hat allusive interval
that begins Blue Flame brought a thrill of recognition or at
least a little tremor of memory when the latest Woody Herman
orchestra sounded if from the stage. This stage stood next to a
graveyard behind the Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue in the
heart of Hollywood, a couple more rich allusions right there.
The septuagenarian Jake Hanna’s quick witted drumming once again brought out the
power of this simple theme, full of blues and a good 60 years old itself.
And as the Herman classics followed, you began to feel again the wicked exhilaration that this unlikely revolutionary bandleader out of vaudeville – and his band from the future – brought to the white man’s music back in the
1950s, when dance bands were supposed to be neat as a pin and the dancers likewise, switching their genteel hips above their bobby sox on black and white television.
Enter with a scream Chubby Jackson and Pete Candoli! Woody shouting "Caldonia!" after an astonishing fly-by of brass bebop! "Your Father’s Mustache!" Bill Harris out of nowhere with a hair-raising new trombone sound! Igor
Stravinsky! Ex-Chicago gangster Dave Tough swinging like no other big band drummer before h
im! Head arrangements! Flip Phillips! "Goosey Gander!" Sonny Berman! "Apple Honey!" Roll over, Glenn
Miller! Tell Tommy Dorsey the news!
On the night they remembered Woody, current shepherd Frank Tiberi kicked off Neal Hefti’s "The Good Earth," and Hanna propelled the gentlemen of the 21st century Herd down
Hefti’s brainy but free-wheeling path with an induced swagger.
And you remembered the revolutionary spirit of this music: revolutionary but not destructive, ringing with faith, if only in the power of kicks, those fleeting moments of delight that proved to be not so fleeting after all.
Joe Lovano, Terry Gibbs, Andy McGee and John LaPorta
he brainy
but freewheeling Ralph Burns, later to bring so much to the
Broadway musical stage, gave to the Herman history "Early
Autumn," a name as richly allusive as the "Blue Flame"
minor interval at the heart of every blues, although no one
remembers the Pulitzer prize-winning 1926 book, "Early Autumn,"
from which the name came, much less its author, Louis Bromfield.
Burns' harmonies, explored so profitably by Stan Getz, echoed
tonight with little fading.
The name Getz may have become more widely known, but tonight, when the great Shorty Rogers chart on
"Keen and Peachy "was polished off, the three tenor sound brought back the quite unjustly overshadowed tenormen Al Cohn and Zoot
Sims as well; and as the Herman classics kept coming, the band’s ghostly pantheon of postwar soloists seemed to repopulate the surrounding boneyard: Phillips, Harris, Bill Chase, Berman, Don Lamond, Marjorie Hyams, Chuck Wayne, Sal Nistico, …
tonight those foot soldiers of the jazz future rose from their
dusty trenches and the past became the present. It was still an excellent adventure.
