Jazz Profiles: Woody Herman: The Early Herds
’ Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman,
New York
Oxford
, 1995, pp. 56-57]:
“For all his success, according to Woody, Isham Jones was always talking about "quitting the business." There have been any number of musicians-and other artists, for that matter-who have abandoned careers at their peak, including Rossini, Sibelius, and later, another clarinet-playing bandleader, Artie Shaw. We can only speculate that Jones, who, like Shaw, hated audiences, simply had had enough of the business. Aside from the money he had already accumulated, there was much more that would come willy-nilly in royalties from his considerable catalogue of songs. The ASCAP logging of radio performances of his songs alone assured him a life of ease.
Woody always insisted that, for all his musical sophistication, Jones was essentially a country boy. Woody said, "He bought this ranch a few miles outside of
Denver
, and, oh, he had books of instruction, and he set up a great plant for turkey raising, and I don't know how many eggs he bought. It takes a fantastic amount of care, particularly in a climate of that sort. He sent a brother out there to oversee it and hire people and run it."
Thus, a year after the Goodman breakthrough at the Palomar, in the summer of 1936, while the band was in Tennessee, Isham Jones, only forty years old, gave his musicians notice. In 1940, when his memory of the incident was comparatively fresh, Woody described how Jones did it:
"It was in
,
Tennessee
, that he called us all into his room. He was very simple and straightforward about it. 'I've got a ranch near
Denver
,' he said. 'I'm going there to write music and take it easy. We've had a good outfit, and it was nice while it lasted, but I'm retiring. We're breaking up.' He paid us off, rather nicely, too, shook us all by the hand and wished us luck. And we were in
Knoxville
without jobs.
"Most of us were ready to pack it in and look for other jobs, but there were those of us who felt that we were a pretty good outfit, and that we ought to stick together and keep on being a pretty good outfit. It takes a long time for musicians to 'work into' each other, and it seemed a crime to break up our now-excellent outfit."
A small group of the musicians, comprising Woody, Saxie Mansfield, flugelhorn player and arranger Joe Bishop, bassist Walt Yoder, arranger Jiggs Noble, and a violinist and arranger named Nick Hupfer, whom Woody had known in Milwaukee, held a series of meetings. Woody had always admired the Ben Pollack band. When Pollack retired, some of the men from his band decided to stay together in a co-operative, with singer Bob Crosby, Woody's erstwhile
San Francisco
roommate, as their elected leader. There was another precedent for a co-operative in the Casa Loma orchestra. Woody and his friends decided to follow the pattern, forming their own group, with members holding shares in the band. The Isham Jones Juniors had recorded for the Decca label, and Woody had been doing studio work for the company. He quickly arranged a contract with Decca.
Two or three of the other musicians joined the Ray Noble band at the Rainbow Room atop
Rockefeller
in
New York
. The remaining six men - Yoder, Mansfield, Bishop, Herman, Hupfer, and arranger Gordon Jenkins - discussed which of them should be the leader. Jenkins said in later years that the discussion centered on himself and Woody, but Jenkins got an assignment to orchestrate a Broadway show and finally the men elected Woody their nominal leader because of his wide show-business background, though he was the youngest among them-twenty-two years old. Jenkins contributed a number of arrangements, which, Woody said, “were more or less gifts, because we couldn't afford them."
Where the discussion that led to Woody's election as leader occurred is unclear. Woody said in a 1940 interview, "We argued about it all the way from
Knoxville
to
New York
, and by the time we hit the big town, we were Woody Herman and the Band That Plays the Blues."
In
New   York
, the men began auditions to find seven more musicians to make up a complement of twelve. Woody at last had his own band, even if he was only an elected leader. ..."
“But to return to Woody Herman, the years 1936 to 1944 were for the Herman band a lengthy (and often economically precarious) period of growth and search for stylistic identity. Ironically, it was the orchestra's exceptional versatility that hindered it in readily finding a large sustaining audience. It excelled in not one but a number of stylistic areas and was unwilling to abandon any one of them, thereby undoubtedly fragmenting its potential audience. "The band that played the blues" also did very well with romantic ballads (especially those by the excellent songwriter-arranger-pianist Gordon Jenkins), also with dance numbers, Dixieland-style instrumentals, even "novelty" tunes, on which Herman and the band lavished a high degree of musical skill and entertainment know-how - again the twin legacy of his own vaudeville background and Isham Jones's philosophy of treating all manner of material with respect and high craft. In all of these eclectic endeavors Herman managed to keep commercialism to a minimum, more so than most bands of the period, including many black ones. Even Herman's solitary commercial and popular success, a 1939 hit called Woodchoppers' Ball, was in essence a jazz piece: an "original" and an instrumental, featuring Woody's blues clarinet, Nell Reid's swing trombone, Steady Nelson's Cootie-Williams-style trumpet, and some nicely swinging riff-ensemble choruses.
The transformation into the orchestra that startled the music world in 1945, known as the First Herd, was very gradual, almost imperceptible. Some of the effects of these changes could be heard as early as 1941 in Lowell Martin’s excellent (but too short) Woodsheddin' with Woody, his Ten Day Furlough, Robert Hartsell's Hot Chestnuts -all hard-swinging jazz instrumentals that not only matched the best that other leaders in the field, like Benny Goodman, Shaw and Barnet were turning out, but already captured some of the drive and excitement of the 1945 Apple Honey, Caldonia and Northwest Passage. Starting with a fairly strong rhythm section of Hy White (guitar), Walt Yoder (bass), and Frank Carlson (drums) and such players as trumpeters Ray Linn and Cappy Lewis, tenor saxophonist Herbie Haymer -only transitionally in the band - Herman by 1943, was hiring Ellington sidemen such as Ben Webster, Johnny and Ray Nance to sit in on his record dates (as well as performing and/or recording, in 1942, two of Dizzy Gillespie's earliest compositions and arrangements). Ben Webster's richly florid solos can be heard to good advantage on such Herman recordings as The Music Stopped (also notable for being singer Frances Wayne's first recording with Herman), Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, and Who Dat Up There. But even speedier and more dramatic changes were in the offing.
Between late 1943 and late 1944 - a period when the recording ban was still partly in force -
Dave
Tough joined the rhythm section, the remarkable trombonist Bill Harris came over from Bob Chester's band, tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips (playing in a manner that combined all three major tenor styles: Hawkins, Webster, and Young) joined up, and arrangers Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti began revolutionizing the Herman band's style by moving it firmly forward in the direction of the new bop frontier, the first major white band to do so unequivocally and consistently.
But perhaps the most influential addition to the Herman band was bassist Chubby Jackson in 1943, not necessarily as an all-that-outstanding bass player (although by adding a fifth string to his bass, pitched at high C, a fourth above the usual upper G-string of the bass, he explored some new frontiers of his own in his walking bass lines and solos), but as an energetic catalytic force in the rhythm section, and -perhaps even more important - as a kind of self-proclaimed associate-leader to Woody, ferreting out new young talent and maintaining a lively contact with all that was new in jazz at the time.
What is so remarkable about the Herman band's stylistic transformation, from an eclectic all-purpose ensemble to the best "bop" or "modern jazz" orchestra in the land, is that this metamorphosis resulted from a thorough fusion of several specific early-1940s' style ingredients: the feel and swing of Basic's rhythm section; the fresh streamlined and linear virtuoso conception of brass-writing already articulated by Dizzy Gillespie [We can hear such lines as early as 1942 on Herman’s recordings of Gillespie’s ‘Down Under’] ; and the new harmonic language previously explored by Ellington, Eddie Sauter, Sy Oliver, Buster Harding, and Ray Conniff. The primary synergistic agent in all this was the new post-Swing-Era technical skills possessed by the best young players, relentlessly energetic and virtuosic. This made possible a level of sheer instrumental excitement that was simply not available earlier, except in isolated instances.
These new qualities were effectively captured on a surprisingly large number of Herman recordings, starting with the up-tempo Apple Honey and Caldonia (1945), on through Northwest Passage, Bijou, Blowing Up a Storm (although in the last title the Carnegie Hall performance of March 25, 1946, is superior to the commercial recording in all respects), and Your Father's Moustache, Wild Root, Fan It, Back Talk, Non-Alcoholic, and finally to Ralph Burns's 1946 four-movement orchestral suite Summer Sequence.
On the lyric and ballad side there were also major contributions to the genre, invariably arranged by Ralph Burns: notably David Raksin's superb Laura (how well Woody plays and sings on this!); I Surrender Dear, a fine vehicle for Red Norvo's creative artistry; Panacea; Bill Harris's lyric masterpiece Everywhere; and, above all, Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe, with Frances Wayne's sublime singing, surely one of the dozen most memorable vocals of the entire Big Band and Swing Era. The singer captured the haunting bittersweet quality of Harold Arlen's song with a maturity, vocal imagination, and taste that avoids all cloying sentimentality - even in her copious use of portamenti [singing a sliding pitch to the targeted note] - and that belies the fact that she was only twenty at the time. Ralph Burns's sensitive arrangement, subdued in pastel-colored muted brass and soft saxes (except for dramatic 4-bar double-time outburst), provides a well-nigh perfect underscoring.
This extensive repertory, primarily the creation of Burns and Hefti - there more, of course, some of it at not quite as high a level, and some of it not recorded commercially at all - has hardly dated in retrospect. It is as fresh exciting now - even when played today by younger orchestras as "older repertory”  - as it was then, over forty years ago. The reasons are obvious: the Burns/Hefti pieces were really new and original at the time, a striking amalgam of first rate jazz solos (by the likes of Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, trumpeter Sonny Berman,[Berman, one of the earliest Dizzy Gillespie disciples, was developing into an important soloist of increasing originality when his career was cut short in a fatal auto accident at the age of twenty-two] and Red Norvo, supported by a dynamic and indefatigable rhythm section, and orchestral writing derived from these very same fresh improvisatory styles. Secondly, the musicians played this material, night after night, with infectious exuberance, an almost physically palpable excitement and a never-say-die energy. As I say, this partially represented the sheer pleasure of frolic in such high-level instrumental virtuosity. But the band also played with a of pride in its individual and collective accomplishments. And it appreciated, indeed relished the newness of their style's harmonic and melodic language. rich advanced harmonies, the lean, sleek bop lines. The musicians also they were playing for a leader who deeply appreciated their talents and contributions to the cooperative whole.
Some four decades later we tend to forget how new this all was. As a result of the constant recycling since the late 1940s of that genre of big-band style by dozens of orchestras, we tend to take much of it for granted today. We should not forget, however, that there has been very little substantively new in big-band styling since Woody's First Herd, and that the ultimate perpetuation of that style during the last thirty years fell to Count Basie (for whom Hefti arranged for many years).
On the other hand, lest I appear to be overstating the case for the importance and influence of the Herman band, two points should be clarified. It was not the full sense of the term a true bop band. Though Hefti, Sonny Berman , Chubby Jackson were enthusiastic disciples of Gillespie and Parker and brought much of the new bop concepts into the Herman band, other players like Phillips, Harris, and Tough (and of course Woody himself) could not be readily aligned with the bop movement. They were "modern jazz" players with roots firmly ensconced in the late-thirties' swing styles. Thus the 1945 Herman band was only intermittently and/or somewhat exteriorly in a genuine bop mold.  The distance between it and the pure bop-styled orchestras -Billy Eckstine's of 1944, Dizzy Gillespie's of 1946, and Oscar Pettiford's short-lived eighteen-piece of early 1945 -can be measured by comparing Herman's Apple Honey, Caldonia, or Back Talk with such pieces as Gillespie's Things to Come and Emanon, Pettiford's Something for You, Eckstine's I Stay in the Mood for You or Blowing the Blues Away.
…, the Herman band was not only an early innovator in the new bop or bop-tinged orchestral style, but it committed itself to it with a perseverance and consistent quality not equaled by any other white band of the time. This was due in large measure, as we shall see, to Ralph Burns's arrangements and compositions, and the fortuitous coming together of a young, dynamic, exceptionally talented group of players. Although all the other major white bands of the 1940s -Barnet, James, Shaw,
Ken
ton, Raeburn, and a lesser extent Goodman - also drew on a whole fresh generation of arrangers and players, they all adopted the new modern jazz language well after the Herman band had made the change-over. Barnet, James, Shaw, and Raeburn were the first to follow suit, with
Ken
ton and Les Brown trailing by a year or more. Moreover, except for Herman - and James with his 1945-46 band - all those orchestras retained a high proportion of pop and purely dance repertory. Their conversion and commitment to the idiom was not as deep as Herman's and his Herd.
As to the question of who got there first, clearly Eckstine's recording of I Stay in the Mood, with its exciting unison bop lines in the brass and Dizzy's concluding solo, takes precedence chronologically; it was recorded in April 1944 when Dizzy was just organizing the Eckstine band. On the other hand, the Herman band's Apple Honey  and Caldonia , basically head arrangements with some of their bop-ish brass figures supplied by Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti, were performed as early as the summer of 1944 (but not recorded until February 1945). Unquestionably, Gillespie and Eckstine's arranger Gerry Valentine inaugurated the new style on records (already explored with the Hines band in 1943, however not recorded - presumably because of the 1942-43 ban). But Woody Herman, with Jackson's and Hefti's ears close to the ground, picking up the new vibrations from
Harlem
and Minton's was certainly not far behind.  It is also a fair assumption that Herman's enormous commercial success with Columbia Records in 1945 - along with Eckstine's - helped pave the way for the establishment in 1945 of Dizzy's prophetic band (it however did not record tm mid-1946).
I have mentioned Herman's appreciativeness of his musicians' talents. But Herman was also a consistently accurate critical judge of talent, and allowed only his most creative players to solo. None was more gifted than Bill Harris [Emphasis mine],  probably the most astonishingly original trombonist of the early modern-jazz era.  Blessed with a seemingly unlimited technique, range, and endurance, Harris was at all times completely unpredictable, relentlessly original creatively. Yet he could always be relied upon to capture the essential mood or character of any given work or arrangement. A typical Harris solo could be passionate (
Northwest Passage
), eccentric (the 1946 Woodchoppers' Ball), quirky (Nero's Conception), suave (Bijou), intensely lyrical (Everywhere), fantastical (Fan It), and bop-ishly driving (Apple Honey). Harris's solos were like recitatives, based on some private scenario of his own invention, which at the same time provided his personal commentary -occasionally a mite garrulous - on the work in question. In all of his playing there was an underlying hard-edged humor, a sharp wit which could instantly break out in the most startling utterances. His seemingly unmoving, tough, taciturn outward expression - surely a mask hiding a highly complex serious persona - kept Harris from ever descending to mere sentimentality – save perhaps to parody it. Even Harris's most extravagant musical expressions can usually be grasped in the light of his strange sense of humor and his penchant for the caustic and the sardonic. His control of musical content was as awesome as his control of technique. His often outrageous use of vibrato, for example was by no means an uncontrolled aberration.
It was on the contrary a finely calibrated, specifically embellishmental, expressive technique, always at the precise service of his musical intentions. It could cover the entire continuum from a searingly intense straight tone (no vibrato) to various extremes of vibrato (in both speed and pitch variance) and all gradations in between.[I know of only one other artist who has such consummate control of vibrato, and that is Sarah Vaughan – more precisely Sarah Vaughan of 1987 and the last 15 years or so] Harris also adapted with great effect the so-called "terminal vibrato" (Andre Hodeir's term), developed by Louis Armstrong and trombonists like Jimmy Harrison and Dickie Wells. Harris often carried this effect one step further by stopping notes with abrupt "ripped" kind of release, thereby adding powerful rhythmic punctuations to his phrases that heightened their sense of swing. [Harris’s countless imaginative solos really defy notation …. They must by heard to be appreciated fully. The relatively “simple” “Apple Honey” solo and the dazzlingly “extravagant” one on ‘Fan It’ are two examples of Harris’s art, suggested for the further-interested reader/listener]
Ralph Burns's always outstanding contributions to the Herman book were climaxed in 1946 with an ambitious four-movement twelve-minute work entitled Summer Sequence. Given the precedent in 1943 of Ellington's breakthrough extended-form suite Black, Brown and Beige and Burns's deep admiration Ellington's art, it was perhaps inevitable that, with his composer's (as opposed to arrangers) creative imagination, Burns would be inspired to try his hand at a similar large-scale work.
Summer Sequence was mostly composed in the summer of 1946 while on a
Long Island
vacation sojourn. Its four movements (played without pause) comprise a lively scherzo-like second movement, a quieter lyrical third movement, both enclosed by two outer movements whose central portions use an attractive rhapsodic 32-bar ballad theme. First stated by the guitar (Chuck Wayne) and further proclaimed by Bill Harris's trombone, this more or less traditional symmetrically formed theme contrasts strikingly with the two inner movements' many “asymmetrical" phrase structures (many of them an uncommon seven bars in duration). In addition, these latter sections abound with a constantly varied instrumentation, resulting in an unusual degree of textural and timbral variety. In these respects Burns was further surveying territory previously explored only by Ellington, Eddie Sauter, and (occasionally) Sy Oliver. In turn Summer Sequence, although never a large popular success - until, that is, its last movement was re-worked into Early Autumn, featuring Stan Getz's famous solo - exerted a considerable influence, in differing ways, to be sure, on such bands as
Ken
ton's and Raeburn's, through their composer-arrangers Pete Rugolo, George Handy, and Eddie Finkel.
Summer Sequence is not without flaws. Some of its transitional passages are commonplace and seem stuck together out of extraneous material not intrinsic to the work; and its ending is weak indeed. But at its best, the work amply displays the potential for extended-form composition of the modern jazz orchestra, beyond the requisites of dance music.
The other work that radically broke through the confines of the traditional jazz-orchestral repertory, Herman's as well as any other, was Igor Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, premiered by the Herman orchestra in Carnegie Hall, on March 25, 1946, and recorded by them with Stravinsky conducting, in August of that year. The work was scored for Woody's eighteen-piece orchestra plus horn and harp, in effect in a wind-ensemble piece.
Ebony Concerto, like Stravinsky's earlier "ragtime" pieces, remains one of the master's more elusive scores, partly because it occupies a no-man's land halfway between jazz and Stravinsky's mid-period neo-classic style; and partly because, due to its stylistic ambiguousness, it is rarely performed convincingly or with much understanding of its special performance needs. Indeed, it may well be that its fundamental performance problems have yet to be resolved, since even to this day players who can meet the technical demands of this work and at the same time infuse it with the jazz feeling and rhythmic vitality the work cries for - which Stravinsky undoubtedly heard in Bijou, Goosey Gander, and Caldonia - are still extremely rare. They are even more rarely assembled in one place to perform the work.[ In some respects the finest performance of ‘Ebony Concerto’ I can recall to date, including my own attempts as a conductor of the work, was one given in the mid-fifties by Kurt Edelhagen and his orchestra of the South West German Radio (an orchestra, incidentally, which was later led for several years by Eddie Sauter).
Certainly the Herman orchestra was not quite equal to the task, typically becoming very tight and inexpressive when, as in this case, the composition seemed to eliminate the basic explicit beat and standard jazz feeling. Woody, with his characteristic honesty and modesty, stated on numerous occasions that the Herman band was not ready for this performing assignment. "We had no more right to play it than the man in the moon," he said.
The critics have never dealt fairly with Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. Most jazz critics at the time of the premiere and recording were incapable of comprehending the work, casually dismissing it with comments of "not jazz" (or "inept jazz”) and other profoundly intellectual pronouncements, never realizing that what they heard was not Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto at all but rather a poor performance of it. The classical critics, too, for the most part belittled the work as minor Stravinsky fare, generally unable, it seems, to savor its jazz allusions and at the same time apparently even incapable of appreciating its impeccable craftsmanship. (This seems to be the usual critical fate of category or style hybrids).  Ebony Concerto certainly does not deserve the status of an inconsequential trifle which most writers have accorded it. Nor could one argue that it ranks with Stravinsky's major works, like Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Symphony of Psalms and The Rake's Progress.
It is beyond the scope of this study to attempt to assign the work its ultimate “resting place"; let history and the future render that final verdict. What is relevant here, however, is that Stravinsky, with his usual unerringly sharp ear, com posed a work which relates precisely to the more experimental, progressive side of the Herman band's mid-1940s' repertory, albeit in unmistakably Stravinskian terms. I am referring primarily to his consistent use of a) major-minor harmonies and melodies-an integral part of Stravinsky's musical language since around 1905-and b) of cross-rhythms and asymmetrical rhythmic patterns. The major-minor ambivalence relates quite naturally to the blue-note tradition of jazz and some of its more modern harmonic expressions, such as "raised ninth" chords or bitonal harmonies, especially the tritonally related ones. [The raised ninth chord is actually a dominant seventh with a flat or “blue” third on top.] This was one aspect of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto the Herman musicians could hear - or at least should have been able to identify with. ….
In Ebony Concerto, as in other Jazz-related works by Copland and Milhaud, Stravinsky was more interested in some of the music's externals, i.e. the sounds of jazz - its sonorities, the fascinating mutes (Harmon, plungers) and the “effects" jazz musicians could get with them - than its substantive essence and rhythmic spontaneity. It was Stravinsky's loyalty to ragtime that undoubtedly influenced, for example, his life-long inability to understand that jazz was primarily an improvisatory art (ragtime being non-improvised). Nor did he fully comprehend that swing, freedom of rhythmic inflection, and rhythmic spontaneity were all keyed to the creation of a steady underlying beat and pulse.  I suspect that Stravinsky in Ebony Concerto abstracted, and used only those aspects of jazz performance that fascinated him. Nevertheless I am convinced that he also felt the drive and rhythmic energy in the Herman recordings he heard, and that he would dearly have loved to incorporate those elements in his work. But he realized, I am sure, that these are precisely what cannot be captured in our notation, and which - I might add - must be supplied in performances of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto before we can fully appreciate and asses this unique work.
Much more in the central tradition of evolving modern jazz was the work of Herman's small group, The Woodchoppers, formed in 1946, to a large extent to accommodate the talents of Red Norvo, who had just left the Goodman Sextet. Indeed, Herman appointed Norvo as his associate leader of the First Herd band, and put him musically in charge of the Woodchoppers. The group recorded ten sides, of which three were composed by Norvo (in collaboration with Shorty
Roger
s) and all arranged by him and
Roger