From the ancient archives: Dick Fenno's Hobby Is Music

This is an article my aunt sent me, published in the Fitchco-Deco News, house organ of the Fitchburg Paper Company. in August, 1956.

At the time, my dad was working as a draftsman at the paper mill, one of the many industrial jobs to be had in the brick mills of Fitchburg, which included Independent Lock Company (ILCO) and the Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works. When you started at one of these factories, you usually retired from them 50 years later. A co-worked of mile when I worked at South by Southwest started at Fitchburg Paper when my dad worked there and retired when they closed the factory in the early eighties.

That was the way things worked in Fitchburg. If you were lucky and hung on, maybe you’d retire to Florida and wait for the reaper there. My family pulled up stakes and left Fitchburg for southern California in October, 1960–as the Pirates were beating the Yankees and the last weeks of the campaign between JFK and Richard Nixon were taking place. This was considered by some–including both sets of my grandparents--as downright heretical. We were leaving the steady paychecks of Fitchburg Paper for the much less solid Westlake College of Modern Music, recently relocated (an accounting scandal was the reason) from Hollywood to Laguna Beach.

The writing in this article is wonderful, but the tone of the piece is clearly that Fitchburg was getting too big for dad’s britches and he was looking for bigger and better things. Odd then that no mention is made of his children, just Noreen and me at the time, but Cindy on the way in November of 1956, and 2 others, Jimmy and Marcia, to come.

Odder still is that the article is published in a column called Hobby Corner, with a cut in the corner of photography, stamp collecting, electric trains, and woodworking. Music didn’t have that relationship with my father. It was central to his life.

Dick Fenno’s Hobby Is Music

There’s nothing unusual about a five year old boy beating a toy drum – but when it is a snare drum and the forerunner of a career in music – that makes it news.

Our child drummer is Dick Fenno, who works in the Chief Engineer’s office at #4 Mill. Dick kept at it and had acquired a full eight years of practice on the drums by the time he played his first professional engagement at the tender age of thirteen. Two years later he joined Eddie Hamilton’s Orchestra and for three years this young lad hit the college and ballroom circuit all over New England and New York State. That was from 1941 to 1944.

Then Dick enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 392nd Army Service Forces band. He toured the Mid-West and South with the band on War Bond and Recruiting Drives. This band recorded V-discs for use by Armed Forces Overseas and made a number of recordings for transcribed radio use.

Upon his discharge from the Army in 1946, Dick joined up with the Gene Carlson Orchestra and worked the New England ballroom circuit for a couple years, building up a bankroll to further his music studies. In 1948 he enrolled at Schillinger House of Music (now Berklee School) and whizzed through the four year course in three years. During this period he played nights with Karl Rhode’s band for six months and with Freddy Guerra’s Band for a year, to provide funds for his studies.

When he completed his music course at Schillinger House, he re-joined the Eddie Hamilton Orchestra and did freelance arranging n the side. This was in 1950 and the arranging work simply poured in. He wrote the complete music library for the Frankie Dee Orchestra, made a number of arrangements for Freddie Sateriale’s Orchestra, and wrote arrangements for the entire library for the Lad Carleton Orchestra.

Last year he organized the Dick Fenno Orchestra of seven musicians and a male vocalist. This group has played for Fitchco events and it is a smart outfit. It has been very successful at colleges, high schools. ad small clubs and ballrooms throughout New England.

Dick recently re-organized the Lad Carleton Orchestra, which is preparing to start out in the early fall. Big units are on the way back, Dick says, and the new set-up runs to eleven musicians and a vocalist. It will be billed as the New Dick Fenno Orchestra.

Prodigious for a young man of 29 to cram so much experience into so youthful an age. But remember, Dick started at five and was a professional musician at thirteen. There have been a lot of drum flourishes in the years since.

Drums and piano are Dick’s instruments and he leads from the percussion section. Progressive Jazz is his preference in Music. Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan are idols. Dick believes very strongly that the big bands are on the way back, and backs up his belief with his new eleven-piece outfit. Bad as Rick and Roll is, says Dick, it is a step in the right direction. It’s got a beat that sets your foot tapping.

It’s been nice to visit you and learn about your hobby, Dick. It must give you a lot of pleasure and if you are lucky and hit it right it could bring you fame and fortune. We hope it does!

Back at it, with an opinion from the past

It’s been a while since I added to this blog, but I think it’s time to get back in the saddle. There are just too many things going on NOT to post, so I will try to habituate.

First off, Tony Campise is still a guest of the medical establishment, at a rehab place in Austin. He was moved by turns from the ICU to the regular wards at the hospital in Corpus, to a rehab place in Austin at St. Davids, where my cardiologist practices his craft, to an outside rehab place to Brackenridge Hospital to treat a staph infection, and back to an outside rehab place, where he is now.

We did a benefit for him in December, the day after we returned from the Sapphire Princess, and it was at that gig that three gals–Marilyn Rucker, Diana Bray and Lisa Clark–stepped forward and performed three zany Christmas songs on their own with the big band behind them. Their delivery was so engaging that they brought down the house.

Somehow a switch was tripped inside me which said, “You know, if you’re having difficulty booking your eleven-piece band, why not add three girl singers and give it a go?” Such are the ways of the arranger’s brain.

I remembered that we I had done arrangements of a couple Andrews Sisters tunes, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Say Sĺ Sĺ” and I thought they’d have a blast singing Jimmy Rowles’ “Ballad of Thelonious Monk.” Then there was “I Wan’na Be Like You,” originally sung by Louis Prima in the Disney movie of Kipling’s Jungle Book.

So off I went to write.

That was 5 weeks ago. We were all busy on New Years, and soon afterward Marilyn had a surgery, so we still haven’t had a rehearsal, but that hasn’t stopped me from dreaming up a name (Mineshaft Canaries) and a dramatic concept which the whole lot can be dropped into.

I’ve taken leave of the small band for the first six months of this year so I can concentrate on this project. In addition, I’ll be trying to put together a 5-piece band doing Brazilian music. I’m trying to justify all the money I have invested in flutes, and I’m on the verge of selling off some Craigslist acquisitions to get an alto flute. As usual, there’s no cash for this purpose, just a room full of stuff I don’t use that ought to generate interest on Craigslist.

And another thing . . .

I picked up a copy of a 1955 Down Beat magazine (which changed its name in the seventies to down beat—ay carumba) with an interesting column by Leonard Feather, or, as we used to call him when he was writing jazz criticism in the Los Angeles Times back in the seventies, Learned Father.

Here it is:

Ruth Cage raised a provocative question in her April 6 column in which she suggested that the recent campaign against suggestive rhythm and blues lyrics was inspired by ASCAP’s battle against BMI.

There may be something to her theory but my own feeling is that larger issues are involved in any discussion of the current status of r&b music. One can dismiss the complaints leveled against r&b lyrics by pointing out that Trixie Smith recorded He Likes It Slow in 1926, that Bessie Smith’s famous Empty Bed Blues was cut in 1928, and that you can trace smut all the way back to Shakespeare and beyond.

There may have been no other reason for raising the issue, at this particular moment, than the time-honored tradition among periodicals of drawing attention to themselves by deliberately stirring up controversies.

What concerns me much more deeply about the r&b state of the nation is not simply the lyrical content but the overall musical level of this phase of the arts, which Miss Cage herself has mentioned from time to time.

Until a few years ago, when a very sensible campaign for a change of name was started by Billboard, r&b records were known as race records. Now I would ask you kindly to compare the sort of records that were being sold successfully in that field years ago with those that are making the grade on r&b best-seller lists today.

Back in the 1920s and ’30s the biggest sellers included such singers as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, and scores of others in the same general class.

Instrumentally, there were Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, even Duke Ellington, and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Jimmie Lunceford, Fats Waller, Don Redman. All these and dozens more, at least in their earlier years, sold exclusively to the r&b buyers (this was before jukeboxes, of course, but the audience was exactly compatible with today’s r&b market).

All these artists, you need hardly be told, became music immortals; their records are being reissued to this day. There was no real borderline between jazz and r&b music.

All right, now let’s look at the r&b picture today.

Can you picture an LP reissue, 25 years from today, of immortal classics by the Hearts, the Charms, the Penguins, the Moonglows or the Crows?

Do you think such early r&b hits as Downhearted Blues, Loveless Love, and West End Blues will be superseded by such currnt masterworks as Oop-Shoop, Tweedle Dee and Bazoom, I Need Your Lovin’?

Can you see a jazz fan in a record shop, after buying the latest experimental works of Charlie Mingus, turning around to ask the clerk, “What’s new by Willis Jackson?”

With rare exceptions such as Joe Turner and Ruth Brown (Atlantic is to be commended for the high level of its offerings), the entire r&b market today is dominated by three factors:

• Vocal groups that seem to have issued to one another a challenge boasting: “We can sing out-of-tuner than you can.”

• Tortured, tortuous ballad singers who would lose all their appeal if they were fitted with spines.

• Instrumentalists who made names for themselves on personal appearances by playing a solo and simultaneously removing their jacket. pants, shirt, and teeth while suspended from a chandelier.

These artists are suitably served by two kinds of material:

• Love songs whose lyrics literally (and I mean literally) could have been written by any reasonably bright third-grader in grammar school.
• Novelty jump tunes written by the younger brothers of those who wrote the love songs.

Many a fine jazzman who has been forced to work r&b, in order to make a living, will confirm these judgments. “I feel as though I’ve just come out of jail,” a young trumpeter told me when he quit a typical r&b band recently. After three months of playing three chords, he almost needed an orientation course to get back to jazz.

I’m sorry, but the fact that somebody is raising a ruckus about naughty lyrics seems mighty unimportant when you stop to consider a much more shocking fact—that music, as a creative art, and the average r&b performance, by today’s standards, are about as close together as Eisenhower and Bulganin—and a meeting between the two seems equally distant and improbable in both cases.

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I was just four when this issue of DB hit the streets, so I can hardly comment on his direct charges. But bringing the argument 25 years forward presents interesting possibilities.

Leonard had a habit of stirring things up (I believe he coined the phrase “moldy figs” to describe the musicians still playing “traditional jazz”), yet so much of this resonates with my theory that (forgive me, Les Paul for you know not what you did) the ability to have technology in the form of overdubbing, pitch correction, and countless other gimmicks which were not available to musicians in most of the twentieth century have given rise to technology-based art, which is, ultimately, technology.

What do you think?

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.