Abe Most Will Take Another Swing at Shaw

When the “Big Band Salute to Artie Shaw” rolls into the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, it will feature some unlikely entertainers paying tribute to the great bandleader, and a clarinetist perfectly suited to the job.

The bill includes the Ink Spots led by Johnny Smith; singer Julius La Rosa, whose “Eh Cumpari,” sold a million copies in 1953; and the suited one, Abe Most, who will lead a 13-piece orchestra to back La Rosa and play a number of the hits associated with the honoree, himself a clarinetist.

The reason Most is perfectly suited to this gig is that he already has assumed the role of Shaw when he recorded tributes to him--as well as Benny Goodman and Woody Herman--for Time-Life Records in the ‘70s. “I tried to play in exactly the same way that the original musicians did,” Most said over the phone from his San Fernando Valley home. “I re-created their exact improvisations, note for note.”

When re-creating Shaw, he had a little help from the man himself. The two have appeared together in recent years: Most leads a band, while Shaw, who retired from playing in 1953, talks about the times and his music.

“We played a little medley of his tunes, and he asked me to play ‘Stardust,’ ” Most said. “I said, ‘We’re not going to do it.’ ‘Well, why?’ he asked me. And I said, ‘I don’t remember what your chorus was exactly, and I’m not going to do it without knowing it exactly.’

“Now, he can be sort of a gruff man at times, and he said, ‘Get me a piece of paper and a pencil.’ And I did, and he wrote out his ‘Stardust’ solo, the same one that he had played some 40 years earlier, note for note. When I play it [at Cerritos], I’ll play it exactly the way he wrote it for me that night.”

Most, 75, has had a long, distinguished career working in big bands and leading his own ensembles. He was born in New York (his brother is saxophonist Sam Most, who played Kikuya in Huntington Beach last year) and attracted attention as a young man, leading a combo opposite Coleman Hawkins at the old Kelly’s Stable club on 51st Street.

He joined the Les Brown band in 1939 on alto sax and did a little singing and then went on to work with Tommy Dorsey and the studio bands of David Rose, Billy May, Nelson Riddle and Henry Mancini.

Most said he and Shaw share the same feelings when it comes to the demise of the swing bands: “The way he used to play was different, in that [his and other] bands were dance bands. But eventually we came to a time when people started listening to the bands. All of a sudden, people weren’t dancing, they were listening, like in the Kenton era.

“The bands then started to play farther and farther out and eventually began playing what composers and other musicians wanted to hear. I think what the people want to hear is melody. When I emulate Artie, I do what he did: establish the melody so that when you begin to improvise, people will know what you’re improvising about.”

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Julius La Rosa said that he never worked with Shaw. “Actually,” he said on the phone from his home in Irvington, N.Y., “I was a Glenn Miller fan.

“I didn’t dislike Artie Shaw,” he added with a laugh. “But, not to sound coarse, this is just another good job for me.”

La Rosa has had a number of good jobs. He was born to Italian immigrants in Brooklyn and wanted to follow his boyhood hero, Pee Wee Reese, and become a shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “Then another hero came along--Frank Sinatra--and all of a sudden I wanted to be a singer.”

With no formal training, he sang in his high school glee club and, while in the Navy, at a bar in Pensacola, Fla., where he was stationed.

In 1950, someone urged radio personality Arthur Godfrey to check out the young singer. “He heard me and liked it and offered me a job on his show. I went from nowhere to getting 5,000 to 6,000 fan letters a week. It was like a dream.”

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In 1953, his first hit, “Anywhere I Wander,” climbed to No. 4 on the charts. It was followed by “Eh Cumpari,” a sort of Sicilian version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” progressively listing the sounds of various instruments as it goes. “Everybody loved it,” La Rosa said, “especially children.”

Several other La Rosa records made it to the charts--most notably “Domani,” which climbed to No. 13 in 1955--but he never again had a hit as big as “Eh Cumpari.”

He said that was because he didn’t have a “recording” voice: “Somebody took [a recording] to Mitch Miller at Columbia records and said, ‘You should be recording this kid.’ And Miller said, ‘The kid doesn’t have a recording sound.’

“That proved to be correct. I just didn’t have that intangible, magnificent quality that great singers like Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Perry Como all have that comes across on record.”

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But he has continued singing, and appearing on and off Broadway. He hosted a respected radio program on New York’s WNEW in the ‘70s (“I played the standards and people like Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and lots and lots of Frank Sinatra”). He has appeared on the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon almost every year since 1957 and serves as the national vice president of the Muscular Dystrophy Assns. of America. A new two-CD recording of standards is to be released this spring.

And, over the last few years, he has been working in New York night clubs and won some rave reviews. Jazz critic Gene Lees even compared La Rosa to his boyhood idol, Sinatra, in terms of phrasing and presenting of a lyric.

La Rosa brushed the comparison aside.

“All of us should bow down and say in the name of the father and the son and Frank Sinatra. He was a real innovator. He put the commas, the hyphens, the three dots in all the right places, what we now call phrasing. He was one of the first people to really pay attention to what the lyricist was talking about.”

* “A Big Band Salute to Artie Shaw” and the Gramercy Five With Abe Most, Julius La Rosa and Johnny Smith’s Ink Spots comes to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos, Tuesday at 8 p.m. $35-$22. (800) 300-4345.