Rugolo to Join Alumni Assn. : Jazz: The principal arranger for Stan Kenton half a century ago will team up with other band veterans at the Irvine Marriott.

When Pete Rugolo steps in front of the Stan Kenton Alumni Orchestra on Sunday in Irvine to conduct Kenton’s well-known theme song, “Artistry in Rhythm,” he’ll mark an association with the band and the tune that goes back almost 50 years.

Kenton’s principal arranger during the band’s glory years of 1945-49, Rugolo penned a number of variations of his boss’s anthem.

“I did several versions of ‘Artistry in Rhythm,’ ” Rugolo, 77, said recently in a phone conversation from his home in Sherman Oaks. “A slow version, a Latin version with a lot of percussion. We did one called ‘Artistry Jumps,’ which was pretty much the same tune only done very fast.”

He’ll be a guest with an 18-piece orchestra directed by saxophonist Alan Yankee that includes such Kenton veterans as saxophonist Bill Perkins and trumpeters Buddy Childers and Conte Candoli.

It’s just the latest in a series of calls for Rugolo to perform his old boss’s music lately, calls that took him to Russia and Tokyo last year and will send him later this year to Sicily, where he was born.

“They love Kenton in Europe,” Rugolo said. “I conducted a very good group at a jazz club in St. Petersburg and they had all my music. I asked them how they got it and they said they copied it down from radio broadcasts and records.”

Rugolo, who studied with avant-garde composer Darius Milhaud after graduating from San Francisco State College, literally came out of nowhere to join the Kenton band.

“I was stationed in San Francisco at Ft. Scott (during World War II) in charge of the Army dance band there and the first few Kenton records had come out,” he said. “When I heard them, I just loved the sound of the band. I started copying the music down from the records and began writing that way; my band sounded like a young Stan Kenton Orchestra.

“Somewhere along the way I found out that Kenton was going to play the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, so while he was there I took about six of the best arrangements I had, all in the Kenton style, and went backstage and introduced myself. I asked him to try the arrangements and if he didn’t use them to please send them back. . . .

“I didn’t hear from him for a couple of months. Then one day I got a phone call from him in the barracks--’Stan Kenton calling Pete Rugolo’--and he said they had finally got a chance to try the arrangements. He said, ‘Gee, you write just like I do. As soon as you’re out of the Army, you’ve got a job.’ It sounded like a fairy story.”

Rugolo stayed with Kenton from 1945 until the bandleader broke up the ensemble in 1949. He’s largely credited with shaping the progressive sound of the group during that period.

“When I was with the band, Kenton hardly wrote anything at all,” Rugolo said. “He was just too busy. We never had much time to write; we were traveling all the time. We would get together whenever we could and he would have an idea for a song or I’d have one and we’d write the melody together. Then I’d go ahead and make an arrangement out of it.

“I’d lock myself in a room and try to do two or three arrangements in a day. We never had a chance to keep them and rehearse them. I’d write them, take them in, pass out the music and we’d record them.”

The accepted explanation of why Kenton broke up the band in 1949 was so that its leader could study psychiatry. Rugolo says it was for more personal reasons.

“I think he was really having trouble with his wife. He had a wonderful wife and daughter, and he never saw them. We were on the road all the time. We lived in buses. I believe she gave him an ultimatum and he decided to come home and give it a try. But it just didn’t work. He was so used to being in front of a band and loved it so much, he organized again.”

Rugolo was active in the early ‘50s writing the progressive concert pieces that became Kenton’s trademark during that period, but his career had taken another turn. In 1949, Capitol hired him as its New York musical director, charged with discovering and recording new acts.

“Be-bop was just starting then and I signed all the be-bop players for Capitol,” he said. “When their stars would come to New York--Peggy Lee, Mel Torme--it was up to me to record them.”

Among the sessions Rugolo put together was the now-classic “Birth of the Cool” sessions with Miles Davis’s nine-piece group.

“I heard them playing one Monday night, probably on 52nd Street, rehearsing the songs they later recorded. I liked them so much that I called Capitol and said I’d heard this wonderful group and wanted to sign them. They said, ‘Go ahead.’ You could hear everyone playing on 52nd Street: Miles would be playing next door to Art Tatum, who was playing next door to Charlie Parker.”

Still, the hectic New York lifestyle kept him from his real passion.

“I decided I didn’t have enough time to write music, and that was my main love. I came out to Los Angeles to do a Nat Cole album and just decided to stay.”

Back in L.A., Joe Pasternak hired Rugolo to arrange a jazz score for “The Strip,” a 1951 film starring Mickey Rooney as a drummer accused of murder. Rugolo continued to arrange for MGM, including the musicals “Where the Boys Are” and “Skirts, Ahoy” (with Esther Williams), until 1960, when he began writing for television. Among his television credits are “The Thin Man,” “The Fugitive,” “The Untouchables,” “Run for Your Life” and “Dr. Kildare.” He found the schedule exhausting.

“When you’re scoring, especially television, you don’t have much time,” Rugolo said. “You look at the picture on Friday and have to have the score finished on Monday or Tuesday. So I’d be working night and day trying to write good music. But there wasn’t time to make it as good as you could. They’re sitting there waiting for you to finish. I did that for 20 straight years, sometimes two or three shows a week. So I was really worn out.”

During the ‘70s, Rugolo cut back on arranging duties, being more selective in the projects he took. But he always champions the music he and others wrote for Kenton, as well as the man himself.

“People liked Kenton’s tunes, the commercial things like ‘Eager Beaver,’ more than they liked mine. When I started writing that crazy stuff, that progressive music, a lot of the critics didn’t like it because they said it didn’t swing.

“But Stan said, ‘It’s not supposed to swing. It’s a concert piece.’ He wanted modern music; he wanted jazz to progress,” Rugolo said.

“He got us away from the Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey sound, which were wonderful things, but were pretty much dance music. Stan’s heart was in modern music. And he gave people like me the chance to write it.”

Pete Rugolo appears Sunday at 6 p.m. with the Stan Kenton Alumni Orchestra, directed by Alan Yankee, and the Four Freshman, at the Irvine Marriott hotel, 18000 Von Karman Ave., Irvine. $25. (714) 553-0100.