"He's tough!" marveled Polly Podewell, the young Herman
vocalist who helped bring him home from Detroit, where he
collapsed in March after medication he had been taking for altitude
sickness affected his heart.
In the midst of his last illness, the 50-year band business veteran
was threatened with eviction from the house in the Hollywood Hills hat
he bought from Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall when the Thundering
Herd was first storming the heights after World War II.
"I've had this place. for 40 years," the Old Woodchopper said last
year, "and I've probably lived here 40 months." No sooner were the words
out of his mouth than the Internal Revenue Service, seeking to collect
$1.6 million in taxes and penalties dating to the Kennedy
administration, seized the house and auctioned it off.
Herman and his daughter, Ingrid Herman Reese, who survives (his wife,
Charlotte, died in 1982) were permitted to rent it for a month, but when
the illness struck and Woody could no longer work, they fell behind in
the rent and the new landlord filed for eviction. . The IRS seized all
of Woody's royalties, so he had virtually no income.
ublicity on his plight touched off a shower of show business
beneficence. As Woody fought for life at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center,
Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Dudley Moore, James Coburn and
Robert Wagner were among the world-famous figures who stepped forward,
and all-jazz radio station KLON quickly gathered $4,600 to pay Woody's.
back rent.
Another all-jazz station, KLON, coIlected money at a benefit concert
in Long Beach early this month that featured the Young Thundering Herd,
as his current band is known, under the direction Frank Tiberi, a
17-year veteran. It was no trick at all to find a number of stars among the thousands of band alumni to re-create the old
days. From the San Fernando Valley drove Shorty Rogers, a trumpeter in
the 1945 band; Terry Gibbs, who played vibraharp with the 1948 Herd;
Bill Perkins, who joined the saxophone section on tenor in 1951; and Med
Flory, class of 1953.
From the East Coast flew Jimmy Giuffre, who wrote the
legendary "Four Brothers" chart that set a new sound for the 1949 group;
and Al Cohn, who was one of the Four Brothers tenor saxophonists along
with Giuffre, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Serge Chaloff.
Joining the current band as though they never left
it, the silver-haired reedmen ran through "Four Brothers" and some of
the other great numbers from the bebop days == Cohn's "The Goof and I,"
Tiny Kahn's "TNT" and "Not Really the Blues," plus
a liberal helping of other hits from "Apple Honey" to "Early
Autumn."
Last week, another tribute sponsored by KKGO brought
out more immortal alumni, among them bassist Chubby Jackson, vocalist
Mary Ann McCall, pianist Nat Pierce and trumpeters Pete and Conte Candoli.
"I understand Woody would like this band to continue .playing and
carry on," said Perkins, "and I gotta say I don't normally like bands
that carry on - like the Glenn Miller band. But I think Woody's an
exception, because his music is jazz, and it's a cut above all that
other music. There is no finer band around today."
Polly Podewell, Stacy Rowles, Nat
Pierce and Jimmy Rowles at the cemetery.
his was the reputation of Herman's band
almost from
the time it came out as "The Band that Plays the Blues" in 1936. The
Milwaukee-born Herman, who toured vaudeville with his parents at age 9
as "The Boy Wonder of the Clarinet," took over the Isham Jones group
when the leader retired. The first Herman Herd was already playing the
Roseland dance hall in New York City when Count Basie arrived with his
first ensemble out of Kansas City.
"They knew exactly what they were doing," Basie
remembered in his autobiography, "Good Morning;, Blues," "and Woody was
very helpful, very generous. He gave me my first waltz arrangement.
‘Just take it easy,' he said, `and everything is
going to be all right.'"
Like Basie, Herman always had a soft spot for the
blues, and thus his music was readily understandable no matter how
sophisticated it got - and he employed some
very intelligent arrangers including Ralph Burns, Bill Holman, Johnny
Mandel, Nat Pierce, Gordon Brisker, Neil Hefti, Giuffre. Cohn and even
Igor Stravinsky, who wrote piece for the First Herd called "Ebony Concerto."
But the Boy Wonder of th Clarinet never fell into the
"symphonic jazz" trap that swallowed Swing Era bands like Paul
Whiteman's and Stan Kenton's, and sometimes even Duke Ellington's.
"I would never play down to an audience. Let them
come and find us," said Herman. "People would
like jazz to reach a lot bigger audience, but really I think it might
lose something if everybody embraced it."
oody don't
want to go, said Ed Dye, shaking his head.
Woody Herman's personal assistant and a couple of dozen graveside mourners were watching cemetery workers lower his casket with a hydraulic device after an unsuccessful attempt to slide the bandleader's remains into a crypt high above the
ground at Hollywood Memorial Park on a November day in 1987..
A curtain flapped over the narrow house where the Old Woodchopper's body would rest.
For seven months, the 74-year-old musician had hung on after a stroke, battling emphysema and cardiac disease before both lungs and heart failed him and he died last Thursday in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
A Give him communion with the saints forever,@ Monsignor George Parnassus had prayed earlier during the funeral service at St. Victor's Roman Catholic Church in West
Hollywood. During the final struggle, Parnassus said, Herman A suffered enormously,@ and felt A privation.@
He referred to the loss of the home in the Hollywood Hills that Herman bought in the 1940s from Humphrey Bogart, and which the IRS had auctioned off for payment of Woody's $1.6 million tax debt.
Cleve Herman, the KFWB radio reporter who broke that story, listened in a pew, his tape recorder in his hand.
Across the aisle, near her father's carnation-and-rose-covered casket, sat Ingrid Herman Reese, with Dye at her side. Woody's wife, Charlotte, died in 1982.
An outpouring of generosity from the show business world greeted the
news of Herman's trouble, and tens of thousands of dollars was raised to keep a roof over Ingrid's and Woody's head
But through it all, Parnassus reminded the mourners, A there wasn't a bit of bitterness@ on Woody's part. A He had faith that
tomorrow would be better.@
A Woody had many blessings,@ Parnassus observed, A and I would say that you@
-- he nodded at Ingrid and the mourners who nearly filled the church -- A were among those blessings.@
hat was quite a statement,
for in the pews were Henry Mancini, Les Brown and Ray Anthony, fellow Swing Era bandleaders; Stan Kenton's widow, Audrey Kenton; arrangers Nat Pierce, Bill Holman and Don Menza; former Down Beat editor Gene Lees; record
company president Albert Marx, singers Mary Ann McCall and Polly Podewell; and jazz musicians Ross Tornpkins, Jimmy Rowles.
Stacy Rowles, Bill Perkins, Cappy Lewis, Pete Candoli, Don Rader, Marty Harris, Doug McDonald, Jack Nimitz and Terry Gibbs.
Hundreds of other famous and not-so-famous friends had attended several musical tributes to Herman as he lay dying,and more would be at the wake that night at Alfonse's in Toluca Lake.
Representing Woody's last Thundering Herd, and the hundreds of young musicians to whom he had acted as Road Father in his 50-year career, were trumpeters Bill Byrne and Diane White and trombonist John
Fedchock. The band was in Stillwater, Okla., preparing for a memorial concert at Oklahoma State University
that night.
Herman's boyhood friend from Milwaukee, Jack Seifert, delivered the eulogy, quoting the man Woody had called one of America's greatest poets; Johnny Mercer, who put lyrics to the band's tender ballad
"Early Autumn" :
