Kenton

Stan Kenton, leader of one of the most successful jazz bands of our generation, is neither a great musician nor a great composer. But through the force of a personality dynamic enough to have made him successful in almost any field of endeavor, he has formed impressive orchestras that have produced great and important music, has presented a number of remarkably talented jazz musicians to an unusually wide audience, and has led them to new jazz horizons never glimpsed before.

He is a compelling and fascinating man, and I consider the five years I spent in close association with him among the most educational and exciting of my lifetime.

It was eight years ago that I first met Stan. His then chief arranger, Pete Rugolo, had heard about the Experiment in Jazz orchestra I was leading in Chicago and came to hear us. He invited me to a concert they were playing that night and there he introduced me to Stan. I was just twenty years old, Kenton was the biggest jazz name in the country, and I am sure I was quite overcome by hero worship that night. I had no idea that a couple of years later he would be calling on me to join him as a trombonist and arranger for the band.

Stan Kenton organized his first band in 1940 and cut some test records for audition purposes. Stan was strongly drawn towards jazz and felt that even with a small band (this first one had thirteen sidemen), within the confines of the popular song, he could create a new kind of depth and mood never achieved before. Early in 1941 the band auditioned for an engagement at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California. The ballroom manager had a choice between Kenton's organization and the band of John Costello. The emphasis on original material and jazz was a little too radical for the manager and he picked Costello, but circumstances forced a cancellation and on Memorial Day, 1941, Stan opened at the Balboa.

His brand of music was well received by the high school and college crowd that colonized the little resort town on weekends, Red Dorris on tenor sax and Howard Rumsey on bass became special favorites, and the band was an immediate success.

The popularity of the organization grew during the early Forties, but the hectic war years required numerous personnel changes. Anita O'Day, well known for her work with Gene Krupa, joined Stan along with male vocalist Gene Howard, and a young man named Stan Getz was sitting in the sax section.

By the middle Forties, Kenton's Artistry in Rhythm orchestra was winning both the Down Beat and Metronome magazine polls as the most popular band in the country, Pete Rugolo was doing the arranging, and a number of the side-men (Eddie Safranski, Vido Musso, Buddy Childers, Boots Mussulli, Ray Wetzel, Kai Winding, Shelly Manne) had become famous in their own right. Anita O'Day had left the band and in (continued on page 56)Kenton(continued from page 47) Chicago a school girl named Shirley Luster auditioned for the female vocalist spot. Stan signed her and changed her name to June Christy.

Late in 1946, on a bandstand in Tuscaloosa, playing a University of Alabama dance, Stan decided to quit.

Financially the Kenton organization couldn't have been doing better. But the band had been traveling almost continually for two years, the men were physically worn, and Stan himself was near collapse. Alter the dance, Stan announced he was disbanding, the men were given three weeks' salary and fares home.

Stan took a long needed rest, vacationed in South America, and came back with an idea for a nineteen piece concert band and a new name, "Progressive Jazz." The instrumentation was substantially the same as it had been with the Artistry band, except for the addition of Jack Costanzo on bongos, but playing jazz concerts across the nation instead of dance dates was an innovation. Sixteen concerts were booked at such established halls as the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the Civic Opera House in Chicago, Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York.

Variety headlined: "Kenton's Carnegie Hall Concert a Killer Both Artistically and at B.O." and wrote: "Kenton's success is based on his constant striving for new paths in music, his band's excellent understanding of it ... His music, filled with dissonant and atonal chords, barrels of percussion and blaring, but tremendously precise, brass, could probably be compared in the jazz field to the music of Stravinsky and Shostakovitch."

Stan played Progressive Jazz concerts through the end of 1948 and once again, with his orchestra the biggest box office draw in the nation, disbanded.

I joined Stan in 1950, when he formed his first Innovations in Modern Music orchestra. This group was different: it included 10 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos, bass, piano, 5 saxes, 5 trumpets, 5 trombones, 2 horns, tuba, guitar, drums, conga drums, and at times 4 bongos. During that bruising tour with an aggregation that numbered 42 men and a girl and which fought its way across the country in two buses in the dead of winter, I got to know Stan very well.

As the leader of a band, he has that rare ability to extract from and utilize the most valuable talents in each musician. He shapes and pats and kneads an orchestra until it is playing at the top level of its ability. And though the band is composed of many individual parts, his magnetism and personality makes that band a mirror of himself.

Some have criticized the Kenton orchestra for its blasting brassiness and sometimes overpowering effect, but this is Stan. He gets a thrill from conducting a virile, swinging powerhouse, and from hearing huge sounds, and that elation is successfully communicated to his audiences.

When he directs. Stan "plays" the band like one gigantic instrument, creating the sounds and dynamics he wants. Whenever possible, he hires musicians who reflect his thinking and his band thus becomes a projection of himself, even though his writing and playing are not dominant in it.

Stan is well aware of the dramatic appeal his appearance and the music of his orchestra have, and he exploits them to the fullest. The outstretched arms and the crashing chords have an almost hypnotic effect an audiences.

As a leader of men he is easygoing but firm, and can immediately assume command in the most trying circumstances. He seldom uses anger to control a situation, it takes a good deal to provoke signs of open displeasure in him, and when he does boil over he chooses the right moment for the right effect.

He is always careful about each man's sense of importance in the band and never hesitates to extend compliments and recognition for something done particularly well. He is generous with both his money and his time. A number of former Kenton sidemen owe him a good deal of money because he advanced them more against their future salaries than he should have, but I don't think he'd dream of asking them for it. And he will give as much time to a bandboy with a problem as he will the most valuable sideman. For example, when the dance band traveled in five cars, Stan's Lincoln quickly became known as the command car or The Flagship, and there was always a seat in it that was not assigned to anyone. That spot became a mobile psychiatrist's couch. Anybody who had troubles of almost any sort -- women, music, women, money, or women--would ride with Stan in The Flagship and talk them out with him.

Offstand, Kenton is pretty much the same person he appears to be to the audience. Unlike some leaders who change personalities like Jekyll and Hyde with the removal of their makeup, Stan's relationships with people outside his organization are the same as with those within. He somehow manages to make time for everyone, even the most boring hangers-on. The demands on his time are so great, however, that he makes the fewest possible definite appointments. Usually he allows necessity to determine his schedule, and an average day careens along pretty much under its own power.

Very down-to-earth and almost tireless, Stan is well suited to the life of a musician on the road, which continually alternates between the tension, excitement and glamor of the performances, and the tedium, boredom and terrible living conditions between: cramped into a crowded bus, eating in terrible restaurants, looking like a bum when you check in at the hotel, only to emerge a short time later, ready to go on the bandstand, a suave debonair jazzman. I have seen Stan the morning after a job looking tired, hung-over, thoroughly whipped, and faced wilh the prospect of driving 400 miles to the next town. But that night he would walk onto the bandstand, smiling, apparently fresh, confident and full of boundless energy.

He's at his best when he's tired. In the most discouraging situations, after the hardest grinds, he is keen and alive, and it is this quality that has buoyed up an entire band at times when it might otherwise have given a lethargic performance.

I think Stan probably found our European tour the most rewarding experience of his career. Preparations for the trip took a tremendous amount of time and effort, yet we continued to play jobs every night up to the day our plane took off. European promoters were eager to have him tour the continent, but he had some reservations because he'd read an account of a Paris concert at which a French orchestra played Kenton music exclusively. The audience had reacted by throwing mixed fruit at the musicians.

Stan was mobbed the minute he hit Europe--the fans were everywhere, they just wouldn't let him go.

Then, just before the very first concert, he got a telegram telling him that his father had died. Stan was shaken. but he carried off the concert beautifully. After it was over, he went out and got loaded and then re-doubled his efforts on our entire, hectic tour of the continent.

It was an exciting and an amazing tour, but a brutal one. Accomodations were sometimes miserable, the buses were bad, and we were tired, always tired, sometimes playing two concerts in a given day, and once in different countries. And it was doubly difficult for Kenton, who not only traveled with us and shared our woes, but also had to attend to money matters, placate promoters, meet newspapermen, give radio interviews, worry about keeping 18 musicians in line, and act as goodwill ambassador while we were catching some sleep.

He never made better use of his seemingly magical knack of showing up just before curtain time than the afternoon we played Fribourg, Switzerland. A minute before we were scheduled to go onstage, no one could find Stan, and the promoter was tearing his hair. In desperation he came to me and said, "Today, you are Stan Kenton!" and shoved me towards the stage. The curtain was going up and I was trying to figure out how I could convince all those hundreds of people of that preposterous lie, when in walked Stan, threw a grin over his shoulder at the audience, and gave us the downbeat.

In Paris, Zoot Sims received a standing, shouting ovation for his number, Zoot. At the Sportpalast, Berlin, a hall in which Herr Goebbels had denounced American jazz ten years before, 15,000 young Germans--many of them from East Germany--turned out for the Kenton concert.

In Stockholm, Milan, Copenhagen, Munich, and every city on the itinerary, the band played to packed halls of (continued on page 66) Kenton (continued from page 56) enthusiastic listeners. A Sunday matinee and evening concert were the only performances for English speaking audiences: American-British union restrictions did not permit the Kenton band to play in England. But when the curtain rose, more than half the audience of 7,000 which packed the Theatre Royal had come over from England. Twelve charter planes had been added to the regular London-Dublin flight. The service across the Irish Sea included a special Kenton excursion.

Stan Kenton plays piano well, but he will never be remembered as a great jazz musician. He writes arrangements for the band, but the works of the Kenton orchestra that have won the most critical acclaim were not his. It is his leadership and the ability to extract the most from each individual who works with him that will assure Stan Kenton an important place in the history of American jazz. he has assembled several bands that were excellent, integrated units, and they all bore the unmistakable stamp of his personality. A Kenton band is almost instantly recognizable because of its distinctive sound and personality and flair for the unusual.

And though no one has made much mention of the fact, Stan deserves considerable credit for the "West Coast School" of jazz that has received so much attention of late. Many of its leaders--Shorty Rogers, Stan Getz, Shelly Manne, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper, Maynard Ferguson, Howard Rumsey, Milt Bernhart, Frank Rosolino, Conte Cancloli. John Graas -- are not only Kenton alumni, but many of them located and "colonized" in Los Angeles, because that was Stan's headquarters when they worked for him. And he has not only encouraged them in their efforts, but has, in his Kenton Presents series for Capitol, recorded many of them.

Stan's devotion to music is a consuming one and though I am certain he could have made considerably more money had he turned his intensity and personal magnetism to law, or politics, or some other business venture, he has stayed with and fought for jazz since his band first began to be heard some fifteen years ago.

When the final note in jazz is played somewhere, far off, in another time, Stan Kenton will be remembered as one of those most responsible for the evolution of the music from its simple, primitive beginnings to a highly respected, serious art form.

Kenton on the Road

A jam session on a bus heading for New Orleans. Kenton's band spends much of the time on the road playing one-nighters. These photographs are of his forty-two piece Innovations orchestra; trombonist Russo is third from the left.

Jazzmen catch some shut-eye between towns; each concert is in a different city, sometimes in a different state. Trumpeter Buddy Childers dozes in foreground; vocalist June Christy is asleep two seats behind him. The big band required two busses: the "Balling Bus" carried the brass section and livelier musicians; the "School Bus" carried the string section and Shelly Manne.

At left: the bus stops to allow the men a "tire check," and above: band members check into a hotel, resulting in what Bill Russo refers to as "mob violence." After getting settled, the band spends the afternoon in rehearsal. Concerts are usually held around 8:30 p.m., then it's back to the busses and off to another town.

At left: the bus stops to allow the men a "tire check," and above: band members check into a hotel, resulting in what Bill Russo refers to as "mob violence." After getting settled, the band spends the afternoon in rehearsal. Concerts are usually held around 8:30 p.m., then it's back to the busses and off to another town.

At afternoon rehearsal, Shorty Rogers leads the band through one of his new pieces. Art Pepper blows solo and Stan studies the score; he will take over as soon as the orchestra has become acquainted with the music.

Stan Kenton leads the full orchestra through a rehearsal of Bill Russo's Halls of Brass and (below) famous drummer Shelly Manne thumps out an exciting beat. Kenton's progressive jazz orchestras have toured throughout the United States and most of Europe; these pictures were taken at a rehearsal in New Orleans where, three short generations ago, jazz was born in the streets of Storyville.

Stan Kenton leads the full orchestra through a rehearsal of Bill Russo's Halls of Brass and (below) famous drummer Shelly Manne thumps out an exciting beat. Kenton's progressive jazz orchestras have toured throughout the United States and most of Europe; these pictures were taken at a rehearsal in New Orleans where, three short generations ago, jazz was born in the streets of Storyville.

After dinner, Jazz musicians kill time on the street before the concert, talk about work and women, look over the town and some of its more interesting inhabitants.

Above, left: trammitts Bart Varsalona and Harry Betts shew off some brightly patterned shorts while changing into band uniforms backstage just before the concert, and at right: the orchestra ready to go on receives a few last minute instructions from Kenton.

Above, left: trammitts Bart Varsalona and Harry Betts shew off some brightly patterned shorts while changing into band uniforms backstage just before the concert, and at right: the orchestra ready to go on receives a few last minute instructions from Kenton.

The musicians are in their places, the house lights dim, the concert curtain parts. The weary hours of travel and rehearsal are behind them now and they are ready to perform: to play music that for many of them is almost the only reason for existing. Kenton steps forward, raises his arms, and another night of modern jazz begins.