Leaders May Die but Big Bands Never Fade Away

Glenn Miller died in 1944. Artie Shaw gave up playing his clarinet forever in 1954. Tommy Dorsey died in 1956, his brother Jimmy the next year. We lost Gene Krupa in 1973, Duke Ellington in 1974, Harry James in 1983, Count Basie in 1984 and Buddy Rich and Woody Herman last year.

Yet today their bands--or bands bearing their names--are still alive and busy.

The ongoing existence of the so-called ghost bands (as which, with the exception of Shaw’s, they all qualify) is one of the oddest phenomena of the 20th-Century music world. Never before did any performer become immortalized in this manner. To make the situation doubly confusing, some of these groups have no true relationship to their predecessors.

The Dorsey Brothers, for example, were famous as virtuosi of the trombone (Tommy), alto sax and clarinet (Jimmy). Yet the Jimmy Dorsey band has been led for decades by Lee Castle, a trumpeter; moreover, most of his band members not only aren’t alumni of the original ensemble, but for the most part were unborn, or perhaps in their infancy, when the Dorsey Brothers died.

A sax player, Frank Foster, rather than a pianist, heads the Basie band today. Glenn Miller’s orchestra is currently headed not by a trombonist but a tenor saxophonist. Earlier leaders played drums or clarinet.

Of all the ghost stories the Miller saga is by far the most remarkable: after 32 years on the road the band still tours 49 weeks a year, playing a 50-50 mix of concert and dance dates.

“The interest in Glenn’s name and his music is as strong as ever,” said Charles de Stefano, assistant vice president of the office that handles the Miller tours. “We have all the great arrangements from Glenn’s original orchestra as well as some charts from his AAF (Army Air Force) band, and some new material.

“The band always includes a male and female singer, but on some dates, they work in tandem with name vocalists--Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Torme, Teresa Brewer, Billy Eckstein, Helen O’Connell. The band has been led for the past couple of years by Dick Gerhart, who for a long time played in the sax section.”

Who leads the band seems almost inconsequential, since it is the Miller sound and style that audiences come to hear. Next March and April, the Miller organization will embark on its 22nd annual tour of Japan. Unlike most of the ghost bands, this one has a reasonably current album going for it--”In the Digital Mood,” taped in 1983 but reissued a few months ago on a CD.

“This is a real young band,” De Stefano said. “Most of the men are from the best music schools--Berklee, North Texas State, Eastman, UCLA, USC. They’re around 23 to 25 years old.”

A point De Stefano did not make was that if Glenn Miller were still leading the orchestra he’d be 84. Moreover, chances are he would have taken the library several steps beyond “In the Mood” and “String of Pearls.”

The Miller organization enforces very strict limitations on the use of his name. It is legal to announce a “Tribute to Glenn Miller,” but the phrases “Glenn Miller Orchestra” and “Moonlight Serenaders” are registered by the Miller office.

(The former Miller saxophonist Tex Beneke briefly used the Miller name after World War II but promptly dropped it until Miller’s widow decided, almost a decade later, to launch an official ensemble under the direction of Ray McKinley, who had played drums in Miller’s AAF band.)

Second only to the Miller band in ghostly longevity is the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, now temporarily inactive while its leader, Lee Castle, recovers from a heart attack. Castle was regarded as a virtual third son in the Dorsey family; after playing with Tommy Dorsey from 1937-38, he was sent by Tommy to study with the Dorseys’ father on the family farm in Pennsylvania.

“I rejoined the brothers after they were reunited in 1953,” Castle says, “but Tommy and Jimmy died within six months of each other in 1956-57 and I bought the Jimmy Dorsey name outright.

“It’s rough to find kids who can understand this music and play it right. We get occasional alumni, but the turnover is heavy. We draw mostly an older crowd, but there are always a few kids whose parents played them the records of ‘Green Eyes’ and ‘Amapola’ and all those early hits of Jimmy’s. Helen O’Connell, who was on those obiginal records, worked with us quite a bit, as well as guest singers like Margaret Whiting and Kay Starr.

“We work eight or nine months a year, and things are holding up pretty well. The band is doing some dates without me, but I expect to get the doctors’ OK and be back on the road in a few weeks.”

Also on the road, perhaps even more steadily, is the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. A trombonist named Warren Covington led the band within a year after Dorsey’s death, but since 1977, the leader has been another trombonist, Buddy Morrow, who had worked in both Dorsey bands before making a little noise with a hit of his own, “Night Train.”

“We work 47 to 48 weeks a year,” Morrow said, “and of course we keep the Dorsey hits alive--we have a Sinatra-type singer, Chuck Andrus, and we use the old charts by Sy Oliver, Ernie Wilkins and the others. We do get requests for my own ‘Night Train’ too. I’d say we play 75% Dorsey stuff and 25% what I feel like playing.”

Morrow’s comment on what he feels like playing symbolizes a problem that confronts all the ghost bands: They are locked into a style that does not necessarily represent the musical inclinations of the leader. When the great clarinetist Buddy de Franco fronted the Glenn Miller orchestra for eight years, simply because he needed the security of a weekly salary, the effect was an eight-year hiatus in his career, since the opportunities to display his phenomenal talent were severely restricted.

More fortunate is Dick Johnson, the Boston-based clarinetist chosen by Artie Shaw when, after years of persuasion on the part of a booking agent, he allowed his name to be used in connection with an orchestra using the old Shaw arrangements and some new material.

Shaw went to Boston in late 1983 to rehearse the band, and during its early months made several appearances as a non-performing leader, but in recent years he has left the direction up to Johnson. The band has been working fairly steadily but does not yet have a current record to represent it, though the old Shaw LPs (and CD reissues) continue to proliferate.

Along with the ghost groups and the maverick Shaw phenomenon, several bands have survived the deaths of their leaders by continuing to tour with many of the same musicians. The preeminent case in point is the Ellington orchestra. Mercer Ellington did not lose a single day; in accordance with his father’s wishes, he flew directly from Duke’s funeral in May 1974 to present the orchestra at an IBM conference in Bermuda. Several of the same musicians who were with him during that traumatic week are still in the band.

“This has been a pretty good year,” said Mercer Ellington in a recent interview, calling from Atlantic City, where his orchestra worked steadily for 4 1/2 months as the house band with the Ellington musical “Sophisticated Ladies” at the Claridge Hotel.

“This is the year we won a Grammy for the ‘Digital Duke’ album on GRP Records, which really helped reestablish us after a long time away from the recording studios. And last week we recorded a new album for Music Masters, using some reggae material and other new additions to the repertoire.”

The Ellington name has been kept alive through such media ventures as the recent two-part TV documentary, “A Duke Called Ellington,” and through the seemingly endless discovery of hitherto unissued material by the orchestra recorded during Duke’s last couple of decades. Though based primarily in Copenhagen (his wife is Danish), Mercer continues to spend as much time traveling as the bookings will permit. The band will be touring Japan from Oct. 10 to Nov. 13. (Where would the big bands be without Japan?)

Coincidentally, the chair of distinction is this orchestra, once occupied by the Duke himself, has been filled on several recent occasions by a young woman named Shizoku Yokoyama. “I found her in a Japanese jazz joint,” says Mercer. “She’s only about 27, but she manages to do very well with tunes of Pop’s like ‘Kinda Dukish’ and ‘Dancers in Love.’ I wanted her to do this show in Atlantic City so she could get a real indoctrination into Ellingtonia.”

Not every major figure of the Swing Era has spawned a posthumous ensemble. Though occasional tributes to Stan Kenton are presented, Kenton specified in his will that there could be no band in his name. Benny Goodman has been the subject of so many events using his name (without any official sanction) that Irving Goodman, the clarinetist’s trumpeter brother, is thinking seriously of putting a Goodman band together.

Perhaps because of the power of their personality, drummers have not yet given rise to any phantom successes. A California based promoter, Joe Graydon, has the right to use Gene Krupa’s name. He has presented some concerts using the band’s old arrangements, but Anita O’Day, heard on many of the band’s best-selling records, has yet to appear with it, and the drummer usually is Jack Sperling or some other leading studio musician. Buddy Rich’s daughter Kathy, asked whether she would consider a Rich band, said: “I’ve helped to put a couple of tributes together, but as far as a full-scale band goes, you know the problem--Buddy Rich was that whole band.”

Nevertheless, the tributes continue. Big bands led by elderly men in the names of dead men are big business, while new bands playing fresh, exciting music (such as the Toshiko Akiyoshi Orchestra, which has won countless polls) have trouble getting three months’ work a year.

“You can’t start a new band today,” says Graydon, “unless it has one of those names attached to it. There’s still a lot of that geriatric set who are totally into nostalgia. They want to hear a band--any band--play ‘Sing Sing Sing’ or Herb Jeffries sing ‘Flamingo’ or Helen Forrest sing ‘I Don’t Want to Walk Without You.’ You don’t see too many people under 65 at these affairs, and there’s a great scramble for tickets.”

What is true of “Flamingo” applies equally to “Woodchopers’ Ball,” “Four Brothers” and the other Woody Herman hits. Herman’s was one orchestra that promptly raised the “Straight Ahead” banner upon the loss of its leader. In fact, long before his death last October, the band had been directed most of the time by Frank Tiberi, who had joined in 1969 playing tenor sax and bassoon.

Ingrid Herman Reese, who for the past two years has faced the mounting problems of Herman’s enormous IRS indebtedness, his lengthy illness, and the attempt to evict him from his Hollywood home, is still helping to keep the band alive. “There’s no real money in it,” she says, but then there wasn’t even when Daddy was doing it; it was just pocket money for him.”

After six weeks off in June and July, the Herman Herd resumed touring last month and has a fair quota of dates through mid-December. Among them will be a fund-raiser in Los Angeles Oct. 28 for the Woody Herman Foundation, which since Herman’s death has been reactivated, with the help of funds from the recently disbanded National Academy of Jazz, to help musicians faced with financial difficulties.

What might be called the Rudderless Ship Syndrome has affected at least one band, the Count Basie Orchestra, since the pianist’s death in 1984. Despite the presence of the late Thad Jones at the helm, followed by saxophonist Frank Foster, the band found it could not command the sidemen’s salaries and fees for bookings fees it enjoyed during the Basie years; it has been going through a bankruptcy proceeding, but at present the outlook is brighter.

“We’re going to be back on records soon,” said trombonist Dennis Wilson, who last year gave up playing in order to concentrate on promotional devices for the orchestra. “We’re also working on a ‘Count Basie Band Suite’ project, which we hope will involve a video; and we want to step up our activity on campuses, playing and teaching.

“Our last album, with Diane Schuur, was a big hit and stayed in the No. 1 slot in Billboard for 39 weeks; but what we need now is an album featuring the band itself. You know, 10 men who are with us now--and also our vocalist, Carmen Bradford--were all in the band before we lost Basie; so it’s essentially the same sound with a lot of the same music.”

Another orchestra that has suffered few changes is that of the bravura trumpeter Harry James. Six months after his death in 1983, the band was on its way again, under the guidance of the brothers Pee-Wee and Sal Monte, who had been part of the James organization since the ‘40s.

Joe Graves was the first trumpeter selected to duplicate the James sound; a few months ago he was replaced by Art DePew, who like Graves was a longtime James sideman.

“This is a dream job for me,” said DePew, 53, who made the rounds of the big bands--Tommy Dorsey, Tex Beneke, Glenn Miller, eight years with Lawrence Welk. “I always idolized Harry’s trumpet playing. We have a good band and good music. I think ghost band is a most unfortunate term. The band is like a brand name, a guarantee of quality. It’s an ongoing sound that we’re proud to keep alive.

“I know the so-called Big Band Era will never come back, but the names have a meaning that promises a first-rate product, and we can deliver it,” DePew said. “We can reach some younger people with it and bring a lot of the older folks back into the fold. If someone asks for a waltz, heck, we’ll play a waltz. Whatever we play, it’s played with conviction and professionalism.”

Having said that, DePew left to embark on the following schedule:

Wednesday, 3 p.m.--Leave from Sherman Oaks Park.

Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.--Play date in Goleta Elks Lodge, to 11:30 p.m. No hotel in Goleta. Immediately following gig, around midnight, bus leaves for Sandman Hotel in San Jose, arriving around 4:30 a.m.

Thursday, 1:45 p.m.--Leave for rehearsal at Paul Masson Mountain Winery with Rosemary Clooney for 3 p.m. rehearsal. 7:30 p.m.--Concert, in tuxedos. Bus will not go back to motel after rehearsal. A gratis dinner will be served at the winery at 6 p.m.

. . . and the beat goes on.