THE KINGS OF SPEAKEASY MUSIC

One of the groups that knocked me out during last year’s Classic Jazz Festival over Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles was the Rhythm Kings, a 12-piece orchestra playing original arrangements from the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The most steadfast devotees of the musical past might admit that a lot of Dixieland goes a long way, and although the incidence of “The Saints Go Marching In” is down in recent years, a certain ricky-tick sameness can get to you over a long weekend.

The saving charm of the festival is that the term “classic” is a wide umbrella, sheltering a range of sound from early New Orleans to ragtime to late Chicago and later New York, pre-bop. The menu isn’t limited to cheerful corn.

The Rhythm Kings, playing those early orchestrations, have found a niche of their own. The group takes its showmanship almost as seriously as the musicianship. (The straw hats and blazers sometimes turn off thoughtful critics, who do not believe that serious musicians should look funny.)

The Kings travel with a resident emcee, four to six dancers called the Hotcha Hoofers (complete with choreographer), antique microphones, three vocalists and period apparel, including tuxedos that Paul Whiteman would have approved.

But the clear intent of the showmanship is to woo customers to the musicianship, and first and last it’s the music that matters. The quality of the playing is thrilling even to listeners who wouldn’t know a kazoo from a contrabassoon.

The arrangements are graduate exercises, calling for lickety-split tempos in the Jelly Roll Morton vein, the tone colors of the early Duke Ellington group, the lyrical, faintly melancholy cornet solos in the Bix Beiderbecke style, played by Dick Randolph. The music is a mix of high-polish ensemble work and first-rate solos, like Randolph’s.

Don Wolfe, who organized the Rhythm Kings in 1979, called to tell me the band will appear on the first two days of this year’s Classic Jazz Festival, which starts Aug. 29, a Friday, and winds up Labor Day afternoon, all at the Airport Marriott hotel.

Wolfe, a screenwriter and film editor, told me over a later lunch how the band came into being. “I’d always had a hobbyist interest in what I call Prohibition Era music, although I don’t read or play myself.” Home Box Office hired him to do some work on a gangster-era film that was in the end never made. But Wolfe had begun to research music for the film. David Hutson, who now plays alto sax in the Kings, had hold of some Duke Ellington arrangements that Ellington had never recorded, Wolfe discovered.

“We wanted to hear what they sounded like, so we started getting together with some studio musicians once or twice a month, and they played them. It was fantastic, and we said we ought to do it in a club.”

The group came together rather quickly, by a kind of musical networking, one musician recommending others with an affinity for traditional sounds. There are studio musicians and others, like Randolph, who have other jobs (he works for the government).

Drummer Timm Boatman uses a 1929 drum set, mounted on rollers, that he found in the garage of a retired vaudevillian. Boatman also plays in the Glendale Symphony.

Bob Young plays the rare bass saxophone, which alternates with Randal Anglin’s tuba. Violinist “Jimbo” Ross, a studio musician, studied with Joe Venuti and Stuff Smith.

David Pinto plays piano and is the Kings’ conductor and musical director. The group rehearses once a week and by now has a repertoire of 250 pieces.

“We’re always finding new charts,” Wolfe says. “We have a backlog of 100 at least.” Williams College, which has the Paul Whiteman estate, gave the Kings permission to play his arrangements, including the original chart (for 22 players) of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” as performed in Aeolian Hall in 1924. The Kings, augmented, played it a few years ago at UCLA. They also employ some of the arrangements the Whiteman band used to play at the Alexandria Hotel in an earlier Los Angeles.

The Rhythm Kings do a number of private and industrial parties, and had a very successful recent three-performance gig in St. Paul, Minn. But Wolfe admits that what he also likes to call speakeasy music has been a relatively slow sell, although he and the group now sense a big breakthrough near at hand.

“We’re finding that young people love the music when they have a chance to hear it. We played for the senior dance for San Clemente High at the Balboa Pavilion. It was a real risk for the people who booked us. But we led off with Fletcher Henderson’s arrangement of ‘Varsity Stomp’ and the youngsters went crazy.

“Acoustic music sounds so different. Maybe some young people have had enough electronic music. We’re not trying to do a put-on of the old music. We make it as authentic as possible--all the rhythm, all the joy and elation.”