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Below
YOU SEE Berry in front of the group
of strong personalities he gathered out in the Valley. He's leading them through
Duke Ellington's "Cottontail," the granddaddy of all the lickity-split show
stoppers that ever brought the fans cheering around the bandstand.Berry was a charter member of that group of
jazzmen who came to Los Angeles in the 1970s, all stalwarts of the
road band era. They were veterans of the Count Basie, Stan Kenton,
Woody Herman, Buddy Rich and Maynard Ferguson groups, or even, like
Berry, Duke Ellington's band.
They were out there by the score, golfing
by day, gigging in the studios by afternoon, and slipping along
Ventura Boulevard at night in their Porsches and Benzes, picking up
a little bread toward the house payments: They were the fabled fast
guys from the studios.
Cornetist Berry's 17-piece group, which he calls
The L.A. Band, is one of a dozen or so that sprang up in the 1970s
and 1980s, led by such players as Don Menza, who was with Rich;
saxophonist Bill Holman, out of Kenton's band; drummer Frankie Capp
of the Harry James orchestra and pianist Nat Pierce, a body double
for Count Basie on many a record date and night club engagement.
Like Berry, many are veterans of long ago
television studio bands -- Berry came west with the Merv Griffin
band, as did another big band leader, Jack Sheldon. Others were
with the late lamented "Tonight Show" band.
PUTTING
THE WIND in the sails of "Cottontail" on many a
night in those days would be Conte Candoli, out of the Tonight Show
band, and his brother Pete, who played lead in the Tommy
Dorsey band. Pete later dressed up in a Superman costume to blow
screech on "Superman with a Horn" with the groundbreaking
Woody Herman First Herd. Conte, one of the slickest of the
beboppers, was in one of Kenton's "Artistry in Jazz"
groups, the Neophonic Orchestra."Sure, a lot of the guys are
grandfathers," Berry said at the time. "I think Conte and
Pete both are."
But one thing it did for you, rolling from one
Great American One-Nighter
to another, especially back in the pre-Interstate days: You
developed stamina.
Playing lead alto in the L.A. Band this night was
Marshal Royal, 71, the who served as musical director for the
Lionel Hampton and Count Basie bands. And everytime he stood up for
his solo on Ellington's beautiful "Warm Valley," it
brought home the motto that Slide Hyde, the trombonist, shouted out
one rousing night at Carmelo's in Sherman Oaks:
"If you ain't 50, you ain't shit!"
BERRY
STILL KEEPS a crease in his pants, as though he were in
Manhattan. He still plays bop on the cornet, but with a Bix-ish
air. He often brought the L.A. Band to the Monterey Jazz Festival,
of which he was musical director for many years.
And he still runs the youth outreach
program there.
"I have the kids at Monterey, the high
school all stars. There are some wonderful high school musicians in
this state, and I get the cream of the crop.<And there are some
wonderful kids, just
wonderful. One year we had -- from one school in Northern California --- we had six kids, and
the school is in a town of 500 people. And out of the whole state,
they got six of the chairs out of about 20 chairs. One little town
called Aptos.
The festival is a non-profit enterprise that
plows back part of its revenue into music education in the state of
California. So a host of youngsters have been getting a jazz
education -- thanks to the jazz grandfathers of the Valley, like
Bill Berry and many of the men who've played in his band, a few of
which are shown below during an engagement at Alfonse's. The
trumpets from left are Steve Huffstetter, Frank Szabo, Don Rader
and Jack Sheldon; the trombones, Buster Cooper, Slide Hyde and
George Bohannon; the saxes Jack Kelson, Marshal Royal, Lannie
Morgan and Jack Nimitz.
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