Stan Kenton: This Is an Orchestra!

10. The Lost Years (1948-1949)

71 10. The Lost Years (1948–1949) In 1948 people still wanted to dance, and Stan soon found his plan to concentrate exclusively on concerts unworkable. He blamed a lack of suitable halls, overlooking the fact that had there been the demand, promoters would soon have found the necessary venues. So in essence the band still carried two separate books, dance and concert , though at most dances a portion of the time was devoted to a mini-concert. Many new charts were added during the year, but being unable to record, most of the comparatively few broadcasts that survive are dominated by the older scores in order to plug the Capitol platters. Despite the band’s popularity, AFRS inexplicably neglected the orchestra during 1948, so that most of the new music has been lost for ever, unless a hidden cache should unexpectedly emerge. Titles like “Convertible,” “Double Whammy,” and “Oogaga” remain no more than names on a band-book listing. Pete Rugolo remained Stan’s indispensable chief arranger, at a time when few of the younger musicians were unaffected by the influence of Bird and Diz on modern music. “Stan didn’t like bebop at all,” Pete told Terry Vosbein. “I wasn’t too crazy about it myself, but I liked to keep up with new ideas in jazz, so I tried to keep the guys happy and wrote a few bop things, but Stan . . . hardly ever played them. I always traveled with the band, Stan wanted me around all the time, and at dances during the last set he’d leave the stand and I’d sit in on piano and play some of the bop things, and he didn’t care. I played more like Count Basie-type piano, Stan was so heavy with his Earl Hines style. One of the things I wrote was a tribute-piece called ‘Dizzy-Like,’ which became ‘Artistry in Gillespie.’”1 It didn’t end there, because Pete then rewrote the chart altogether and rechristened it “Design for Brass,” but Stan still didn’t dig it, and in 1950 gave the score to Vic Lewis, who recorded it for Parlophone (EMI). 72 Stan Kenton: This Is an Orchestra! Other bebop scores from the Rugolo pen include “June’s Bop,” a scat vocal for Christy, a reworking of Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” and an original called “Three Bop,” which Pete changed to “Three Mothers” when Herman ’s “Four Brothers” chart by Jimmy Giuffre hit the headlines. Under either title the composition was a no-holds-barred bopper featuring Pepper , Conte, and Coop, and the nearest Stan ever got to sounding like the Gillespie band (hear it on Tantara’s Revelations). When Rugolo rearranged the theme for the 1948 Metronome All Stars small group he renamed it “Overtime” (because of the length of the session), and it was this title Charlie Barnet used when he recorded the big-band chart for Capitol in 1949. More to Stan’s liking was “Theme for Alto,” an atmospheric ballad for the full-voiced George Weidler, which Stan recorded in 1951, though by then Weidler was long gone, and an unhappy Bud Shank was called upon to take his place, despite the difference in their styles. At least as impressive was an intense companion-piece for Milt Bernhart’s trombone called “Hambeth”: a combination of Hamlet and Macbeth, with some of the most trenchant use of dissonance ever conceived. Milt recalled: “The title ‘Hambeth’ was a joke, a play on words, indicating that I’m a ham actor. We didn’t play it a lot, we couldn’t record in 1948, and it wasn’t a melodic number, it was based on harmonies and movements. I didn’t feel comfortable with it, so it just kind of got lost in the shuffle.”2 The only known recording, a 2009 version produced by Terry Vosbein, shows Milt was certainly not exaggerating, though a much simplified Rugolo arrangement featuring Johnny Keating and retitled “Theme for Trombone” was recorded in 1950 by Vic Lewis. If we are all losers from the Petrillo recording ban, no one’s career suffered more than that of Bob Graettinger, who had joined as staff arranger in the fall of 1947. Because of Graettinger’s non-conformist lifestyle and the unconventional nature of his music, a mystique has grown around him that almost defies rational explanation. One thing is clear: Kenton and Graettinger stuck together like limpets, Kenton because he was so smitten by Bob’s...