ON THE AVENUES DOUBLEHEADER (2): A book about Bunny Berigan, his life and times.

ON THE AVENUES DOUBLEHEADER (2): A book about Bunny Berigan, his life and times.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I was born in 1960, and grew up during the pinnacle of the swing era – the big bands, the great bands, and the swinging years.

Well, no. Not really.

It only seems that way to me, thanks to my otherwise musically disinclined World War II veteran father’s Sunday morning habit of reliving his youth with the aural assistance of LP collections filled with the songs he remembered and enjoyed.

His only son usually was within earshot, and the rest is disjointed personal history, though make no mistake: I’m grateful for the tuneful area buzz from my youth. I love big band music. Swing led me backward and sideways, to jazz’s myriad configurations. Rock and pop predictably grabbed me, and so did classical.

The musical mash-up in my brain can get very strange at times, but the overarching point is that for someone born more than two decades after the heyday of the big bands, I carry a disproportionate weight of their epoch with me, every day.

Sadly, it’s all ancient history now. The newscaster Tom Brokaw once coined a clever phrase, and in 2017, when you’d have to be at least 80 years old to have early childhood memories of World War II, Brokaw’s stylized notion of the “Greatest Generation” is tempered by the knowledge that most of them have long since gone.

It’s actually far more nuanced and complicated than all this, though for the sake of the argument, the Greatest Generation shorthand can be accepted. As we’ve been told, these men and women started coming of age in the 1930s, when the Noble Experiment (Prohibition) was just a bad hangover, but the Great Depression ongoing and seemingly intractable.

It took a planetary conflagration to cure the economy, and many of the “greatest” became citizen soldiers, shipped abroad to slay fascism, a job they performed with requisite modesty, not to mention Coca-Cola and Hershey’s chocolate bars for the kids whose elders had sold them down the pike.

When they returned home victorious, the American Dream was made concrete reality, at least for white people during a scant period of time lasting roughly three, maybe four postwar decades. Many veterans hadn’t reached retirement age before neoliberalism became the preferred mechanism for the 1% to begin nostalgically reconnecting those profitable dots interrupted by war.

Obscene capital accumulation by wealthy elites accordingly resumed, and perhaps this is the real, recurring problem in American life – but I digress.

We might look to facets of the Greatest Generation’s upbringing for clues to its distinctive merits. One needn’t be versed in advanced psychology to grasp the importance of early life experiences in what we come to be.

In terms of population, America in the 1920s and 1930s had officially become industrialized and urban. The countryside wasn’t always sure it approved of this. For better or worse, regional differences still mattered, but owing to a number of factors, these were narrowing.

“Big” government was birthed at the time of World War I’s taxation and national security needs (arrest them Reds, now), followed by an more intrusive nanny state emanating from Prohibition.

There were no interstate highways, but a national network of roads was emerging, and the automobile brought with it seeming freedom of mobility, not yet illusory, though harboring the seeds of future suburban sprawl.

The emergence of mass media also was a huge factor in shaping perceptions during the Greatest Generation’s youth. Newspapers and magazines remained somewhat localized and were absolutely essential in conveying basic information, but the emerging mediums of film and radio seriously threatened ink-stained hegemony, paving the way for television’s collective national brain-shrinking and -washing.

In short, in the 1930s both news and entertainment were merging together as a mass-market cultural phenomenon, shared by greater numbers in ways not possible before.

Hollywood famously brought escapist motion pictures into theaters; these were new generation circuses to accompany bread lines and soup kitchens. Movies at least were still experienced communally, in a venue, with other humans.

However, one needn’t leave home to listen to the radio. It offered news, scripted comedy, religion, drama … and plenty of music.

Prior to the invention of the phonograph, culminating in “records” as we know them today, music was strictly a live performance art. Embryonic radio stations obviously played recordings, though the musical accompaniment to original entertainment productions overwhelmingly remained the domain of musicians carrying union cards, playing live during live broadcasts.

One bedrock requirement for a musician seeking such a secure and well-paid job was the ability to sight-read sheet music, quickly and accurately. Another was stringent professionalism, as there was no way of correcting mistakes. It was one take, and gone into the irreparable ether.

It was into this dynamic milieu that a young man named Bunny Berigan landed with noticeable fanfare. As with so many others, Berigan at first accepted the corporate paycheck. It brought him to the big city, but he yearned for something more.

The jazz bug had bitten him, and now jazz itself was morphing into something else beyond small groups in dingy speakeasies. The backroom combo became the ballroom big band, fusing the spirit of improvisation with the crowd-pleasing predictability of increasingly sophisticated arrangements, both at the point of origin and for a far wider audience of nightly radio listeners.

Berigan was perfectly suited for the advent of swing, quickly forsaking the remunerative safety of studio employment in the Big Apple to play in constantly touring big bands, first as a featured sideman, and later as leader of his own aggregations.

Berigan’s high water mark as a big band leader came during the late 1930s, when the swing era still was in its ascendancy. By the standards of the day, he had it all: professional respect, personal popularity, a wife, children, house and car.

But by 1942 Berigan was dead, his liver ravaged by cirrhosis, the victim of stunningly heavy drinking. Three-quarters of a century later, very few Americans remember Bunny Berigan, but for a while before most of us were born, he could do no wrong.

Even Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong thought as much.

Long after the big bands provided America’s WWII soundtrack, a Canadian named Neil Young suggested it was better to burn out than fade away. Roland Bernard “Bunny” Berigan provided a case study in how to do it, with nary an electric guitar in sight.

Berigan began as a fair-haired, corn-fed lad from Wisconsin, preternaturally talented and instinctively musical. He lived the normal Midwestern life of the time, made it through high school and dabbled at college. He was quiet and generally affable, and always regarded warmly by his friends and associates.

Seemingly destined for great musical achievements, his trumpeting skills took him to New York City, where his studio prowess can be heard, usually uncredited, briefly salvaging numerous pop songs with no redeeming qualities whatever, save Berigan’s inspired soloing.

Berigan’s trumpeting style still stands out from the era’s norm. He had the rare technical ability to play well in the instrument’s lowest and highest registers, with an amazingly burnished, broad clarity of tone. His was not the agitated attack of a Harry James. Berigan’s improvised solos were thoughtfully calculated, lyrical and “risky,” as trumpet players liked to describe them.

In fact, Berigan’s solos were as iconic in their time as Eddie Van Halen’s were a half century later, whether for Benny Goodman (King Porter Stomp, Sometimes I’m Happy); Tommy Dorsey (Marie, Song of India); or in the trumpeter’s own bands, as with his greatest hit, I Can’t Get Started.

Earlier in the year, I read a biography of Berigan: Mr. Trumpet: The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumph of Bunny Berigan, by Michael P. Zirpolo. It is one of two major biographies written about the musician; the other is Bunny Berigan: Elusive Legend of Jazz, by Robert Dupuis.

Zirpolo’s book isn’t perfect, but it’s as definitive a survey as any writer is likely to produce at this late date, when none of Berigan’s contemporaries are alive to tell the tale.

Granted, the author is far from a disinterested party, and on occasion seems happy to reprise ancient blood feuds and eager to pick a side in them, as with the big band journalist George T. Simon’s purported indifference, perhaps even antipathy, to Berigan.

Simon began as fanboy swing enthusiast, started young as a writer, and perhaps most unforgivably to his enemies, outlived just about everyone else who’d been there at the time, thereby achieving a cult status through sheer longevity.

Zirpolo also isn’t always kind to Berigan’s long-suffering wife, who wasn’t prepared for the jazz lifestyle or her husband’s infidelities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had a drinking problem of her own, and probably deserves greater benefit of the doubt.

Far more informatively, Zirpolo amply describes the entertainment industry milieu in which Berigan and so many other musicians struggled to stay afloat amid the machinations of resident charlatans, piranhas and cutthroats.

Indeed, these are constants throughout showbiz history, and perhaps Zirpolo’s greatest single contribution in writing his biography of Berigan is to settle accounts with those (like Simon) who continued to insist that the trumpeter was an indifferent businessman and a poor bandleader.

At least some of Berigan’s circumstances were extenuating. It’s true that as a bandleader during two separate stints, he was beset by simple bad luck, seemingly unable to catch a break. We know he drank too much. At the same time, he was badly served by monopolistic booking agencies, conniving managers and uncooperative record company executives.

More importantly, far from being detached, Berigan exhibited considerable skill in recruiting and drilling his musicians, constantly receiving positive reviews from the public even when cash-poor and operating at a loss, which seems inevitable given the challenging economics of one-night stands and a paucity of recording opportunities in the latter stages of Berigan’s short career.

Ultimately, the story of Bunny Berigan’s life is inseparable from the tragedy of his early death. Zirpolo cites a former Berigan sideman’s testimony that near the end, his boss was drinking two bottles of rye whiskey per day; his cirrhosis, for which the author posits a genetic predisposition, steadily worsened, and the trumpeter was broke and living out of a suitcase.

Without intervention, it was only a matter of time. Still, numerous accounts confirm that Berigan’s embouchure, chops and ability to perform remained largely intact amid this onslaught, until just before his liver finally disintegrated.

We now understand that alcoholism is a disease, and while Berigan certainly refrained from treating it, the support mechanism for sobriety had not yet come into its own. Taking time away for treatment subsequently became a rite of passage for rock stars, but societal attitudes hardly supported this approach at the time.

Berigan was left to his own devices, stuck in a moment like a hamster on a treadmill, unable to stop trying to make money even as the pace of his efforts left him increasingly indebted, with a break-even point that arrived only when he died. It’s useless, sad and infuriating, but in the end, it just is.

Zirpolo documents Berigan's life more than capably, and I recommend the book.

The music of the big band era has survived the departure of its creators and consumers, albeit as tribute rather than preference, according to the half-life that follows the demise of cultural relevance.

In retrospect, the era of peak big band in America was remarkably short-lived – ten, maybe twelve years at most. The music rose out of the Depression, reached a crescendo during World War II, and receded just as quickly at war’s end.

We can listen to Berigan’s recorded output; ponder his many might-have-beens, and imagine the musical scene long since passed. All of it, a society and culture, have been consigned to the history books.

At times it is a melancholy remembrance, though a necessary one, at least for me.

ON THE AVENUES DOUBLEHEADER (1): Listening to "Dixieland" jazz, and thinking about drinking a beer.

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As with the big bands, now with rock and roll. It's time to become an opera buff.

Already we're into the month of March. Where are the damned rock albums, already?

The sobering truth of the matter is that times have changed, perhaps irrevocably, and in spite of my best efforts to find youthful musicians hard at work to renew the music that still speaks to me like no other, it's getting harder and harder to find them.

So it goes, and there is little choice apart from going along with it.

Is Rock Still Relevant In 2016?, by Carl Wilson (Billboard)

So much of the major music news of 2016 involved death: David Bowie, Prince, George Martin and Leonard Cohen were among the legends on this year’s grim roster. Is it time to add rock music itself?

With little new of interest to me in 2017 (at least yet; hope springs eternal), I've sought my refuge in classical and jazz.

Lately, it's been big bands from their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, as accompanying my current reading: Mr. Trumpet: The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumph of Bunny Berigan, written by Michael P. Zirpolo.

That's Roland Bernard Berigan. Echo and the Bunnymen came much later.

The plan is to write a full-scale review of Zirpolo's book, which I should be concluding later today. In the interim, I'm as ever 56 going on 90 when it comes to big band music. I was raised on the big band sound. The founding generation of this genre's practitioners was gone by the 1980s, and long before the digital era, I watched as they passed from the scene, and knew the era was over.

Of course, the actual big band era (as opposed to my own) didn't survive VJ Day, but it always seemed that for so long as the giants were alive, the genre remained viable.

Bizarrely, I remember this New York Times article from August 7, 1988, which today seems like a bookend for the topic of rock as an irrelevant (dead?) genre in 2017. Someone must have clipped the article and given it to me, because I wasn't reading the NYT as much back then.

MUSIC: Heeere's the Band ... But How Much longer? by John McDonough (New York Times)

In a culture whose critical mass has nourished rock and roll for 30 years, the fall of the big bands toward extinction has been inevitable. The old swing-era infrastructure of bands, ballrooms, broadcasts and booking agencies is gone. Most of the legendary figures are dead. And now, Johnny Carson's contract will be up in September. If that last observation sounds like a nonsequitur, consider this: the Tonight Show Band with Doc Severinsen is the last, modern, full-time big band in America - and of course the last in American broadcasting. It has musical power and star power and stands today at the peak of its fame, yet its continued existence hangs by the thread of Mr. Carson's future.

Of course, Carson retired in 1992, and I made note of all this here at the blog back in 2013, so be aware: Not only is Doc Severinsen still standing at the venerable age of 89, but he'll be performing down the road in Evansville on April 4.

Doc Severinsen, left standing.

ON THE AVENUES: In the groove.

ON THE AVENUES: In the groove.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

In this particular world, "beat me, daddy, eight to the bar" is not considered an obscene utterance. 

It has been alleged that humans exercise “free” choice in our daily lives, although the decisions we make tend to be only marginally more contemplative than those pursued by our cats and dogs.

Obviously, instincts and conditioned responses carry far more weight than most of us are comfortable conceding, probably because the loftier aspirations of the human race have a way of being debased at breakneck speed by animal needs that can’t always be understood or controlled.

This is not to say that conditioned responses are universally bad or injurious. In fact, they can be quite conducive to an enjoyable, healthy and hummable consciousness.

Comes a normal, quiet Sunday morning at home, I invariably awaken with the urge to listen to music. Specifically, my subconscious demands authentic recordings of the big bands, those long-forgotten dinosaurs of popular culture that barnstormed the United States during the approximate period of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s "New Deal" tenure in the Oval Office.

In the interest of full disclosure, these recordings are neither the original 78 rpm heavyweight singles, nor the long-playing albums onto which the 78’s were transferred. My cassettes long since have given way to compact discs. As yet, there has been no legislation introduced to mandate uploading to an iPod.

Even if so, I'd decline to comply. New Albany doesn't enforce its own ordinance, anyway.

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Long after the fact, those times roughly sandwiched between the repeal of Prohibition and the Potsdam Conference became known as the “Big Band Era” and the “Swinging Years” (referring to quickened tempo, not sexual adventurousness).

The historical status of the big band as semi-official soundtrack provider to the American experience in the Second World War simply cannot be denied. When removed from proper context, a song like “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)” is devoid of meaning.

Today’s doughboys do not march off to Afghanistan or Iraq with songs like these wafting through their heads. There’s something archaic and mythical about Everyfightingman’s attitude toward WWII, resonating in tunes alternately hard-driving and softly sweet, rollicking and danceable, cockily sassy and guilelessly sentimental. Today they seem quaintly pre-ironic, and decidedly non-electric, to the jaded ears of a post-industrial country preoccupied with navel gazing and social media outrage.

To me, big bands are where the radical syncopation of early “hot” jazz came to meet the expanded instrumentation of the staidly formal middle-class orchestra. These mismatched celebrants stole off to a corn field by the roadhouse, and swing was their progeny.

A typical big band might have four saxophones and a clarinet; three trumpets and a couple of trombones; a rhythm section of piano, guitar, bass and drums; and both male and female singers. Multi-instrumentalists varied the sonic palette, as did additional vocalists, string sections, and the occasional cowbell.

Pure jazz, America’s least besmirched indigenous contribution to world culture, was present to greater and lesser extent, perhaps more so in black bands than in white, as were random symphonic touches (typically the other way around). The sum total of this music skirted American social mores, indisputably more rigid then than they are now, with swing offering a greater breadth of youthful subversion than might appear the case today, while still barely satisfying the chastity-first, prim and proper lobby.

Because the big bands tended to perform popular songs written by outside songwriters (Duke Ellington being an original and iconic exception), their unappreciated arrangers often were the true stars, taking by-the-numbers songs and rendering them into identifiable charts reflecting the individual band’s style, which is to say that Benny Goodman’s approach sounded different than Tommy Dorsey’s and Count Basie’s, even when the three bands played precisely the same song.

Soldiers and steelworkers whistled and listened, but the war itself hastened the passing of the big band era. Musicians were drafted and volunteered for service, often continuing to play for the troops overseas; some of them died, as when Glenn Miller’s plane disappeared over the English Channel.

Domestic rationing, travel restrictions and conditions on the home front conspired against touring and carefree recreation. Wartime exigencies changed people and their tastes, and as the baby boom erupted, pop culture took a wide turn. Later, when enough time had passed, big bands became synonymous with nostalgia, and now, 70 years after VJ Day, the generation embracing that nostalgia is inexorably passing.

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I grew up in a non-religious household – not irreligious, which I chose to become purely by my own devices later in life. As a child, Sunday mornings quite literally were times for rest, reflection, breakfast, the newspaper, and perhaps a spot of radio or television, but the one activity that could be relied upon was listening to big band music on reissued LPs, something instigated by my otherwise non-musically inclined father, a veteran of WWII whose lyrical flights did not customarily extend far beyond singing the Marine Corps’ hymn.

That’s the whole cosmic point: He was a Marine, WWII was his war, big band music was his soundtrack, and Sunday morning was the time to attend his personal church of Still Trying to Make Sense of It All – to reflect, remember and reminisce to a boogie-woogie beat. When he died, the Marine hymn was not what came to my mind. Rather, it was his other favorite song: “Sentimental Journey.”

That’s why at 55, I still awaken on Sunday mornings to the swinging sounds of the big bands. I don’t even have to play the CDs outright, because the songs are in my head, burned into responsive permanence thanks to all that delicious – and haunting – conditioning.

Bonus Trivia: Did you know that Elvis Presley’s first television gig was Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show” in 1956?

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Artie Shaw, a curmudgeon out of nowhere.

I'll be standing on the street corner when a car or truck goes past. There'll be a noise from somewhere -- a random sound, a child yelling or a chord produced by a squeaking load shift -- and a song just begins playing in my head.

As noted previously, any innate ability of mine to create music is limited to the point of non-existence, and yet music is with me every minute of every day. One of these days I'll awake to dead air in my brain, and know it's my time to die.

"Out of Nowhere" is not the first tune that comes to mind in the recorded canon of Artie Shaw, the swing era's resident contrarian (perhaps that's why I'm a fan). But it remains fresh and vibrant almost 75 years later, and somewhat summarizes the theory and practice of arranging during the ascendancy of the big bands. I've known this song since I was a kid, and it makes me smile when listening. It re-entered my head Saturday after a snippet of hip-hop was heard from a passing boom car. Why, I'll never know. These things come out of nowhere.

Shaw was a survivor who discarded music a half-century before his death at 94 in 2004. Apparently he was a bright, complex, narcissistic and impossibly difficult man, one whose talent has brought me a good deal of pleasure. Life remains grimly funny that way.

Artie Shaw: Swing and Loathing, by David Gates (NYT)

 ... And then, at the height of his powers, Shaw stopped playing the clarinet, walked away from the music business and spent the next 50 years busying himself with dairy farming, marksmanship, movie distribution, writing a never-to-be-finished autobiographical novel — anything except what he seemed put on earth to do. And wondering what his life had been about.

Doc Severinsen, left standing.

Johnny Carson (2005), Ed McMahon (2009), Tommy Newsom (2007) and now Ed Shaughnessy have died. Doc Severinsen is 85 years old, and was touring as recently as last year.

Carson, during his last show, in thanking Doc and the band, would lament TV's loss of the "last big swing band," saying, "To say that this band is not 'hip' is to not know the meaning of the word."

ON THE AVENUES: Killer Diller.

ON THE AVENUES: Killer Diller.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The last surviving member of Glenn Miller’s “civilian” orchestra has died.

Paul Tanner, a trombonist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra who became a prominent jazz educator at UCLA and created an unusual electronic musical instrument heard on the Beach Boys' classic 1966 hit "Good Vibrations," has died. He was 95.

Paul Tanner’s last performance with Glenn Miller came 71 years ago, prior to the bandleader joining the Army, where he formed a new military aggregation to play for the troops in Europe. Miller died in a plane crash in 1944, and 22 years later, his former employee played on a Beach Boys hit. By then, I was 6 years old, and can remember hearing “Good Vibrations” on the radio.

Will the circle be unbroken?

Mostly I grew up listening to big band records like those of Glenn Miller. They weren’t the original 78 rpm recordings, but the long-playing compilations that began appearing during the 1960’s as original listeners grew older, and a lucrative market for nostalgia came into being.

My father, who served three years in the Pacific during the war, had no musical aptitude of which I’m aware apart from singing Marine Corps boot camp anthems while mending barbed wire fences on the farm, but it didn’t stand in the way of his favored weekly ritual of playing World War II-era songs on Sunday morning.

It was music, not church. If memory serves, his all-time favorite was “Sentimental Journey,” and nothing better describes his customary mood, looking back through the years, than this choice of ditties.

Like so many of his wartime generation, my dad adored the music of Glenn Miller, who was a veritable hit-making machine from the mid-1930s through his death. At the age of 10, I could reel them off by heart: In the Mood, I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo, American Patrol, Tuxedo Junction, Elmer’s Tune, Moonlight Serenade and Chattanooga Choo Choo, among others.

As for the latter, Miller’s big band era counterpart Artie Shaw – an irascible, erudite and unrepentant curmudgeon who died at 94 in 2004 – once said, “Glenn should have lived and Chattanooga Choo Choo should have died.” Shaw’s bon mot reflects a certain annoyance among jazz and swing purists that Miller’s work was overly commercial, and it may have revealed the clarinetist’s own dissonance; he, too, led a military band into war zones (Pacific Theater), but survived into old age, seldom revered. Miller never had to face the post-war shift change in popular music taste, which already was killing the big bands before the war killed Miller.

In short, James Dean wasn’t the first American cultural icon to die young and stay pretty.

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For the longest time, I was unable to square my dad’s attachment to this music with those three years of duty as a Marine gunner aboard the USS Washington. How can music elicit nostalgia about the dangers of combat on the front lines? What’s more, how could such sweet and innocuous music ever have transferred psychologically to a battlefield in the first place? Isn’t fighting about anger? For soldiers in Vietnam to have the Doors, and during the Gulf War to be thinking about Metallica, makes perfect sense – but Moonlight Serenade?

At some point, I finally understood that nostalgic memories like my father’s almost always exclude what was bad about the past, all the better to focus with total recall on what was good; seeing as the whole idea back in the day was to get home alive so there’d be the time needed to grow old, it strikes me that nostalgia usually references the strength, vitality and unlimited horizons afforded youth. Those are the things we miss the most.

While I try to resist the nostalgic temptation, it’s clear that when more of life lies behind you rather than ahead, you understandably enjoy the reverie of recalling when the chronology (joyously) was the other way around, even if nothing can be done to facilitate a reversal at this late date. Hence the old, outdated music, from Genesis to Replacements, still spinning in my own head today as I try to make sense of my 1980s travels in the East Bloc, almost a quarter-century after the Wall came down.

At least it was just a “cold” war.

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The central point here is that thanks to my non-musical father’s musical obsessions, I carry the legacy of the big band period with me always, and when I say “with me,” it’s purely literal in addition to metaphorical. He couldn’t have known it, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain it as a child, but music has been a constant presence with me for as long as I can remember, in spite of my not possessing a shred of vocal or instrumental aptitude apart from frightening the cats while singing while in the shower.

Does whistling qualify as music?

And so music plays in my head every single day. Glenn Miller had a hit song called Juke Box Saturday Night, but with me, it’s Juke Box All the Damned Time. Music plays in my dreams, and the random song generator pops into place when I awaken. In my personal episode of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone,” it’s a given that when the music finally stops playing, I’ll soon die. Thus, it’s axiomatic that the music … the show … must go on.

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At some point during my teens, it was a late summer’s night in Southern Indiana. The windows were open, it was warm outside but with a slight nip in the air, and leaves just on the cusp of turning were rustling amid a breeze in the woods. The song in my head as I lay in bed was “Manhattan Serenade,” in all respects a forgettable pop song, circa 1942, as performed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with Jo Stafford on vocals.

For whatever reason, something just clicked. Surely it was a coincidence. Probably I was ready to contemplate mortality in some way I hadn’t previously, to imagine an anonymous song, a lost era, a pastoral scene and my own tombstone in a cemetery filled with hundreds of others – the whole, huge, meandering procession of history; somehow grafting the chairs lined up in “Our Town” onto my brief lifespan, the unfulfilled hopes and dreams, the fears and uncertainties arranged like books on a shelf, and basically, momentarily, glimpsing a small bit of the finality of death.

It was confusing, wistful and melancholy. Oddly, it wasn’t debilitating. Rather, it may have been my first exposure to the quality known as the elegiac; by definition, a sacramental summary of what has passed, offered by the living looking backward.

The whys and wherefores are not clear, only that it’s something about Paul Tanner’s wire service obituary, following on the heels of a recent week delving into the Glenn Miller CD archive, while thinking about where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the music still playing all the while. It rouses the elegy gene, and here we are, ruminating ... in the elegiac mood.

Moonlight Cocktail? Need a few.

Alvino Rey has nothing to do with the Andrews Sisters.

When I heard that news that Patty Andrews had died, a song by the Andrews Sisters immediately came to mind.

Not. Problem is, upon closer examination, the song I remember from youthful listenings to my dad's big band records wasn't performed by the Andrews Sisters at all. It was the King Sisters ... performing a capella.

There likely would have been the customary instrumental backing of the day, except it was the period of the American Federation of Musicians strike (1942-44), when union musicians were banned from recording.

The song itself was a hit in 1944, and it's hard to imagine a more prescient pop song. Thanks to wartime industrial growth, California was about to explode in every imaginable way, and the San Fernando Valley epitomized the suburb. It was less than two decades until the Beach Boys, and soon afterward, Charles Manson.

The story of the King Sisters is interesting, too. One of them married the bandleader Alvino Rey, who was an unheralded pioneer of the electric guitar; two of their grandchildren are Win and Will Butler of the indie group Arcade Fire.

Alvino Rey’s Musical Legacy

Today's Tribune column: "In the groove."

In this world, "beat me, daddy, eight to the bar" is not considered obscene.

BAYLOR: In the groove

On a normal, quiet Sunday morning at home, I invariably awaken with the urge to listen to music. Specifically, my subconscious demands authentic recordings of the big bands, those long-forgotten dinosaurs of popular culture that barnstormed the United States during the approximate period of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s tenure in the Oval Office.

Tommy Dorsey and the meaning of life.

I remember being awake on a windy evening in spring, listening to the new leaves rustle through the open windows, and hearing the song “Manhattan Serenade” in my head, as performed by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. It’s a forgettable pop tune by almost any standard, but for whatever reason, in the mind of a ten-year-old, it prompted thoughts of life and death and ultimate meanings. I’ve no idea why. It just did.

Which is to say that it isn’t necessary for me to Google the name of Tommy Dorsey to know who he was.

More than fifty years after Dorsey’s death, a big band stocked with younger musicians bearing his name still tours the country, playing tunes that the famous bandleader made famous during his heyday in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The band is playing two Mother’s Day shows this evening at the Speakeasy, and my wife and I will be escorting my mother to the first of these.

Back in the day, Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra was in the upper tier in terms of visibility and record (78 rpm) sales. Before and after the period of his greatest success, he worked alongside his brother Jimmy, and these were volatile working arrangements not unlike those of the Robinson (Black Crowes) and Gallagher (Oasis) brothers of the current age.

It’s often forgotten that Elvis Presley’s first network television exposure came on a show hosted by the Dorsey Brothers.

Tommy Dorsey played in the studio with Bix Beiderbecke, did credible Dixieland with his Clambake Seven side project, hired some of the period’s finest sidemen (Bunny Berigan, Ziggy Elman, Buddy Rich and arranger Sy Oliver), and provided Frank Sinatra with the model for the young singer’s breathing technique by virtue of his own approach on the trombone. Dorsey was acclaimed for his “sweet” ballads, but the “swing” numbers rock hard, even today, seventy years after some were rcorded.

My exposure to the big band phenomenon came very early in life, at the behest of a father who had no musical skills whatsoever, but forever associated the music with his youth, and more importantly, the period of his wartime experience in the Pacific theater. My dad’s favorite was Glenn Miller, but I came to prefer Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw among the famous white bandleaders, reserving my ultimate accolades for Duke Ellington -- genius not so much as performer as a songwriter.

Miller always was a bit too calculated and commercial for my tastes, and his legacy as synonymous with the “Great Band Era” primarily owes to an untimely death while serving with the military in Europe. The other bandleaders mentioned here were jazzier from the start, and also lived to preside somehow over changing tastes and the decline of the genre, which has survived, albeit at the fringe of the listening public’s imagination.

No matter. Big bands remain embedded in my consciousness, even if genetics doomed me to as little musical comprehension as preceding generations of the family. Tonight at the Speakeasy there’ll be food, wine and merriment, and I hope my mother enjoys it. However, I’ll be thinking about Tommy Dorsey, the long forgotten “Manhattan Serenade,” life, death and ultimate meanings.

After all, it’s a long tradition inside melancholics like me.

In the Mood: Saturday at the Speakeasy with the Glenn Miller Orchestra ... and more than a few ghosts.

(Noon update Monday: Here's the Tribune's Monday web "extra" coverage: Speakeasy opens with a bang)

"The clarinet lead, handsomely intoned by Wilbur Schwartz, and the swaying melody pinned to the first beat of each measure evoke a vanished age, even for those who never knew the age."

--Gary Giddins, on Glenn Miller’s original recording of “Moonlight Serenade.”

The Speakeasy’s grand opening was Saturday night, and as many readers probably already know, the Glenn Miller Orchestra played two sold-out shows. With only three “soft” work days under their belts, Brad, Lori and the staff at Speakeasy were setting the bar fairly high by hosting such an auspicious event so early in the game, and they performed admirably under extreme pressure. There were a few problems, but I think most in attendance understood the situation and gave the Speakeasy high marks for attempted difficulty.

Hang in there, guys.

There has been an authorized touring version of the Glenn Miller Orchestra since 1956. The 2007 edition is again being led by Larry O’Brien, who has been at the orchestra’s helm since 1988. The band’s members are youthful virtuosos, stubborn jazz aficionados, and graduates of music schools nationwide. On Saturday evening, O’Brien graciously showcased trombonist Chris Fortner, a Floyd Central graduate who brought his area fan club for the 9:00 p.m. performance. The veteran O’Brien observed that it was one of the few times that audiences were not bewildered by mention of “Floyds Knobs.”

Fortner merely played brilliantly.

Judging from the listing of tour dates at the orchestra’s web site, most of the band’s shows these days are in concert hall settings. The Speakeasy’s gig was described as a dance, and that’s considerably different. The music originally performed and perfected by big bands was designed to serve as entertainment in venues where drinking, laughing, eating and dancing were part of the expectation of those in attendance. In old air checks from the golden days, you can hear glasses clinking and conversations humming during the brief silence between songs. You can almost hear the cigarettes being smoked.

The atmosphere was like that at the Speakeasy for the Glenn Miller Orchestra on Saturday night, minus the tobacco smoke (malfunctioning kitchen vents are another story), and I was very happy for the informality of the evening. Formality would have been too much. Sunday was Father’s Day, and my dad, who died six years ago, was a Glenn Miller fan without equal. Obviously, to me, there can’t be one without the other, so here’s a bit more about the music in context.

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Long before teenagers in suburban bedrooms played “air guitar” to Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen, there undoubtedly were “air trumpet” displays in the vicinity of crackling urban household radio sets, with young fans patiently waiting for the end of FDR’s fireside chat to listen for the sophisticated big band arrangements aired live from clubs and ballrooms, knowing by heart when the solos from Ziggy Elman, Bunny Berigan, Roy Eldridge and dozens of others would come blasting through the damp night, to be imitated and admired.

It was all the norm during the Swing Era, or the Big Band Era, or any other convenient phrase coined long afterward to describe a pervasive phenomenon whose zenith was long ago, short-lived and very far away from the present time of computers, terrorists and global warming. Thankfully, the art form is being kept alive today by sturdy traditional practitioners like the 25-year-old players and 74-year-old musical director currently inhabiting the Glenn Miller Orchestra, which does 300 road shows a year.

Many theories have been advanced purporting to explain the demise of the “big bands,” from transportation costs to technological and communications advances. Truth is, the world just went and changed, but one of the beauties of today’s niche-driven marketplace is that there’s still an audience for big band music, which is at its most vital performed live before an enchanted local audience.

These musical aggregations, which combine elements of small group improvisational jazz with the more formally scored tradition of symphonic bands, enjoyed their golden age in popular culture from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II. During the post-war era, big bands barely survived, being supplanted first by a greater emphasis placed on individual vocalists, and then later by various tsunamis of rock ‘n’ roll, pop and country, and the myriad cultural diversities of an ever smaller planet.

Big bands never really went away, but their pulse grew very faint as time inexorably marched, and generations of people who played the music or knew it as their own sadly passed from the scene.

To my mind, the “big band era” in America did not truly end until May, 1992, when Johnny Carson departed from the “Tonight Show.” He took with him Doc Severinsen’s “house” big band, which was the last regularly broadcasted link with the halcyon days of Miller, Shaw, Goodman, Ellington and Dorsey, a sound accessible weekly to any person with a television set and rabbit ears. During the fifteen years that have followed, big bands have gone from being an active memory for many in the populace to occupying a status somewhat in line with Civil War re-enactors, who are charged with making ghosts relevant and educating those who aren’t in the know.

How many people under the age of 50 know that Glenn Miller abandoned the music business at his band’s commercial peak and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942? That Miller subsequently organized a military orchestra that eschewed his trademark civilian arrangements for jazzy reworkings of stodgy marching band music, annoying hidebound military traditionalists and entertaining hundreds of thousands of Allied troops overseas? That Miller’s airplane mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel in December, 1944, with the wreckage never located?

The author is 46. I knew all about Glenn Miller, his music and the songs and stories of the big band era courtesy of my father, for whom these numbers and legends were the soundtrack accompanying his military service in the Marines in the Pacific Theater from 1942 to 1945. Growing up at the tail end of the baby boom generation, I spent countless Sunday mornings listening to long-playing 33 & 1/3 compilations of big band swing – “sweet” ballads, “hot” orchestral charts, novelty tunes, and the radio fodder of wartime.

It was almost more fun watching my dad listen, tapping his feat, with songs like “Sentimental Journey” or “String of Pearls” prompting stories and memories of the time in his life when he was a part of something far, far bigger than himself. He came back home after it was over, lived his life by his terms, worked six days a week, and relaxed on Sunday morning over sausage, eggs and Glenn Miller … and usually went back out for more farm work on Sunday afternoon.

That’s a hard habit to break (the music, not the fence mending), and the tradition lives on in the Confidential household on most Sunday mornings, albeit without children present for instruction. For this reason, I’m depending on readers to pass this information along to someone younger, and perhaps even join in listening to a few of the standards like “American Patrol,” “In the Mood,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000, or one of my signature songs for late at night, “Serenade in Blue.”

I can loan you the CDs.