modded form, in my book.

Speaking of demos, we had to cancel the Promiseland session on February 21 because we booked a gig for the smaller band, one that starts at 4 in San Antonio. I need to get together with Mike at the studio and push back a time we can all agree to.

But meanwhile I am cautiously calling a rehearsal for next week. The upcoming big band gig is in June, in Stonewall, and pays $200.

That means leverage. Calendars graven into stone will thus be made flexible.

When My Horns Were Stolen

There was a time when all the musicians who played softball in Santa Cruz rose as one to my aid. Between the first version of Sofrito and the second, after I’d gone to New York with drummer Jim Baum and came back to town, after I’d played alto, baritone, flute, clarinet and bass clarinet with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, I was in town to play a few tentative gigs with what became Sofrito once again, transformed.

My entire net worth (expressed in woodwind instruments) could fit into the back seat of my 1964 Dodge Dart, and that’s where it was when, after one of those gigs, I arrived at the house the girl who became the mother of my children. I may have locked the doors of the Dart. Her west side house was plenty quiet at 1 in the morning when I arrived.

We were pretty deep into softball then, as I’ve described elsewhere, playing long ball on the short-porch fields of Branciforte Park as many afternoons as not and taking in an Oakland A’s game once every couple weeks.

While the blissful ignorance of all people who trust human nature to be a benign force in the universe, there was my Dart, loaded up with expensive woodwinds, most of them Selmer Paris. Like an idiot, I compounded my stupidity by bringing in my flute, an Armstrong worth maybe $80.

Some time in the night, the car’s contents were removed. I knew that the car’s locks could be easily picked. I was blindly trusting the universe to protect me from villains. Someone with other ideas strolled by in the wee hours.

When I woke up at the crack of noon, I discovered the deed. There was no broken glass, but none would have been required, because any 1964 Dodge Dart could be unlocked with a coat hanger. My horns were gone.

So I called my home team. We had a meeting, dividing the city up into sectors, some heading for the music dealers, some for the pawn shops, some for the schools. Soon we received information about a guy in town who was bragging about coming into some woodwind instruments suddenly. It’s hard to imagine back then that this whole thing was co-ordinated without the benefit of cel phones, which at the time were toys of the idle rich.

The sun went down, and the softball gang had grown militant. They were going to track this guy down if it took all night. Sadly, there was no progress until early the next morning, when my once and future wife went off to Cabrillo, the local junior college and, finding a message chalked to one of the boards of the music department, called the guy’s number and recovered every one of my horns.

So I guess we were not all that successful in our plans to enforce simple justice. The guy left town, and the goods were recovered by Sue Slater and Holly Ray, not by the softball guys with the testosterone pumping.

No matter. We had a potluck at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center to celebrate the oddest thing, the coming together of forces for good in Santa Cruz, where it was at times impossible to get people to see mutual interest in anything. We played music that night, and it was good.

Treasured friends who took part in this mobilization included Joyce Cooper, Sue Slater, Peter Burchard (then known as Peter Ashley), Steve Bennett back when he still flew single-engine planes, Olaf Schiappicase, Dennis Broughton, and many, many others.

Back from the Sea

We’re back, and I have news that’ll be so obvious that I probably should state it. But here goes: Being a passenger on a cruise ship is ordinally better than being a crew member. There, I said it. Like Brent Musberger describing the way-obvious antics of the players in a football game.

The fact is that I started as a passenger. When I played with the Modernaires we got booked on the Viking Serenade on its winter repositioning from Vancouver to Los Angeles. We got passage for two, plane tickets from LAX to Vancouver for two, and no money, but we in turn got free passage for two in return for two shows on the sixth day of the seven-day cruise, one for each seating. When we arrived at the ship, the agent (Jay Gredon’s father Joe) had a proposition for us. “Uh-oh,” I thought, leaning on my memories of working on the Azure Seas. “here we go . . .”

Joe asked us if we’d do a dance set for a hundred, cash. Sure, we all said.

A little further up the road Jan and I booked a handful of cruises on her vacation periods, all in the Caribbean, one with Carnival out of New Orleans, the other out of Galveston just after 9/11, which was the best deal ever on a cruise. I had a “real” job then, and scheduled a vacation with Jan, who tends to have hard and fast schedules depending on the passage of the semesters across the calendar.

I will miss our cabin steward. I will miss having all my food prepared for me and served with great flourish by our Portugese waiter. Did you know that, here on land, you are required to PAY for food? There’s no salmon at the breakfast buffet either.

How I adjust to this reentry is anyone’s guess.

Vacation Time

From Historical Artifacts

Starting tomorrow, Jan and I will be taking a great adventure on MS Grand Princess from Los Angeles to Hawaii and back. We fly to LAX Tuesday morning, then board her Wednesday afternoon. Then we have 5 sea days, 4 days of island hopping, then 5 days back. I doubt we’ll have anything to say about the sea days or the band on the ship, or much of anything, so I am officially pulling down the “Gone Fishing” sign on this enterprise until we fly back to Austin when we get back.

I DID, however, write what might be a very nice chart of Three Little Words, a vocal/tenor feature of the Harry Ruby tune from the previous ‘teens.

Here is where our position is, provided it is after the seventh of January, 2009, and before the twenty-first of January.

See you when we get back!