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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
