Les Brown’s Band Keeps Swinging, Just Not So Often : Music: Engagements are down to 80 a year. An upcoming annual gig at Disneyland will allow the band ‘to blow out the way we like to blow out.’

When clarinetist-saxophonist Les Brown started his career, he wanted to be the next “King of Swing.”

In fact, he wished this so much that he patterned his Durham, N.C.-based Duke Blue Devils, formed in 1935 when Brown and his crew were students at Duke University, after Benny Goodman’s big band.

Today, the 78-year-old Brown may be the “King of Swing” by default. “I’m the only one (of the original swing era bandleaders) left,” he says jokingly.

Most of the remaining big-name swing bands, from Count Basie and Duke Ellington to Woody Herman and Glenn Miller, continue as “ghost bands” under the leadership of former members.

“Big band business is down. The ghost bands can’t work year-round any more,” he says. “(Trombonist) Buddy Morrow leads the Tommy Dorsey three or four months a year, the Ellington and Woody Herman bands don’t work much, though (saxophonist) Frank Foster does all right with the Basie band, but their prices are down. The other bands, like Ray Anthony or (the Art Depew-led) Harry James (band), work only a few nights a month.”

Brown, whose new album of classic standards, “Anything Goes,” is on the USA label, doesn’t get a lot more work himself. He says he averages six or seven dates a month--”about 80 a year”--in performances from San Diego to San Francisco with an occasional trip to Palm Springs or Phoenix. His Band of Renown begins a weeklong stand at Disneyland’s Carnation Plaza Gardens on Sunday.

The theme park engagement is special for Brown. He played on the park’s opening day--July 17, 1955--and has performed there every year since as part of Disneyland’s summer big band series. And while other current engagements keep the band active, the Carnation Plaza Gardens affords the band a chance to really come alive.

“I enjoy the Disneyland gig more than any other we play all year because the band can blow ,” Brown says with exuberance, sitting on the back porch of his home in the Pacific Palisades, where ocean breezes and tall pines provide an idyllic ambience.

“Actually, the only time we can blow out the way we like to blow out and play the arrangements that we recorded and the way we recorded them, full blast, is at Disneyland, or an occasional concert,” he adds. (Brown’s old hits, like 1945’s “Sentimental Journey” and 1948’s “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” are collected on the recently released, “Les Brown: The Best of the Big Bands” (CBS)).

You see, Brown doesn’t play in public that much. “We do maybe 10 dates a year for the public,” he says.

Most of Brown’s engagements are for charity, political fund raisers and private parties. A few weeks ago, he was in San Francisco, playing a Realtors’ convention, then he went down to West Los Angeles and a 25th-anniversary party for a car dealership. Each winter, Brown makes trips to Palm Springs to play a series of celebrity charity golf tournaments, including the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational, the Nabisco Dinah Shore Invitational and the Bob Hope Chrysler Desert Classic.

“We’re big on golf tournaments,” says Stumpy Brown, Brown’s younger brother, bass trombonist since 1943 and manager since 1981.

“We’ve become a society band,” Les Brown says, laughing. “I didn’t think about it like that until I went to see Buddy Rich in the hospital at UCLA before he died and he said that to me. I said to him, ‘You know, you’re right.’ ”

Playing black-tie occasions at $250 to $2,500 a plate calls for a subdued musical atmosphere, Brown says. “A lot of old bands have played these affairs without cutting (back their volume), and they blow ‘em out of the room, so they don’t get hired again,” he says. “So I have two books, one for before and during dinner and the other for after dinner. After dinner, we go back to our stuff. But by then--these things usually start at 7:30 and go to 11:30--almost everybody’s gone home, except the few people that can dance to, or remember how to dance to, our style.”

Brown has had a rewarding career. Putting down the clarinet and the Goodman image early on, Brown adopted more of the Basie flavor that made him one of the most popular bands in the country. “We were never a jazz-band band, we were a dance band that now and then played some jazz,” he says. “And we had some good jazz men in the band,” like clarinetist Abe Most and saxman Ted Nash. (Today’s band features tenorist Rusty Higgins, vocalist Jo Ann Greer, trombonist Andy Martin and trumpeter Don Rader.)

At his peak in the ‘40s, Brown worked almost year-round; in the ‘50s, he still played 200 dance dates a year in addition to TV shows (Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Steve Allen) and tours with Hope and others. He has worked with Hope since 1947, when he replaced Desi Arnaz as the comedian’s musical director. The former reed soloist--”I still play with the sax section occasionally but I let the younger guys do the blowing”--cut things back drastically in the early ‘70s, when he said “enough” to his schedule of cross-country one-niters.

After 55 years in the business, Brown still hasn’t had enough. “Hell, no!” he all but shouts, then laughs. “I’ve got nothin’ else to do and as long as I have my health, I’m not going to hang it up.”

As for the future of his business, Brown isn’t so upbeat: “Let’s face it. We’re going to fade out. There won’t be much demand for big bands soon.”

Les Brown and his Band of Renown perform Sunday through July 7 at 7:15, 8:15, 9:30 and 10:30 p.m. at Carnation Plaza, Disneyland, 1313 Harbor Blvd., Anaheim. Admission included with park admission: $20.50 to $25.50. Information: (714) 999-4565.