Stan Kenton: This Is an Orchestra!

8. Artistry off the Rails (1947)

57 8. Artistry off the Rails (1947) As 1947 dawned, Stan Kenton had achieved just about everything he had set out to accomplish in music. Stan had every reason to be satisfied, but below the surface problems were accumulating. For six years almost without a break, Kenton had driven himself at a pace that would have exhausted most men within a month, and for the first time in his life he was feeling tired. The constant travelling, lack of sleep, snatched meals, and ever-present cigarettes were having their effect. Once they reached a hotel the guys could often relax before that night’s performance, but for Kenton it meant another round of radio shows, intensive interviews, personal appearances. Everyone wanted a piece of Stan Kenton. On top of that, Violet was giving him grief. They had planned the orchestra together, but for Violet the dream had turned sour, for the simple reason the couple had no home life together. Stan was constantly on the road, and even the short periods he was able to sleep over, his mind was as much on music as marriage. Violet had become a grass widow, and their daughter Leslie can hardly have known who her father was. Now Violet was hassling Stan that if their marriage was to last, somehow he had to spend more time with her, and that demand was incompatible with leading a road band. Kenton was truly between a rock and a hard place. Medical advice was that Stan should take a complete rest or face a total breakdown. In his own words: “The pressure was such that I was never at home. I began to worry a great deal about my family. I felt my marriage was going on the rocks. I began to blame the band. We had been going at such a great pace, I felt like I wanted to take time out to patch up my marriage.”1 Down Beat put it even more bluntly, saying Kenton “is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as a result of six years of steady work at a grueling pace to push his band to the top of the name list, a condition aggravated by worry over the divorce suit recently filed by the wife on the coast.”2 58 Stan Kenton: This Is an Orchestra! When it came to a contest between band and family, music usually won. With the orchestra booked solidly for months ahead by binding contractual commitments, Stan decided he had no option but to continue as planned. He tried to convince Violet this was the right move, to throw off his exhaustion, and continue with the normal routine. Having unseated Gene Howard from the crooner’s chair, Stan now decided he wanted to experiment with a vocal group, an attraction more commonly associated with dance bands than a jazz unit, leaders in the field being Glenn Miller’s Modernaires and Tommy Dorsey’s Pied Pipers. (True, Woody Herman had his Blue Flames, but they were so ineffectual as to be instantly forgettable.) Kenton cast envious eyes on Mel Torme’s Meltones, a hit with Artie Shaw’s band, but they weren’t available, and anyway Stan always preferred originality over the obvious. Dave Lambert was hired to organize a new group, a surprising choice in view of Dave’s bebop background. Lambert elected to go with the usual four guys and a girl, and Stan named them The Pastels, after his famous saxophone composition. The result was a highly professional vocal group, slightly more “husky” than the Modernaires, but one that broke no new ground in the idiom in the way The Four Freshmen would do a year or so later. Stan would complain they lacked a jazz phrasing, but in fairness the material they were given was generally not of a jazz nature, and was clearly designed with the aim of producing hit recordings. Much care went into the making of their first record, a calypso novelty called “His Feet Too Big for de Bed,” but it bombed, and it was the ballad B side “After You” that instead became a minor Kenton classic, and was recorded with the band in later years by both The Modern Men and The Four Freshmen. “I was commissioned by Stan Kenton to organize The Pastels, and write their first book of arrangements,” Lambert confirmed. “I sang with them only on the occasion of their first recording date, because Don MacLeod, the last member to...