A Bostonian who joined Woody's Third Herd in 1951, Pierce spent five years with the band and then, after a five‑year interim, returned for another five. He wrote arrangements for Woody --  "Watermelon Man," "Sister Sadie" and "Opus de Funk" among them -- and served as the band's road manager. 

"It's unbelievable the number of people you can call that were with Woody's band," says Pierce. "And never any one that I know of ever said a bad word about him." 

n Beverly, Mass., a couple of years ago, Pierce attended a band reunion where literally hundreds of alumni showed up, including Flip Phillips, Al Cohn, Jimmy Giuffre, Chuck Wayne and Dave McKenna, the man Pierce replaced when he first joined Woody. 

At a Long Beach tribute at the beginning of October, Giuffre and Cohn were joined by local saxophonists Med Flory and Bill Perkins to recreate the fabled Four Brothers sound, and before you could say the Old Woodchopper, trumpeter Shorty Rogers and vibraharpist Terry Gibbs, who live in the Valley, were up on the stand. 

 

Not to mention ex‑reedman Leonard Garment, just recently in the spotlight as counsel for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. 

Garment played saxophone briefly in a Herman band and is representing Woody in his tax difficulties. 

oody had his off moments like everyone else. But if he said you were wrong, you were probably wrong," Pierce said. "Sometimes guys would get a little stoned and stuff like that. But he would always know what was happening. And that would be it. Much like Count Basie used to do." 

Pierce knows the Count Basie picture because for 34 years, he worked for the late pianist, subbing when he was ailing or wanted to take some time off. 

The Wadsworth tribute is being sponsored by station KKGO, the jazz radio station that collected more than $4,000 to pay Herman's back rent so he wouldn't be evicted. Station owner Saul Levine has established a trust fund to help with the band leader's back taxes, and proceeds of the concert will go to the fund. Jazz disc jockey Chuck Niles will emcee and is handling the producing chores. 

"So many guys are coming we're gonna have to play musical chairs every so often," says Pierce. 

t's gonna be Frank Szabo and Pete Candoli on trumpets; Jack Nimitz, Med Flory, Bob Cooper, Gordon Brisker and Dick Hafer on saxophones; Monte Budwig on bass; Chuck Flores on drums, and of course I'll be playing piano. But Alan Broadbent will be playing a couple of tunes and Jimmy Rowles is going to play. We got Mary Ann McCall on vocals. 

"Chubby Jackson is coming, to do a little scat on `Lemon Drop' with Shorty Rogers, who's going to  put together an alumni band of his own. The `Tonight Show' band is going to play the second half, with Pete Candoli's brother Conte Candoli. Rosemary Clooney's gonna use the 'Tonight Show' band, but Tony Bennett is gonna have a trio. 

"And we have Dudley Moore, he's gonna do his Errol Garner thing. And now Patti Page is involved. This thing is getting to be a mushroom cloud."

Perhaps the only interested party who won't be there is Woody.

 

The Jazz Bakery, Culver City, Sunday, March 31, 1987

 

he great Woody Herman tribute was over by 10 p.m., and all the fans could drive home and retire early with their archives and hot water bottles, resting up for whatever industry duties called them out at 6 a.m.

Certainly Ruth Price, vocalist and  Bakery proprietor, could write this day down in her diary in big red letters. It was the day she sang ''Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe'' like she will never sing it again, the day she made the lilacs want to grow.

Ralph Burns himself, the man who wrote this soaring and so far unsurpassable  arrangement, was there to tell how he wrote it for Frances Wayne when she was the singer with Charlie Barnet's band. Then Herman stole the chart, the vocalist and the chart's author for his own band, recording the number for Columbia and scoring one of his first big hits. Tonight Price scored again.

 The daylong tribute over which she presided had begun with an afternoon set by Bill Perkins' big band, playing some fresh versions of old Herman favorites, e.g. ''Blue Lou'' in a Frank Strazzeri arrangement. The reviewer could not be  present for it. Then Mark Canton provided an interlude of filmed Herman pieces before a panel of Herman alumni including Terry Gibbs, Burns, Gene Lees and Peter Levinson told war stories.

After dinner, Perkins joined the sax section of a glitteringly talented big band led by Bill Holman that played behind Price on ''Joe.'' They played this music and several of the other immortal Herman Herd charts in  way that brought back that first shock of revelation when this groundbreaking  band took your breath away.

es, you had Ellington and Basie in those days. But this was a completely innovative  sound. ''Northwest Passage,'' replayed by the  Holman band, came across 50 years later as fresh and modern, with its big band vs. small band structure and its awesome throwaway brass fragments like the tip of a huge mountain emerging from the clouds.

''The Good Earth,'' Neal Hefti's deftly structured work, became three solid minutes of jam‑packed thrills with its darling little ending. Trumpeter Ron Stout and tenor saxophonist Doug Webb soloed brilliantly.

In Holman's hands, Burns's complex   longer work, ''Lady MacGowan's Dream'' took on shape and substance that its echoes of   Stravinsky had hitherto concealed. It began to sing.

The climactic work of the night, Holman's suite ''Homage a Woody,'' receiving its American premiere, was an awesome, analytical magnum opus in the Holman manner: folksy but abstract. Bob Efford, whose affectionate re‑enactments of Woody Herman's clarinet solos had been a pleasure all night, carried the solo burden here.

And it wasn't light: This monster band throwing dissonant polyphony and stuff at you, nine brassmen expansive and exalted, a roaring rhythm section.  Efford more than met his obligations, down and dirty when called for, lovely and lyrical when needed, swift and telling on cue. Like the tribute, the performance turned out to be a triumph.

 

nable to speak or eat, flat on his back in the intensive care quarters of Cedars‑Sinai Medical Center, jazz immortal Woody Herman nevertheless tuned in, it was said,  to the broadcast of Friday night's tribute to his bandleading career ‑‑ an experience that must have been a bit like reading his own obituary.

And Herman, toughened by 50 years on the American road, is the kind of guy who no doubt said to himself, ''Nuts to them, I ain't checked out yet.'' Because he's still hanging in there. They took away his income, they took away his house, they knocked him off his pins, but he is not about to quit.

''How do you keep the music playing,'' sang Tony Bennett in his gruff but ringing baritone, ''How do you make it last?'' It was the last song in a long evening that never sagged into bathos or boredom, and the 61‑year‑old Bennett, who toured with Woody's band and used Herman alumni like Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and John Bunch on his recordings, had an answer: ''The music never ends.''

erman's music was made by men like composer Ralph Burns, one of the many Herman alumni who went on to shape the course of American popular music. Friday night, Burns was introduced by Johnny Mandel, who fits the same description, and Burns recalled how Woody asked him to write a ballad for a soulful new tenor saxophone player he had hired.

The player was Stan Getz, and the piece was ''Early Autumn,'' an instrumental as evocative as its title. It was sensitively rendered by the alumni band assembled by former Herman arranger and pianist Nat Pierce, in which Joe Romano, Gordon Brisker, Med Flory, Dick Hafer and Jack Nimitz manned the saxophones that carried Burns' lovely theme.

Then came the work of another great arranger, Neil Hefti's rousing bebop anthem, ''The Good Earth,'' with high register brass pioneer Pete Candoli punching out the lead trumpet part. Nowadays, almost all jazz bands have a screech player to scream out the top notes, but before Pete came in, there was only Cat Anderson (with Duke Ellington) and Al Killian (with Lionel Hampton). One of Woody's many  trend‑setting adaptations.

Young Polly Podewell, who'd been singing with the 74‑year‑old Herman when a stroke felled him in March, recreated the legendary Frances Wayne vocal on ''Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe,'' with Candoli leading the spine‑tingling trumpet riffs behind her.

 

trumpet player of a different stripe altogether, the diffident Shorty Rogers, followed with another trend-setting Herman instrumental, ''Keen and Peachy,'' which Shorty co‑wrote with Ralph Burns, and Rogers was joined by bassist and comic Chubby Jackson, who flew in from Florida for the sardonic scat duet on ''Lemon Drop,''a high velocity bebop tour de force with a witty aftertaste.

Mary Ann McCall, a compact blonde with a rich and unerring voice, emerged from semi‑retirment in the Hollywood Hills to sing her two distinctive Herman hits, the jovial ''Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams'' and ''Detour Ahead,'' a hambone ballad which could have been a Dolly Parton vehicle. Some say Herman never had a better vocalist, and when McCall was finished, you could see why.

At intermission, Bennett, McCall, Podewell, and the rest were joined by Herman fans James Coburn, Robert Wagner (who came with Jill St. John) and Dudley Moore for a picture-taking session in a large and crowded tent behind Wadsworth Auditorium, where half a dozen mobile television cameras and double that number of still cameramen fired away.

Meantime, the encouragingly affluent patrons ‑‑ KKGO, the jazz radio station, sponsored the $50 a ticket event as a benefit for the Woody Herman Tribute Trust Fund ‑‑ gathered for drinks from refreshment stands in front. A station spokeswoman said that despite slow ticket sales, which left the auditorium with a few empty seats, $25,000 was added from advance sales to the fund, which until then stood at $70,000.

(Herman owes the government $1.6 million by the IRS count, the result of embezzlement of tax withholding funds by a long‑ago band manager, now deceased. The news has touched off a number of benefits for him, including one sponsored in Long Beach by KLON and another at the Nucleus Nuance, a night club on Melrose Avenue.)

It has been an unforgettable evening up to this point, but when Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show band took the stage after the interval, the night took on major dimensions. Severinsen's ensemble, which employs a few Herman alumni like Conte Candoli, Pete's trumpet playing brother, was in top form.

Pete Christleib and Ernie Watts surged through a thing called ''Sax Alley'' at an incredible clip; Doc got out his flugelhorn for an eerie minor‑key work he didn't name, and after a rousing ''Apple Honey,'' Snooky Young wielded his celebrated blue plunger on a novelty number called ''Foolin' Around.'' In it, he was joined by Severinsen for a wonderfully comic finale in which they ''talked'' on their instruments.

That opened the gates for the wily comedian Pete Barbutti, who played broom, and actor-pianist Dudley Moore, who delivered his side-splitting version of the theme from ''Bridge on the River Kwai'' as it might have been developed by Ludwig van Beethoven.

But it was Rosemary Clooney who put the old tear in an eye or two with her understated and moving ''My Buddy,'' the title of an album she made with Herman not long ago.

''One of the joys of my life was to make an album with Woody,'' said Clooney, a sentiment to which the players who paid him this impressive tribute could heartily endorse.

         

 

Vine St. Bar and Grill, Thursday, Feb. 25, 1987

 

t only takes one to start the fire, and in this case it was Jake Hanna, the drummer who played with the late Woody Herman back in 1957.

It became apparent on the very first number, ''Things Ain't What They Used to Be,'' that he wasn't going to let anybody alone. The out chorus on this one is a skein of bitterly exultant dissonances. Bitter exultation is just Jake's meat, and soon he was drawing the horns along like some medieval gnome at the spinning wheel.

The gentlemen of the ensemble, the Woody Herman All‑Stars, were reuniting in an attempt to turn bass mettle into gold for the benefit of Ron Berinstein, the Vine St. owner, who faced some tax problems.

They did this by playing jazz in that shockingly astute way that Herman pioneered back in the 1940s. ''Apple Honey,'' was prototypical. Those sizzling muted trumpets sounding the theme could almost be in a Basie chart.

 But there was more, much more. Basie never had a trombonist who played anything near the late Bill Harris, to whom Slide Hyde paid an oblique tribute in his solo at Vine St. And Ron Stout's work, while in the debonair Joe Newman groove, devoured the changes like that burning bebopper Fats Navarro.

either Basie or Ellington would risk the dour quote from Stravinsky at the end of this 1946 chart. Faithful alumni Pete and Conte Candoli played it in the same old pungent way.

In short, it was just like the old days: the sound of surprise.

Bouyed in spirit by Hanna's oceanic outlook, the soloists prospered, alluding from time to time to their former mates in the Herman Herds. Ex‑Ellingtonian Bill Berry swooped and scored on cornet, trombonist Hyde provided a New Orleans touch, and Bob Shepherd played some lyrical clarinet on ''Rose Room,'' which became ''In a Mellotone.'

Tenorman Bob Cooper, a ringer from the Stan Kenton band, carved out an alternative to the famous Stan Getz solo on ''Early Autumn'' Trumpeter Conte Candoli was brimful of invention on ''Body and Soul.'' Trombonist Mike Fahn overflowed on ''What's New.'' Even at this late date,  you couldn't have stopped any of them.