fter mispending 12 years
in Chicago and 5 years in New York, I’d gotten used to the fact that
Woody Herman had had his heyday and was pretty much forgotten. Everybody knew Count Basie and
Duke Ellington, whose bands were still going strong, but not Woody. So
when I got to Los Angeles in the 1980s, I was pleasantly surprised to
find that many of Woody's cats were still around, still out there playing
and writing and progressing.
Because 40 years before, in the
1940s, Herman’s band had some of the best jazz writing before or since,
and it had some of the jazz era’s greatest musicians playing the stuff.
Stravinsky wrote for this band. And so did Neal Hefti, Ralph Burns, Stan
Getz, Shorty Rogers, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerald Wilson, Gerry Mulligan,
Bill Holman, Johnny Mandel...
These were the days when Woody
himself used to come into Donte’s, a couple of blocks from where I lived
in North Hollywood. Shorty Rogers brought a band in. Jake Hanna would
drop by. Jimmy Rowles would play there with his trio. Bill Perkins
brought in some of his advanced charts, not to mention the nights with
Conte Candoli and his brother Pete, Woody’s Superman with a Horn..
So I got myself some fast lenses and
fast film and started hanging out around town, haunting Donte’s, the
Parisian Room, Carmelo’s, Alfonse’s, Catalina’s and Marla’s Memory
Lane, writing about the surprising number of relics still tromping
around in the elephants’ graveyard and photographing them as best I
could.
hich is a good thing,
because now you can see 'em and read about them here, even though a lot
of the gents have marched in with the rest of the saints. But a lot of new cats are marching
on, waiting for the Pope to call, and I covered them too.
We begin with a tribute to the Woody
Herman Herds from a couple of years ago, and for the rest, the
hyperlinks are in blue, below. Thumbnail free!
These are the cats.
