A Fine Arrangement

Orange County native Bill Holman has, at age 71, an international following of jazz fans. The much-honored composer-arranger’s latest album, “Further Adventures,” with the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra, was nominated for two Grammys in 1999.

With an extensive career as a studio and television arranger behind him, Holman now spends his time shuttling between Los Angeles, where he writes and rehearses a big band of top-shelf West Coast musicians, and Europe, where he writes for and conducts both the West German Radio Orchestra (WDR) of Cologne and the Netherlands Metropole.

Not a bad life for a guy who was born in Olive, now just a county island surrounded by the city of Orange, and who once played clarinet in the Willard Intermediate School band in Santa Ana.

Holman, who went to public schools in Orange and Santa Ana, isn’t all that nostalgic about the musical education he received in the county.

“Sure, we had band and orchestra and the obligatory musical appreciation course, but there were no fundamentals of music classes, no harmony classes, nothing challenging,” said Holman, who makes a rare Southern California appearance with his 17-piece ensemble at Steamers in Fullerton on Sunday. “And the education situation has gotten worse. Everybody is so flipped out about technology, there’s no money left for music budgets.”

The one thing Orange County did provide the budding young musician was the chance to hear the Stan Kenton band. “I began going out to Balboa to hear him in 1941. That--and the the fact that I started playing saxophone there--that’s what I got out of growing up in Orange County.”

That was enough. After studying engineering briefly at UCLA and the University of Colorado, Holman made a choice in 1948 to pursue music studies at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles.

He supplemented his studies with lessons in counterpoint from trumpeter-composer Russ Garcia, a technique that still marks his writing.

Stan Kenton, who, according to Holman, was looking at that time for a “more contrapuntal approach,” got wind of the ambitious young writer’s gift from a demo album Holman made at Westlake and, in 1952, hired Holman away from his gig playing sax and writing for Charlie Barnet’s band.

“I’d written a 12-tone blues--like every composition student writes a 12-tone blues--and somewhere along the line [Kenton] heard it and liked it,” Holman remembered. “That’s when it all started.”

Some of the pieces Holman wrote for Kenton, including “Zoot” and the ambitious “Invention for Guitar and Trumpet,” helped define the Kenton sound during the ‘50s. Still playing saxophone--he put the instrument aside in 1966--Holman went on to team with Shorty Rogers and Mel Lewis, writing arrangements for Gerry Mulligan, Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson.

He orchestrated Johnny Mandel soundtracks and arranged instrumental parts on recordings for such pop groups as the Fifth Dimension and the Association. He wrote for Della Reese and Pearl Bailey and earned a Grammy nomination for his arrangement of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” for Buddy Rich’s big band. He also wrote arrangements for Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable” album.

Today, Holman has largely put commercial pursuits aside, but not his opinions about the quality of today’s writing for film and television.

“You don’t see standards coming out of movies like you used to. The songs don’t exist outside of the theaters. It’s that pop-music thinking. It hits hard then fades fast.”

Holman said that he doesn’t follow popular music anymore, though there was a time in the late ‘60s that, because of his involvement with it, he listened carefully to rock.

“When I was working in the idiom, I got to like a bunch of the musicians, groups like the Band and the Rolling Stones. Today, I like Bonnie Raitt,” he said. “Hip-hop has gone completely by me.”

“What we do [with the big band] is not connected to the music business anyway,” he said dryly. “The jazz world is a tiny part of the business in comparison to pop music. The big record companies just aren’t interested anymore.”

Since his debut album in 1954, “Stan Kenton Presents the Bill Holman Octet,” the composer-arranger has released a steady, if sometimes widely spaced, stream of albums, some on major labels. The most recent of his U.S. releases--”Further Adventures” was issued in Europe--came in 1997 from JVC. “Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk” is Holman’s harmonically involved, suitably propulsive take on the great composer-pianist.

The album’s liner notes make a fuss about lessons Holman has absorbed from 20th century classical composers, including Bartok, Ives, Lutoslawski and Ligeti. But Holman, in a characteristically low-key manner, downplays their impact.

His music, he said, “is really still jazz writing. I’ve learned lots of techniques from [20th century composers], like utilizing clusters of notes instead of chords, but I don’t base my entire approach on that.”

Still, he loves working with classically oriented European orchestras like the WDR and the Metropole: “They are very enthusiastic, very interested in the music and doing it right. [In the U.S.] it’s hard to find an orchestra with that kind of enthusiasm. Most of them don’t want to know anything about jazz. They don’t want to see conductors out of jazz because they think they can’t conduct.”

While American orchestras haven’t shown much interest in Holman, American jazz musicians do. Sunday, as always, his band is scheduled to be heavily weighted with important West Coast instrumentalists, including saxophonists Pete Christlieb and Bill Perkins, trumpeters Steve Huffstetter and Bob Summers and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow. Though the band rehearses most weeks that Holman is in town, it seldom makes public appearances, because few venues are willing to take on the expense of a big band.

“Jazz clubs are a floating craps game,” Holman said. “They pop up and disappear. But we keep on rehearsing, every week, anyway.”

* The Bill Holman Band plays Sunday at Steamers Cafe 138 W. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton. 7 and 9 p.m. $15. (714) 871-8800.