Sunday Morning Vinyl

Record: Big New Herd at the Monterey Jazz Festival
Artist: Woody Herman
Released: Atlantic Records, 1960

For the second week in a row I'm writing about a live performance recorded at a jazz festival. Last week it was Duke Ellington at Newport, and this week it's Woody Herman at Monterey. The Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals are unquestionably the biggest and most storied music festivals in America, so it's no surprise that so many of the greats have released recordings of their performances at one event or the other, and also no surprise that so many of those recordings are in my father's collection.

There's essentially zero chance that I'll ever make it to Newport, Rhode Island, and even though it's possible that I could head up the coast one summer to Monterey, the event I'd truly love to check out is the Detroit Jazz Festival, held annually on Labor Day Weekend. I've even got a cousin who sometimes performs there, so there's really no excuse not to make the trip. Someday. 

But back to Woody and his band. Herman had taken to referring to his orchestra as a "herd" rather than a band, due in part to the fluidity of such groups. For this festival the herd included many of its usual members, but they also added a few guests from the nearby San Francisco Symphony. According to Ralph J. Gleason's liner notes, Herman remarked, "I wish I could take this band on the road!"

The result is some of the most listenable jazz you could ever find. It's not bland background music -- there's plenty of substance here -- but it isn't challenging. That's hardly a criticism. 

We choose our music with a purpose in mind, creating a soundtrack to fit the moment. In my early twenties, when I was regularly making the six hour drive between L.A. and the Bay Area, for example, I had a playlist of CDs designed to keep the energy up during an otherwise monotonous trek. Some genres work well as the background for a study session, while something else might fit for an evening with friends. 

There are even differences within genres. Charles Mingus demands your attention; Woody Herman says, "Don't mind us. We'll just be over here having fun if you want to listen." And it's the fun that shines through in this live recording. As one solo is passed to another, all the expected instruments have their moments -- a trumpet here, a saxophone there. But there's also Woody's clarinet as well as Vic Feldman's vibraharp, a warmer relative of the xylophone. Because it's a live performance -- and not just remixed versions of what was played that afternoon and evening in Monterey -- we can often hear the band members shouting encouragement to one another. (Gleason also writes that we can even hear a plane buzzing the crowd at various points, but I can't quite make that out.)

Gleason closes his notes by explaining that "Monterey was a gas for musicians and fans alike." We spend the time and money to go and see our favorite bands in concert precisely because "it's a gas." Cuing up the music and singing along at home to our favorite tracks is one thing, but being part of a crowd waiting for something unexpected to happen is something completely different.

Sometimes the venue matters. My wife and I went to see one of her favorite bands, the Shins, in a small club several years ago. There might've been five hundred people there, and the setting was so intimate that we could hear conversations between the bandmates between songs and comments from some of the superfans who predicted upcoming numbers based on which guitar the lead singer grabbed before heading back to the mic. I remember seeing the English Beat with a friend in an even smaller venue on the Sunset Strip; the crowd was so small that frontman Dave Wakeling opened the stage for any of the women, soccer moms all, to come up and dance as he played "Tenderness." 

But somehow that joy of the performance isn't lost when the venue gets larger, it only changes. There's nothing like the collective explosion as an arena crowd hears the opening chords of a favorite song or sings along with the chorus. I saw U2 at the Rose Bowl several years ago, and even though our seats were roughly 200 yards from the stage, there was still a connection as one hundred thousand of us shared our voices with Bono as we sang the songs we'd been singing alone in our cars for the past twenty-five years. It was magic.

There might not have been any dancing on the stage on October 3, 1959, in Monterey, but there's no doubt the crowd that afternoon and evening arrived with the same expectations of concert and festival goers anywhere. Perhaps that's why we see only Woody Herman's silhouette on an album cover that's dominated by the crowd, row upon row of fans that say something significant about the era. Many of the men are wearing dress shirts and ties, and a few are even in suit jackets. There are hats everywhere with a few programs serving as makeshift visors, and those who aren't wearing sunglasses are squinting into the sun. If it were Woodstock or Lollapalooza or Coachella there'd likely be a lot more skin showing, but on some level a festival is still a festival. 

The panorama of the crowd does bring up another issue that I've written about before. There might be two hundred faces in the photo, but only four of them appear to be Black. Granted, this was Monterey, California, and a picture like this taken in Chicago or New York or Detroit might've looked a bit different, but this was still 1959, a time when jazz musicians, both Black and white, were playing for predominantly white audiences like this one. So maybe this was more like Coachella than we might think.

Side 1
Four Brothers
Like Some Blues Man
Skoobeedoobee

Side 2
Monterey Apple Tree
Skylark
The Magpie

Record: Woody's Winners
Artist: Woody Herman
Released: Columbia Records, 1966

I have thoughts about the clarinet, so I hadn't been looking forward to this record. I started playing the alto saxophone in the fourth grade and continued through high school with two notable detours. I played baritone sax for a bit during the eleventh grade, but back in elementary school I tried clarinet. 

I had been playing saxophone for two years at that point, and I was beginning to think of myself as more than just a sax player; I wanted to be a "musician." It's amusing to think about the level of delusion necessary for a ten-year-old to think such thoughts, but there I was. I knew that true musicians played multiple instruments, so I couldn't just focus on the saxophone. I needed to diversify my skill set. I'm not sure why I chose the clarinet, nor am I sure how I convinced my parents to buy me a new instrument when an old one was already sitting in my room, but somehow I managed the trick. That year I even auditioned (twice) for the district honor band. I missed the cut with my clarinet, but made it with my sax, so I actually played both instruments that year.

It's a cruel thing to put a clarinet into a child's hands. First, it isn't very cool. If my wife is reading this, she likely just spit her coffee all over the screen; I understand that "cool" is a very relative term. But there is a clear hierarchy in the world of elementary and middle school band. What's always been interesting to me is that while the band kids are typically on the fringe of the overall school society, the social structure of the band often mimics what's going on in the larger school. The trumpet, flute, and percussion sections are filled with the cool kids. The clarinet section? Not so much. (Quick but important side note: band kids are some of the nicest kids you'll ever meet. That was true then, and it's still true now.)

Beyond the coolness issue, the clarinet is a technically demanding instrument. Not only must the player navigate a maze of twisting, interlocking levers and keys running the length of the clarinet, there are also holes which must be covered with finger tips. And if you've ever had an aspiring clarinetist in your house (I have), you know that it's an instrument that's notorious for its squeaks -- immediate but painful feedback that the player is doing something wrong.

And so when I pulled this record out of my father's collection and looked at the cover, I had all of these thoughts and more. I'd heard of Woody Herman, so I knew he'd had a long and distinguished career, but it was a long career playing the clarinet. And the design of the cover seemed like such a transparent attempt to compensate for a poor choice he had made years earlier. I felt sorry for him. There he sits with his clarinet surrounded by the cool kids -- fifteen young women who had clearly just come from their audition for That Girl, which would debut only months after this photo was taken. Sure, they lost out to Marlo Thomas, but I'm certain they all went on to garner walk-on roles in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. The cool kids always end up on top.

So I had low expectations for this record. Very low. But I couldn't have been more wrong.

I can't quite believe I'm writing this, but this record is incredibly cool. I had scoffed at a description of the opening track, "23 Red," as a "blistering swinger," but that's exactly what it is. Herman's band is phenomenal. He wisely filled it with all the cool kids from band class -- five trumpets, four saxophones, and three trombones. I should also note that Woody plays clarinet and alto sax here, just like I did once upon a time.

As I've written here before, I'm a sucker for horns in all genres, and I especially love them here. Each song has its own flow, but typically they play like this: big horns for a few bars, then a quieter interlude to allow for a saxophone or clarinet solo, followed by more big horns. Blistering, indeed.

There's probably nothing more cliché than judging a book by its cover, but I'm guilty here. I had thought about skipping this one altogether, and probably the only reason I even listened to it was because it would give me a chance to write about my dalliance with the clarinet. As it turns out, I can't stop listening. This is definitely a record I'll come back to.

When I started this project I expected that I'd be listening to a lot of good music and thinking a lot about my father. What I didn't expect were the tangents each record would inspire and the things I'd learn as I pulled on one thread or another. The album notes, for example, have almost always been treasures of information about the artists, the recordings, and the era. It truly is a distinct art form, and the Recording Academy has awarded a Grammy for Best Album Notes each year since 1964.

The notes are always credited, and when I finished reading about Woody's Winners and saw the credit at the end -- Herb Wong, KJAZ-FM, San Francisco -- I wondered about the obviously Asian name, so I investigated. It turns out that Herb Wong was a long-time jazz expert and deejay in the Bay Area. He fell in love with jazz as a boy when a package of classic jazz records was incorrectly delivered to his house, and he went on to live a life full of jazz, among other pursuits.

I think that says something about the inclusivity of jazz as a musical genre. We can talk about cultural appropriation -- take another look at the cover of this record -- or the fact that this medium, the first true American art form, was largely created by Black Americans and then performed by Black Americans for primarily white audiences. That dynamic led to the stories which may or may not be true about why Miles Davis famously played with his back to the crowd.

Like it or not, the issue of race is a part of the history of jazz, but there's also something more. I like the image of a young, Chinese-American boy serendipitously discovering a few Count Basie and Duke Ellington records and becoming enamored with an art form that couldn't have been further removed from his own family's history. It seems incongruous at first, but then it makes perfect sense. Jazz, after all, is all of our history.

Side 1
23 Red
My Funny Valentine
Northwest Passage
Poor Butterfly
Greasy Sack Blues

Side 2
Woody's Whistle
Red Roses for a Blue Lady
Opus de Funk and Theme (Blue Flame)

Record: Dance to the Bands!
Artist: Various Artists
Released: Capitol Records, 1956

Back in October of 1998, Sony Music and Universal Music released a CD called Now That's What I Call Music!, a collection of current pop hits. The format was already successful in England, so it was no surprise when millions of units sold, nor when subsequent volumes were released every few months or so. (Volume 83, believe it or not, dropped last August.)

Music lovers of my generation will remember a company called K-Tel records doing much the same thing in the 1970s and '80s, though on a much smaller scale. In fact, one of my saddest childhood memories involves a K-Tel record, Wings of Sound, a collection released in 1980 featuring hits from Michael Jackson, Kool & the Gang, and Blondie, among others. It was one of the first records I ever bought, and I played it all the time. But because I was only eleven years old, I left it on the turntable after listening to it one day, not realizing that it mattered that the record player would be bathed in sunlight all afternoon. When I went back to listen to it the next day, the vinyl had warped and buckled. I can still see the hills and valleys in my mind's eye, and I can feel my eleven-year-old heart breaking all over again. It was a sad day.

This wasn't the first time record companies released compilations like these. There are any number of them in my father's collection, and this collection of big band tracks is the first one I've come across. The blurb on the back of the album jacket explains it better than I ever could, so I'll include the whole thing here...

Americans are flocking to the dance floors. 39 million of them at last count, according to a national magazine. And of all the places where people dance, one is a sure winner for the least crowding and most informality. That, of course, is home itself, whether it's a penthouse apartment, college dormitory, or suburban living room where dancing's done.

Capitol makes a whopping contribution to the trend toward do-it-yourself dance parties with this album that is trend-setting in its own right. For here in a two-record package is enough music to brighten an entire at-home dance. What's more, the music is wonderful enough to keep couples dancing all evening. The bands play in top form and their program is ideally balanced. Altogether, it's an irresistible Invitation to the Dance, styled for today!

It's impossible to read that without imagining such a gathering -- maybe a neighborhood dinner party that finishes with drinks and dancing, or a group of pretentious college students pretending to be grown as they couple up and dance the night away on campus. Nothing could be more 1950s.

The record features six different band leaders and their orchestras, but only two of them are familiar to me -- Les Brown (and his Band of Renown) and Woody Herman. I'll have to trust the producers that Stan Kenton, Harry James, Billy May, and Ray Anthony also belong.

Double albums were always fun. I remember being eager to open them up and see what waited inside the fold. This jacket features pictures and short bios of the six band leaders, as well as track info, but the most interesting thing about the physical album are the records themselves. When I first pulled the vinyl out of the protective sleeves, I noticed something odd. One record was labelled with sides 1 and 4, the other with sides 2 and 3. I assumed there'd been a printing error until I remembered something about my father's turntable, the one that I grew up with.

We're used to seeing a small metal rod protruding from the center of the turntable that fits the hole in a record. On my father's turntable, however, there was a stem that extended three or four inches, and it was designed to hold a stack of records while one was playing. Once the first was finished, the tonearm would automatically lift from the record and swing back out of the way, then the next record would drop to be played. In this way, an automatic record player -- an ancestor of the 5-disc CD changer I once had -- would allow a host to listen to several album sides in a row without having to fiddle with the records. (If that doesn't make sense, here's a short video clip.)

And so if you wanted to play Dance to the Bands! at your evening soiree, the odd 1-4 and 2-3 orientation of the sides would allow you to use your automatic record player to play sides 1 and 2 consecutively before flipping them both over for sides 3 and 4. Genius.

Side 1
Tangerine (Les Brown)
April in Paris (Harry James)
You and the Night and the Music (Ray Anthony)
Suddenly (Billy May)
Square Circle (Woody Herman)

Side 2
Opus in Turquoise (Stan Kenton)
Fascinating Rhythm (Billy May)
Walkin' Home (Harry James)
Lover (Les Brown)

Side 3
Big Band Boogie (Ray Anthony)
Dream (Woody Herman)
Spring Is Here (Stan Kenton)
On the Alamo (Les Brown)
Mad About the Boy (Billy May)

Side 4
I Hadn't Anyone Till You (Woody Herman)
I'm Glad There Is You (Stan Kenton)
Smogbound (Harry James)
Cheek to Cheek (Ray Anthony)