HERMAN STILL THUNDERING AFTER 50 YEARS

There were two auspicious events on the night of the first Tuesday in November, 1936: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a second term, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont, and Woodrow Charles Herman played his first gig as a bandleader at the Roseland Ballroom in Brooklyn.

Fifty years and eight Presidents later, Woody Herman is doing essentially what he did then: leading an orchestra of young, enthusiastic musicians, keeping the big-band flame burning.

For his semicentennial year, numerous celebrations have been planned. The most eagerly awaited is his concert Wednesday at Hollywood Bowl, for which he will be joined not only by his present “Young Thundering Herd” but by such former sidemen as Stan Getz and Jimmy Rowles (with his trumpeter daughter, Stacy Rowles), and by Richard Stoltzman, who will take over the clarinet part originally played by Herman in “Ebony Concerto,” which Igor Stravinsky voluntarily composed for the orchestra in 1945 after hearing some of the band’s records.

Herman’s career is unique not merely because he is a survivor (at this point virtually the sole survivor, not counting the ghost bands, of the Swing Era), but also in the variety of personalities taken on by his bands over the decades. He’s always seemingly moving with the times. His personnel have included hundreds of bright young artists, dozens of whom earned individual fame as leaders or composers.

He has outlived one trauma after another: financial problems that led to the breakup of several bands, brief interludes with smaller groups and an income tax disaster. His debt to the Internal Revenue Service--at last report $1.6 million and holding steady because of interest and penalties--has been a millstone for some 20 years.

In 1977, during a typically grueling tour, he was alone in his car one night, fell asleep at the wheel and was involved in a head-on collision. Two months elapsed before he was sufficiently ambulatory to go out with the band.

A particularly disastrous year was 1982. He had attempted to establish a semi-permanent home for the orchestra at a showroom in a New Orleans hotel. Late that year, business was in a slump and the project was abandoned. Almost at the same time, in Los Angeles, Herman’s wife of 46 years, Charlotte, died after a long illness.

What he has never lost is the love and respect shown toward him by the people who have worked for him. His alumni repeat the same phrases: “He was like a father to me” . . . “He’s the finest man I ever worked for” . . . “He knows exactly how to showcase his musicians.”

What precisely is the nature of Herman’s contribution to jazz history? Certainly, it is not his individual capabilities as an instrumentalist. He has been known to say “I never was much of a clarinet player”; although this is unduly modest, certainly he could not have competed with Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw during their great years. Still, his clarinet conveys a cheerful, buoyant spirit, and his alto saxophone, clearly inspired by Johnny Hodges, has always been gentle and graceful. During the post-John Coltrane years, he revealed another aspect by beginning to play soprano saxophone on occasion.

Whatever his virtues or shortcomings on those levels, Herman has succeeded on the strength of his uncanny ear for talent, and his ability to mold it and present it under the best possible circumstances. In a conversation with Gene Lees, the editor of Jazzletter, who was Herman’s press agent in the early 1960s, he would take credit only for being a capable editor. “When somebody brings in an arrangement,” he said, “I may take letter B and put it where letter A is, and put letter C somewhere else; and I may change solos, because it will suit that particular chart better.”

Of course, there is much more to it than that. One can detect it in the musicians’ attitude toward him, and on the frequency with which they return when a special celebration is called for. At that, one wonders how he can still keep going, after all the traumas.

The other day, when asked about his ability to sustain his spirits, and the band, after so many roadblocks, he said: “First of all, I still love the music. Sure, there are some rough nights, but the good ones outweigh the bad. Of course, there’s another reason I have to go on. If I stopped working, I don’t think the IRS would take very kindly to it.”

Originally, Herman had “The Band That Plays the Blues.” It was a simple blues tune, “Woodchoppers’ Ball,” that gave him his first hit in 1939. But by the mid-1940s, a new crop of bebop-inspired youths had begun to dominate the band; out of this development came the poll-winning years (Down Beat, 1945; Esquire, 1946-47), his own sponsored radio show (unheard of for a jazz orchestra) and his first record that eventually went gold, “Laura.”

After breaking up that band and taking a seven-month hiatus at his Hollywood home, he organized what came to be known as the Second Herd. (The “Herd” nickname was suggested by the big-band expert George T. Simon.) It was also called the “Four Brothers” band, after a tune by that name by the saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre, whose use of a particular blend of three tenor saxes and a baritone sax became the band’s chief identity. Giuffre, Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Herb Steward, Serge Chaloff and Gene Ammons passed through that illustrious reed section.

The Second Herd was the most taxing of all for its leader, since those were the days when heroin was rampant among some members of the band. “Somehow,” Herman says, “it didn’t affect the music. Sure, some of the guys might be late, but then, Duke (Ellington) put up with late-showing sidemen all his life and it didn’t bother him.”

Herman’s background had not prepared him for dealing with social problems of that kind. Born in Milwaukee in 1913, the son of a successful shoemaker, he became a child vaudevillian, touring at age 9 as a song-and-dance prodigy. “That first season earned me enough money to buy a saxophone; later I got a clarinet.”

During his high school freshman year, he worked in a roadhouse until 4 a.m. (“Sometimes I’d get into trouble at school for being asleep at the desk.”) In his sophomore year he joined Joe Lichter, whose band of Chicago musicians was working at a Milwaukee ballroom. “I was 15--the youngest cat in the band by far. Finally, I left school and went on the road with Tom Gerun’s band from San Francisco. Another member of the sax section was Al Morris, who later became a singer and called himself Tony Martin.”

Joining Gerun at 17 became a sudden education in the rigors of adult life on the road during Prohibition. One night in Chicago, he and a friend were in Herman’s roadster about 6 in the morning, having dropped in on Earl Hines’ band at the Grand Terrace Cafe. At a stop light, they were accosted by three thugs. A scuffle ensued during which, as Herman puts it, “my right leg got in the way. I still have the scar where the bullet went in--and where it came out.”

While the band was in San Francisco, he met Charlotte Neste, a stunning redhead, also 17, who was dancing in “The Nine O’ Clock Review.” For six years they kept a romance going, much of it by telephone; they were married, when both were 23, on Sept. 27, 1936, just weeks before he started his band.

After Gerun, there were a couple of other band jobs before the pivotal one: In 1934, he joined Isham Jones, best known as a composer (“It Had to Be You,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams”) and leader of an excellent dance band with arrangements by the likes of Gordon Jenkins and Fletcher Henderson.

“Then Jones decided to retire, and a nucleus of five of us got together with some other musicians and organized a new cooperative group. That was ‘The Band That Plays the Blues.’ Later on, after a lot of personnel changes due to the draft, I took over and became the sole owner.”

Despite the blues orientation of the original orchestra, Herman was always on the lookout for new ideas, players and arrangers. As early as 1942, he bought some arrangements from a then almost-unknown musician named Dizzy Gillespie. One, “Down Under,” was recorded immediately; another, though its title was “Woody ‘n You,” was never recorded by the band until Gillespie himself played it on a live session taped with Herman in 1979.

During the transitional period, the band went through an Ellington phase. “Duke was always a tremendous influence on me. We used several of his men on sessions in 1943-44--Ben Webster on ‘Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me,’ Johnny Hodges, Juan Tizol and Ray Nance on ‘Perdido.’ But I suppose the most important change for us was having Ralph Burns as arranger and pianist. He was as much responsible for our sound as anyone at that time.”

One of the very first Burns arrangements, “I’ve Got the World on a String,” stood up so well that it has never been discarded from the band’s book. Burns, like the singer Frances Wayne and the bassist Chubby Jackson, who served as the band’s cheerleader, came to Herman from the Charlie Barnet orchestra.

Along with the orchestra’s modernization, fittingly, there was a changeover from the conservative Decca label to the more permissive Columbia Records. “Those were really the great years,” Herman recalls, “when we did ‘Apple Honey’ and ‘Northwest Passage’ and ‘Caldonia’ and ‘The Good Earth’ and Ralph Burns’ ‘Bijou,’ which was a jazz rumba featuring Bill Harris.” Another of the band’s originals, “Wildroot,” by Neal Hefti, was named for Herman’s radio sponsor.

Riding higher than ever, with hit records and his radio show and the Stravinsky work performed at Carnegie Hall, Herman amazed the jazz world in 1947 by suddenly breaking the band up and announcing his retirement. There were many explanations at the time, but the real reason was never printed: The constant touring threatened to destroy his marriage, and Charlotte, alone at home with an infant daughter, had developed an addiction to pills and alcohol. After she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and the marriage was secured, he ended his retirement, which had lasted seven months. In later years, Charlotte traveled with him whenever possible.

The so-called Second Herd, formed in Los Angeles in the fall, lasted until late 1949, when Herman worked for a while in Cuba with a remarkable small band that included Bill Harris, Milt Jackson, Dave Barbour and Shelly Manne.

Yet another big band, launched in 1950, was known as the Third Herd, but from this point there were so many switches between large and small bands that everybody lost count and eventually started calling the ensemble “The Young Thundering Herd.”

The Herman repertoire became more eclectic. It was not that he was a bandwagon jumper, but rather that he was interested in keeping pace with every development in jazz. When the funky trend emerged in the mid-’50s, he had Nat Pierce write arrangements of such Horace Silver hits as “The Preacher,” “Opus de Funk” and “Sister Sadie.” He has even toyed with rock, though not consistently and with less success.

The Herman library is comparable to an art gallery that embraces everything from comic strips (“Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard?”) to pop art (the innumerable versions of jazz standards and originals) and, at the other extreme, the masterworks: Ralph Burns’ “Lady McGowan’s Dream,” Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto,” Bill Holman’s “Concerto for Herd” (written for a Monterey Jazz Festival premiere) and “Variations on a Scene,” a suite by the New Zealand composer Alan Broadbent.

In 1978, one of his longtime admirers, Chick Corea, composed and arranged the three-movement “Suite for a Hot Band,” which took up one side of an album. The other side was devoted to material by Steely Dan (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen).

Just as he adapted to changes in musical idioms, Herman had to keep pace with altered conditions in the business and of music. During the 1950s and ‘60s, the dance halls, large nightclubs and hotel rooms that had provided havens for the big bands began to disappear. Herman adjusted his thinking, as well as the size of the band when necessary.

Meanwhile, other venues had come along to fill the gap: jazz festivals, concerts and college dates. The overseas market, too, had expanded tremendously.

Everything, in fact, seemed to be going along swimmingly on the surface; but behind the scenes of the “Apple Honey” band something had eaten its way into the apple, with results that almost landed Herman in prison.

It turned out that no taxes had been paid for Herman for three years (1964-66); neither had there been any payroll tax returns filed for the band during that time. The entire burden fell on Herman. Ever since then, his life and career have been in the huge shadow of an ongoing battle with the IRS.

His home, near upper Hollywood Boulevard overlooking the Sunset Strip, was seized by the government and auctioned off last year. Herman had bought it from Humphrey Bogart in 1946, and had lived there with Charlotte until her death. He is still living there, but only on a month-to-month basis worked out with the buyer.

The IRS situation had already gone from bad to worse when, laughing on the outside but crying inside, Herman celebrated the 40th anniversary of his orchestra with a concert at Carnegie Hall. It resembled the scheduled Hollywood Bowl event Wednesday in that the regular Thundering Herd was present in addition to a band featuring Getz, Burns and other alumni. Of the regular band members presented that night, only two are still aboard: Frank Tiberi, the tenor saxophonist and bassoon soloist who joined in 1969, and trumpeter Bill Byrne, a 21-year veteran.

As Herman points out, for the entire half century his orchestra has consisted largely of men in their early and middle 20s. “The band stays young,” he says. “It’s just the coach that got very old.”