The 18-piece big band, “The Abletones”, led by Dan Gabel, was featured, with Amanda Carr, ABBPS founder and concert organizer, and Rob Zappulla as vocalists. A special moment was when four members of the Melrose High School band joined the band to read the charts and each take a solo to “Alumni Jazz Band Blues” composed and arranged by Gabel.

Reserved seats were sold out a week in advance on the internet with only general admission tickets available at the door. The main local ticket outlet reported the largest advance sale for the Hall they had ever experienced. Based on the anticipated favorable word-of-mouth, a return engagement is being planned for the spring by ABBPS with other venues under review.

The Hall is considered one of the most distinctive performance centers on Boston’s North Shore with a seating capacity of 800 and a 30 X 40 ft. stage. For the event, a large dance floor, surrounded by reserved tables, was sometimes filled to capacity with dancers of many ages.

“The turnout exceeded our best expectations,” said Carr. “The evening’s success verified our faith in ABBPS’s mission to help restore the music of the big bands to its proper place in our music culture, especially with the younger generation.”

Jazz SInger is filled with vivid, candid images of many of her compatriots in the world of jazz and big bands. Some of her more fascinating observations:

Gene Krupa: “When Gene played Drum Boogie or Drummer Man, there was no mistaking that he had incorporated the best of Chicago drummers such as Baby Dodds, Chick Webb, and dozens of black drummers from the South Side plus sounds of the Belgian Congo to create the Krupa style. To this day, people believe that Gene was a hard drug addict. Untrue. He never touched heroin or cocaine. All he did was smoke a few joints and drink lots of Scotch.”

Billie Holiday: “She blasted Artie Shaw in Downbeat saying, ‘Artie never paid me for Any Old Time . With Basie, I got seventy dollars a week, with Artie sixty -five dollars. Lady Day is the one true genius among jazz singers. Only somebody who’d gone through the things she did and survived could sing from the soul the way she did. I wasn’t only in awe of her singing. I was in awe of her habit. She didn’t cook up with a spoon. She used a small tuna fish can and shot 10 cc into her feet.”

Woody Herman: “Woody paid higher salaries and got better musicians than Gene. Maybe not more talented, but more dependable. He was alert to little changes in music and would change his approach to keep up with the times.”

Stan Kenton: “Stanley wasn’t anymore interested in pandering to popular taste than I was. Swing was the thing then and Stanley wasn’t into it. His worship of Ellington made him look upon Ellington as a minor god. He never seemed to rest. After the last performance, he’d stay on at the theater working on arrangements. He had a cot in the theater basement where he usually slept.”

Stan Getz: “When seventeen-year-old Stan joined Kenton, he begged me to get Stanley to let him take a solo. Finally he got one. The only thing he knew were eighth notes, but he went out and played the whole thing in eighth notes and everybody fell off their chairs. He was always working on that saxophone and progressed until he got too far out for me. Whatever the melody was, I couldn’t find it. And I’m a professional. What did ordinary listeners get out of it ? But, listening to that tenor sax was pure joy most of the time.”

Dizzy Gillespie: “A straight cat who never used grass or any other drug, he once played a spirited bebop solo from the branches of a tree in our yard.”

Peggy Lee: “She changed with the times and stayed on top for many years but she didn’t improvise. Her piano player for many years told me she always did the same song the same way night after night. If the musicians varied the backing, she faltered.”

Carmen McRae: “Carmen is a wonderful singer. This chick has a lot of voice, a lot of chops. But, in my opinion, she can’t sing a fast tune and really get on time.”

Sarah Vaughn: “Sarah’s got great chops, good sound, but, on a fast tune, she runs behind the beat.”

Ella Fitzgerald: “She is, more or less, first. Whatever her approach, she can sing a ballad, an uptune, a novelty, almost anything. But, like me, she doesn’t have a really good voice. She’s a straight cat who doesn’t drink hard liquor, take drugs or make waves.”

Charlie Parker: “I idolized Charlie. He was one of the great jazz geniuses of all time. He changed the whole face of music. When Louis Armstrong became popular, all trumpet players had to change their styles. Not the rest of the band. When Charlie became popular, everybody in the band had to change their style.”

Benny Goodman: “I was thrilled to be part of Benny’s world but, as I’d heard, he doesn’t want anyone or anything to stand out above him and his orchestra. If it does, he doesn’t just compete, he undercuts the competition. He’ll pick his teeth during your number, sit behind you and pick his nose or scratch his private parts – do anything to distract the audience’s attention.”

My friend, Danny D’Imperio, was her drummer for several years in the 90′s. He recorded a CD with her called Live at Vine Street (available on Amazon) with Pete Jolly (piano), Gordon Brisker (tenor), Bob Maize (bass), and Steve Homan (guitar). Danny says, “At that time a movie was being considered based on Anita’s book. Faye Dunaway was being considered to play Anita. Faye walked into the Vine St. club during the recording and Anita inserted into the lyrics ‘Faye Dunaway, Hi girl’”.

Who was her favorite singer ? According to Danny, “Everybody thinks she wasn’t influenced by another singer but she once told me that her main influence was Martha Raye. I’ve got a Charlie Barnet record and Martha Raye is singing on a couple tunes. Sounds exactly like Anita.”

She told Danny that she’d bought the distinctive black dress, black hat with white feathers and white gloves for her famous appearance at the 1958 Newport Jazz festival from a dress shop in town the afternoon of the concert. It had been raining and she slipped going up those steps at Freebody Park. George Wein kept her from falling. She was high as a kite.

Her performance became the highlight of the award-winning documentary Jazz on A Summer’s Day. (Among the rave reviews, the New York Times reported that, “her Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two was as vivid and insinuating as is Mahalia Jackson booming The Lord’s Prayer.”

Danny went to Japan with her twice and also to Europe. “She was an intrepid drinker and I went right along with her most of the time. I did ten weeks with her at Michael’s Pub in NYC booked as Anita O’Day and the Gene Krupa Legend (I played Gene Krupa). I did the Blue Note with her and Fat Tuesdays. Biff Hannon, pianist, was with her for some of the time but he quit drinking so she fired him. Can you imagine getting fired for QUITTING DRINKING?

“I have a wet season and a dry season. My dry season runs from January 2nd to July 4th. Then I go wet. One time in March of one of those years, I arrived in Italy. We’d been traveling on different flights and both hit the front desk simultaneously. As we were checking in she said, ‘I’ll see you in the bar in 15 minutes.’

“I said, ‘Colton’ I’m not drinking’.(I always called her by her real last name which was ‘Colton’). She became irate and said, ‘I once fired a piano player because he quit drinking. I’LL SEE YOU IN THE BAR!’ Suffice to say, my dry season was cut in half that year. I remember how, like in Days of WIne and Roses , we used to clean out the courtesy bars in Europe and refill the vodka miniatures with water and return them to the small refrigerators.

“She was past her prime then as a ‘looker’ but it got close for us one night when she was in my room. She had her hair in curlers and we were both loaded. I just couldn’t do it. I asked her how long it had been….she responded, ‘I haven’t gotten l–d since 1952’”.

Joe Glaser, the legendary agent who was Anita’s booking agent for many years (including two bands I managed), used to say to her, “Anita, you’ve got a million dollars worth of talent and no class.”

I’ll take the talent – nobody’s perfect.

References: High Times Hard Times Anita O’Day. 1981 Limelight Editions;

Anita O’Day: The Life of A Jazz Singer . Amazon.com.

Author Unkown

Seldom acknowledged is how many big bands provided the “launching pads” for their vocalists who went on to fame and. sometimes, fortunes. Many became as important and familiar to the public as their former employers,  .As the big band era began to fade,  their  careers  blossomed.  It is an impressive list:

Peggy Lee, Martha Tilton, Helen Ward – Benny Goodman

Doris Day – Les Brown

Billie Holiday – Count Basie, Artie Shaw.

Rosemary Clooney – Tony Pastor

Jo Stafford, Connie Haines – Tommy Dorsey

Ella Fitzgerald – Chick Webb.

Helen O’Connell, Kitty Kallen – Jimmy Dorsey

Lena Horne, Kay Starr – Charlie Barnet

June Christy – Stan Kenton

Keely Smith – Louis Prima

Sarah Vaughan  - Earl Hines

Berry Hutton – Vincent Lopez

Anita O’Day – Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton

Dinah Washington – Lionel Hampton

Helen Forrest – Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Harry  James

Chris Connor – Stan Kenton

Frances Wayne – Woody Herman

Mary Ann McCall – Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman

Helen Humes – Count Basie

——————

Bing Crosby – Paul Whiteman

Frank Sinatra – Harry James,  Tommy Dorsey

Perry Como – Ted Weems

Joe Williams, Jimmy Rushing – Count Basie

Bob Eberly – Jimmy Dorsey

Ray Eberle – Glenn Miller

Merv Griffin – Freddy Martin

Don Cornell – Sammy Kaye

Dick Haymes – Harry James, Tommy Dorsey

Billy Eckstine – Earl Hines

Johnny Desmond – Glenn Miller

Dick Powell – Charlie Davis

These vocalists were invaluable to the popularity of the bands they performed with, but, more important, was what the big bands did for them.

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Thank you to everyone who has visited our site and signed up to be a part of our mission. We are currently re-organizing to localize within the Boston area and recruit volunteers to assist in our upcoming fundraising events and cataloguing our small but growing library of arrangements.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting the titles of our unpublished arrangement library and listing our new sponsors. If you would like to join us in our efforts and live in the Boston or surrounding area, please contact us.

Amanda Carr, Founder

The band also featured lead trumpet player, Charlie Shavers. Shavers had first joined Tommy Dorsey in1945 to play the jazz chair and sometime lead trumpet. It was the first time an African-American had become a regular member of the band. Peggy Schwartz, a member of Dorsey’s Sentimentalists, recalled that, despite his importance to the band, “Charlie had to go through the backdoor of hotels on the road. He could never eat with the rest of the band. We had to bring him whatever he wanted from the restaurant or diner.”

in Florida in1965, little had changed for Charlie. Segregation was still  alive. The Inn management didn’t allow black people in the bar. Charlie would stand in the kitchen next to the Lounge bandstand between his breaks with the Dorsey band and look out into the room to hear the Six. The  piano player and a jazz fan bartender kept slipping Charlie glasses of gin as he stuck his head out the kitchen door.

Ruedebusch was quite aware of what was going on and, being one helluva a trumpet player himself, decided to take charge and prolong the “bar service” for Shavers by the bartender. Leader Jack Maheu,  featured himself on “Lazy River” which was a big show stopper.  Dick decided he was going to take the bull by the ‘tail’ and protect Charlie’s supply line. He told the pianist, ‘When I start my chorus you keep pumping on the piano and don’t stop until I’m through!”.

After 15 choruses, each one building to a higher fever pitch and intensity, Dick finished his scorching solo.The  place was in an uproar and there was nothing left for Jack to play. He couldn’t follow THAT!! Jack just motioned for the band to take it out.

Dick later went with Woody Herman’s Band but eventually missed his family and returned to Milwaukee. He came back on the road to earn enough money to pay off some debts,   He told a friend he owed around $500 and, when told that was not a lot of money, Dick’s answer was ‘It’s a lot of money if you haven’t got it!‘”.

Dick’s horn went silent too soon. He died at age 42 in 1968 from a heart attack.

Thanks to YouTube, you can see “Dick Ruedebusch and His Underprivileged Five” on the Ed Sullivan Show in ’62 with Sid Caesar introducing the band. Just go to YouTube on your computer and type  “Dick Reudebusch” in the search window.

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Danny later commented about playing behind Woody’s vocal on “Blues in the Night”.  “Woody was a great blues singer (Tony Bennett was greatly influenced by him) and that chart was fairly new to the new guys ( I was still reading it). Stan Getz was to guest star next with the band.  Pardon my impertinence but – when we went into that last 6/8 bit where Woody hollers the blues,  I went on the swish cymbal and Getz just comes on stage and started staring at me. I didn’t know what to do.  He was apparently moved by the looseness of what I’d done (which was, of course, Elvin Jones motivated).  Buddy Rich was in the audience as was Charlie Mingus. I wish I had that day to relive.”

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Most of  top jazz clubs have long since faded away, but not from our memories.  In Boston, there was the Hi Hat at Massachusetts and Columbus Avenues where Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Roy Eldridge frequently appeared and Symphony Sid did his nightly broadcasts over WCOP. Nearby was The Savoy which featured more traditional jazz  as did Storyville in the basement of the Buckminster Hotel in Kenmore .  It was run by former BU student and jazz impresario, George Wein, who later founded the Newport Jazz Festival. The clubs provided work for many future stars such as George Benson who appeared at Estelle’s on Tremont St. I can remember going to Paul’s Mall on Boylston Street and seeing Bette Midler with a young accompanist named Barry Manilow.

One of the last great jazz clubs in the area was Lennie’s on the Turnpike, on Route 1 in Peabody. Somehow, Lennie Sogoloff and his top assistant, Joe Batista, found enough room in the small club to present the big bands of Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Count Basie and Woody Herman and many famous solo artists.  I never forgot the night  Buddy Rich’s 15-member band  was there with his daughter as vocalist.  Then In his late 60s, and having survived quadruple-bypass heart surgery, he  could boot the band the same as ever. He used Ludwig drums and, unfortunately for him, Mr. Ludwig was in the audience. Rich asked Mr. Ludwig to stand up and take a bow. Famous for his verbally-abusive behavior and twisted sense of humor ( I once saw him fire a sideman right off the bandstand), Rich saluted Ludwig with “Heil Hitler.”  Lennie was recently honored by Salem State for (?)   and had Amanda Carr perform at ( Amanda: can you clarify the gig Lennie arranged for you).

New York City, Chicago and, of course, New Orleans, were also meccas for jazz and big band fans. I grew up outside New York City when the jazz scene and big band venues were  thriving. A trip to clubs on 52nd St., Birdland, or Nick’s was a trip to jazz heaven.  Big band fans could hear Benny Goodman at the Paramount Theater (plus a feature film), Harry James at the Astor Roof,  Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt Hotel, or Tommy Dorsey at the Cafe Rouge in the Hotel Statler.  ”When I came to New York in 1945, it was filled with night life,” club entertainer Bobby Short once reminisced with Elijah Wald of The Boston Globe. “There were all kinds of clubs. Some were tiny rooms where one person like Mabel Mercer could sing to 60 people. All that’s gone now.”

My involvement with the jazz scene became more than just a fan. As a sideline since college, I became a personal manager/booker for a number of jazz artists who appeared in some of the best clubs and on radio and television thanks to the assistance of agencies like MCA and Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking Corp.  One of the groups I booked into Lennie’s was the Saints & Sinners, co-led by Red Richards, piano, and Vic Dickenson, trombone. Herman Autry was on trumpet and Rudi Powell, clarinet/alto sax. Both had played and recorded with Fats Waller. They told me Fats would record in a loft in Brooklyn and have RCA send over a case of gin (hope they took some home!).

In January 1965, a British agent, Jimmy Jones, stayed at our house in Melrose while he arranged for a band I managed – featuring Wild Bill Davison and some all-stars – to tour England. The British union required that a British group tour the U.S. in exchange. When I asked Jones the name of the British group, it didn’t ring a bell … some group called The Rolling Stones.

Besides television (when Milton Berle was on Tuesday night the clubs were almost deserted),  the arrival of rock and roll  hastened the demise of the jazz/big band scene. I first “got the message” in the 1960s when I booked a traditional jazz band into a club in Chester, Pa.  The manager said they would alternate with a rock and roll band which would begin the second set. After they had finished their earsplitting electronic barrage, it was sadly apparent that they had captured the young audience gyrating on the dance floor.  Sound and fury had won.   Artie Shaw, then 90, who was appearing in Boston with the band led by Dick Johnson, once told The Boston Globe, “People send me tapes and records to listen to, and frankly, I’m appalled by what I hear. As far as rap music – please! That has nothing to do with music.”

Shaw would no doubt agree with fellow clarinetist, Reginald Kell, one of the world’s most accomplished classical clarinetists, who once described his approach to playing:  ”I do not play the clarinet. I play music on it. I use it to express my personal feelings. An instrument is just a heap of dimensions with no life or intelligence. How different this can become in the hands of someone who has mastered the technical difficulties and uses it as a means to transfer both the composer’s and his own thought into sound. It is not longer lifeless and dull. It lives and reflects the message of the music no matter how sad or cheerful it may be. If you are going to play, then play with character.”

The legendary jazz guitarist, Marty Grosz, said it best, “Before forests of microphones had become requisite of every nightclub or concert hall, a sensible restraint governed jazz musicians … the idea that individual exuberance be governed for the good of the group. Today, owing to the miracle of amplification, instead of blending harmoniously, it’s every-man-for-himself ego tripping. Young musicians, thanks to rock and roll, equate loudness with masculinity. Noise swings.”

Seldom fully recognized in the rise of rock music was the impact of the “Payola Scandal” of the 50′s. For the sake of drugs and cash, disc jockeys started playing records by

performers and songwriters who did not belong to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). At the time, its competitor, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI),

represented most of the rock and roll bands. Congress investigated the payoffs and 25 deejays and program directors were caught in the scandal.  More recently in 2005, N.Y. State

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (you remember him !), prosecuted payola-related crimes and settled out-of-court with Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music. They paid, $10, $5 and $12 million respectively for illegal “promotion payments.” As  cabaret entertainer, Bobby Short, once commented, “I remember when disc jockeys used to say with great pride, ’Now we’re going to play a new Cole Porter song.’ You heard the words ’Cole Porter’ and your ears perked up.”

Of all the jazz concerts in history, the two I would love to have seen was Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert and Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars at Boston Symphony Hall, Nov. 30, 1947.  My fellow  jazz fan and D-Day veteran, Irving Smolens, was there for the Armstrong concert. Luckily for Armstrong, he had a front row seat.

As Irving describes it,  ”About 20 or 25 minutes into the concert a young woman raced down the aisle  jumped up on the stage and started grabbing at Louis’ pants in the area of his private parts. Louis was perplexed to say the least. Because most of my live jazz listening was  in small clubs (I preferred the intimacy) I wanted to be as close to the music as possible so I had a front row seat.  I was determined that I would not be deterred by this interruption.

“I was twenty-three years old at the time and had fought Germans with the 4th Division in Western Europe so stopping the young woman was a minor challenge. I jumped up on the stage and grabbed her by one arm and began pulling her away from Armstrong. I was soon joined by an attendant who grabbed the woman’s other arm. Together we pulled her backstage where Velma Middleton had been standing  waiting to go on. She thanked me and I returned to my seat and enjoyed the remainder of the concert. I learned later    that the   woman had just been released from what was probably a halfway establishment so she did have mental problems.

“After the concert, I wanted to hear more jazz so I walked down Massachusetts Ave. to the Savoy  Club. While standing at the bar I met Armstrong’s clarinetist, Barney Bigard, who recognized me as having helped pull  the woman off stage. I don’t remember who was playing that night. It might have been Edmund Hall and Ruby Braff with Crabfish Crawford on drums, or, it could have been Red Allen and J.C. Higginbotham, both groups had frequent and long term engagements at the club. For me, it’s always been a “nignt to remember.”

My  saddest experience as a jazz and big band enthusiast was in July 1986. My wife and I had bought tickets for the Benny Goodman Orchestra appearance at the Hyannis Music Tent. Goodman had reformed his band and had been rehearsing the young musicians for weeks. Unfortunately, he died days before the event. Bill Carmen, the Music Tent owner, told me that Goodman had specified in his will that there would be no “ghost band” after his death. Carmen had pleaded with the estate lawyers to let the band play one more time and they agreed. The band, led by young Ken Peplowski, was outstanding, but your eyes could not miss Goodman’s clarinet that rested on a stool in front of the bandstand. How the young musicians got through Benny’s  standard closing theme, “Goodbye,” I’ll never know.

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From Keeping the Big Band Sound Alive by Nat Hentoff, in The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 3, 2010).

Characteristically, Ms. Carr has researched, pondered and created a specific agenda for the ABBPS. It will not only provide educational clinics and master classes to students from elementary school through college, but also assist young music teachers, many of whom have not had any experience with this music but are expected to teach public-school jazz bands or music ensembles. “We plan to focus on schools that don’t have enough funding for a curriculum that would support, in whole or part, big-band education or performances,” she says.

But to bring vivid pleasure to all this orientation, the ABBPS will, Ms. Carr continues, “perform live concerts in schools, playing selected arrangements from our library and getting young people excited about this music. Kids needs to hear this music played live.”

Read the full article here or  click here to download a PDF version.