Jumpin' Punkins.

For at least a few days, my posts are going to be identified by song titles. These will not necessarily have anything to do with the content of the post. However, this one does.

This version of "Jumpin' Punkins" is included in a 3-disc compilation, "The Blanton-Webster Band", which was released in 1990. Of course, it's digitized now. I've owned these CDs since around 1995, listening to them literally hundreds of times (again last week), and still I hear new bits. The period was Duke Ellington's creative zenith, almost every song is essential, and I'll always look to music, art and literature for inspiration in whatever business I'm pursuing.

Other people read spread sheets. Fuck that.

Mercer Ellington wrote Jumpin’ Punkins (1941) after being asked by his father, Duke, to join the band as a writer. It is believed that even though Mercer composed several compositions during this two-year period, Duke actually arranged this chart for the Ellington Orchestra himself. This accounts for the near perfect adherence to many stylistic concepts of harmony and voicing used by Duke during this period. This composition also contains the swing feel and style of many other Ellington Orchestra recordings of this time. The parallel voicing of the chromatic clarinet and baritone sax melodies are very refarm-near-me/">miniscent of many Duke Ellington compositions. The 32 bar form with a 20 bar interlude has blues and dance feel as its major focus. Still, the main emphasis of this composition is to showcase the greatness of the individual performers in the Ellington Orchestra including Duke Ellington on piano, Harry Carney on baritone sax, Jimmy Blanton on bass, Barney Bigard on clarinet, and Sonny Greer on drums. It seems obvious that this composition was specifically written for the dance era because of the traditional dance swing rhythms employed throughout, yet it is also a great vehicle for soloists.

Classic jazz solos by Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster at Swing & Beyond.

I've been enjoying the archives at Swing & Beyond.

This blog will showcase the music, history, and images of the swing era (roughly 1935-1950). It will also include material from from years both before and after the swing era, because Swing is a rich musical tradition that endures to this day. Here you will be able to listen to and learn about some of the greatest music in the swing idiom, and in other compatible musical idioms. Your guide will be jazz historian and author MICHAEL P. ZIRPOLO. His commentary will accompany whatever is posted, and it will inform and stimulate discussion. Once the music and Mike’s commentary have been posted, the forum will be opened to your comments, questions, and insights. The objective of this blog is to share the music, history, and images in the swing idiom, and seek a deeper, richer understanding and appreciation of what swing is, and why it is so great.

Zirpolo is a familiar name. He wrote the book on Bunny Berigan -- one of them, at least.

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

Following are three of Zirpolo's blog posts at Swing & Beyond, each of them breaking down a particular song featuring legendary tenor saxophone solos.

“Lady, Be Good” (1936) Lester Young and Count Basie

“Body and Soul” (1939) Coleman Hawkins

“Cotton Tail” (1940) Duke Ellington and Ben Webster

Not many rock and pop releases of interest to me have been scheduled for the remainder of 2018. I'll be combing the usual sources of information lest something choice has been missed. Otherwise, the winter months are prime time for jazz and classical music.

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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Recent columns:

July 13: ON THE AVENUES: Using Deaf Gahan’s dullest razor, we race straight to the bottom of his hurried NAHA putsch launch.

July 6: ON THE AVENUES: Beercycling with or without Le Tour.

June 29: ON THE AVENUES: Back in the USSR, with my old friend Barr.

June 22: ON THE AVENUES: Train Whistle Reds, or my journey from Budapest to Moscow by rail in June, 1987.

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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July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Homegrown New Albany, but not in a good way.

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ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2011, Part One.

ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2011, Part One.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Part two here)

There’s no use in pretending.

Ear X-tacy’s demise is metaphorical, and the game of contemporary relevance in musical taste is almost certainly finished for me. In terms of chronology, I’ve effectively pole vaulted the shark.

Perhaps this state of irrefutable old fogeyism owes as much to technology, and my ongoing refusal to embrace it, as to any other single factor. I fail to utilize the handy mechanisms that currently exist to convey packaged music to waiting ears. I’ve no Sirius, Pandora or Spotify, and not a single song is stored on my phone or computer. You might as well bring on the 8-tracks.

Glancing at the year-end lists in the media, I’m struck by how few of the artists are familiar to me. Needless to say, I’ve heard next to none of their songs. Of those managing to strike a chord in my comfy hermetic world, most came from listening sporadically to Louisville’s 91.9 FM throughout the year.

Perhaps my current feelings mirror those of an imagined, long-forgotten devotee of the “swing era,” watching Elvis on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show in 1956, and asking himself: What on earth compelled these two dependable veterans of hot jazz, sweet pop and the Lindy Hop to feature this pouty-lipped, swivel-hipped kid from Memphis? It’s not unlike the words Archie and Edith once sang:

And you knew who you was then
Girls were girls and men were men
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again

In point of fact, my parents raised me on these very same big bands, but when those LPs were safely put away into their dust jackets, I liked to retreat to my room to fiddle with the AM radio dial. That’s where I heard the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Doors and Beach Boys somewhere behind the pervasive static.

My conversion didn’t transpire overnight, but in due time, an immersion in rock and pop music blindingly occurred. Now it seems that rock’s dying, if not already buried, and pop is submerged somewhere beneath hip hop, electronica and a slew of performers whose names I don’t even know how to pronounce correctly, from Gaga to Kanye to Beyonce.

Still, I try mightily to resist the temptation to slip permanently into the illusory trance of the past by listening exclusively to my old favorites. Balance is difficult, but always sought. My goal remains to find the next rock band that speaks to me like the Who’s Quadrophenia did – except now, today, in the present tense. Is there music to help me feel the way I did when I was younger, when certain songs were magical talismans, and lengthy periods of life were defined almost exclusively by what I happened to be hearing at the time?

Alas, perhaps all that raw adrenalin has left the building for good, and I’m not actually supposed to feel transformed any longer. Increasingly, the daily memo suggests that instead of running over there and listening to one hugely transformative power chord, I should slowly walk, and try to absorb the subtleties of many types of different music as possible.

This I do, and yet it’s too bad the old-fashioned thrill seems gone.

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In 2011, I finally installed ad-hoc audio in my office. While assuredly not made of wax cylinders, it is late model, but aurally suitable for CDs and radio. Laboriously, and over time, most of my compact discs have been hauled home from work, and accordingly, I’ve been delving back into the classical, jazz and world music collections.

Classical

The Baylor household will remember 2011 as the year we completed our long-term, chronological viewing of all eleven seasons of M*A*S*H on DVD, culminating with the series’ enduring, final episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.” In it, Major Winchester endeavors to teach Mozart to captive Chinese folk musicians. It is the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581, and it was lodged in my memory for quite some time.

The available collection includes at least a dozen compilations of music from the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, which hold an enduring fascination. I turn back to them frequently, but cannot pick one above the rest. Of slightly more recent vintage is Music for Egon Schiele, a 1996 release from the group Rachel's. It was scored as music for a play about the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, a great personal favorite.

Across the seasons, binding 2011 together for me was a multi-disc copy of Shostakovich’s complete string quartets (1-15), which occupied numerous early mornings of solitude, writing and espresso. This is “chamber music” of a high and inspiring order, and a sublime artistic achievement.

Jazz

I must confess to it being a sub-par year for me in terms of jazz listening. Local favorite Dick Sisto’s sole appearance at Bank Street Brewhouse was a high point, as was digging out the Smithsonian’s Big Band Renaissance compilation for repeated listening. Seeing Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris produced a scramble not for Cole Porter, whose music is pivotal in the narrative, but Sidney Bechet, the virtuoso soprano sax player who, like many African-American musicians, sought refuge from racism in France.

World Music

Three archival releases spoke to me in 2011.

To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929 … A three-CD gathering of tunes recorded during the early 1902’s in New York City by immigrants of numerous nationalities, who came to America from the collapsing Ottoman empire. Spellbinding.

Bossa Nova: Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s … a wide-ranging look at bossa nova as a pathway from samba to jazz.

Funky Frauleins, Vol. 2 … West German female pop performers, also from the 1960’s, doing original material and some crazy covers, like “I Dig Rock and Roll Music.”

Esoterica

It’s the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, and to observe it, there is Songs of the Civil War, which I first examined in July: Civil War songs: "I’m a Good Old Rebel," but assuredly not like this. I never grow tired of these robust, poignant, devotional and confrontational tunes.

(In Part Two next Thursday, it’s from Booker T to Twilight Singers to Wild Beasts, all in the year 2011)

Thinking about Bunny Berigan.

Fox Lake, Wisconsin, lies north of Madison and Milwaukee, roughly equidistant between the state's capital and largest city. It's where the swing era trumpeter Bunny Berigan (1908-1942) grew up and is buried. Each May, the town hosts a Bunny Berigan Jazz Jubilee honoring the memory of its most renowned former resident, and although I'd love to make it to the jubilee some day, it's more realistic to imagine visiting during our annual August excursion to Madison for the Great Taste of the Midwest.

I intend to do this, maybe even next year.

As the years pass, the brief period of Berigan's pop music primacy recedes ever further from active memory. Could there be more than a handful of people still living who heard him play in person? And yet, as with all historical occurrences, there remains a stubborn human instinct, at least among some, to keep a living record of what's dead and gone. In the case of Berigan and other musicians of his time, we are fortunate that the record includes recordings like this.

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.