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194 22. Adventure in Emotion: The LA Neophonic (1964–1968) For much of 1964 Kenton was turned off from music altogether , in what may have seemed like over-reaction to a mere two weeks’ poor reception overseas, but which Stan explained in a long letter to Joe Coccia dated September 7, 1964. This is just a short extract: “I haven’t been any place other than at home with the children, they need me so much to be with them. I’ve been through a period of adjustment, from wanting to give up music for something else, or retiring completely on a low budget. I’ve had terrible depressions and hardly any creative drive. I’m delighted to tell you, however, that I’m about to come out of it, and I realize I’ve had these dry periods before, but that doesn’t seem to make it any less painful while they’re taking place.” John Worster also explains how Stan’s psyche could easily put things out of perspective: “Stan Kenton is a man who’s immense in everything he does. When he trips, he doesn’t just stumble, he falls flat on his face. Everything he does is done exaggerated, and all his emotions are exaggerated . When he’s happy, he is happy; you and I aren’t ever that happy! And you and I are never as sad as he is. He’s a very emotional, exaggerated person, and if you hurt him you hurt him deeply, or you don’t scratch the surface at all. If you get through to him, you get through to him, and he’ll never forget it. If you do him a wrong he’ll never forget it; and if you really please him he’ll never forget that either.”1 Most bandleaders (think Glenn Miller, Les Brown, Count Basie) found their niche and stuck with it. Often buffeted by market forces, Kenton was never quite sure whether his was a dance band, a jazz band, or a semi-symphonic concert orchestra. The latter was his preference , but audiences for such music were thin on the ground, and even in the “good old days” had been too few to support a national tour. So since he was confined to LA anyway by his children, in conjunction with his new managers George Greif and Sid Garris, Stan conceived a plan to front a resident concert orchestra of the finest Hollywood-based Adventure in Emotion: The LA Neophonic (1964–1968) 195 musicians, playing only avant-garde music, and limited to around four concerts a year. The prospect was enough to shake Stan out of his doldrums, and restore his creative drive. He started writing for an instrumentation similar to the “New Era” orchestra, but with five French horns replacing the unpredictable mellophoniums. Possibly sensing a certain kudos to be gained from their participation, Capitol was initially enthusiastic, and gave Lee Gillette the green light to suggest an album of Wagnerian themes recast in Kentonian terms. At first Stan rejected the idea, but as he related, once he became interested, “It took about three months to write all that music. What I had to do was take the guts, the important things, out of those Wagnerian scores, because a lot of those things last for ever. So it was the editing that was crucial. But outside of trying to figure out how they were orchestrated, there wasn’t really any great problem.”2 Clinton Roemer did all the copying of Kenton’s scores, and he agreed: “The album was pretty much a literal transcription for a different-sized orchestra of what Wagner wrote. If you compare the Kenton charts with the originals, you’ll see that the ‘advanced’ writing was Wagner’s, not Kenton’s.”3 Interestingly, Bill Russo (who knew his classical music) made much the same point when reviewing “Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin” during a Blindfold Test: “I thought perhaps Stan hadn’t made the work enough his own, hadn’t sufficiently taken the material and made it into his own personality, that he had simply reset it rather than remade it.”4 It is hard to envision precisely the audience Kenton-Wagner was intended to satisfy. Certainly not the classicists, who would to a man reject any tampering with the original compositions. Certainly not the jazz fans, for whom this totally “traditional” approach would hold nil appeal. Nor even the average Kenton-lover who revelled in the likes...

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