Les Brown, Swing Bandleader, Dies at 88
By Richard Severo, courtesy of The New York Times
January 6, 2001 - Les Brown, whose Band of Renown was one of the most enduring orchestras that grew out of the swing era of the 1930's, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.
Mr. Brown was one of the last swing bandleaders to remain active as the century drew to a close. He and his band were best known for their classic 1945 recording of "Sentimental Journey" with Doris Day, their hit 1946 record "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and for their long association with Bob Hope. Mr. Brown became the musical director of Mr. Hope's radio and television shows in 1947 and later accompanied him on 18 Christmas tours around the world to entertain American troops.
For more than 60 years, the Les Brown orchestra was a frequent attraction, providing dance music at college proms and ballrooms and appearing at the Presidential inauguration galas for Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The band also entertained Queen Elizabeth II at a ball arranged by Frank Sinatra.
With the help of such resourceful arrangers as Ben Homer, Frank Comstock, and Skip Martin, Mr. Brown fashioned an orchestra that made people want to dance.
"We strove for a cleanliness and a certain conservativeness that was commercially successful," Mr. Brown said in The Instrumentalist magazine in 1990. "For the most part we played ballads on the pretty side, rather than swinging them like Benny Goodman."
Over the years, the Brown orchestra's muscular, tight approach to its music, with its emphasis on sure intonation and intentions that were always clear and serious, were rewarded with critical and popular success. John S. Wilson, jazz critic of The New York Times, noted in 1983 that Mr. Brown's group had "retained the style and sound" of the swing period and yet had a "freshness that makes it seem quite up to date."
Mr. Brown teamed up with Ben Homer to write the music for one of the memorable songs that emerged from World War II, "Sentimental Journey." The record was released in 1944 and became a big hit in 1945, largely because of Ms. Day's lovely vocal and the lyrics of Bud Green, which evoked the eagerness of G.I.'s returning to see their loved ones again.
Got my bag, I got my reservation, Spent each dime I could afford. Like a child in wild anticipation Long to hear that `All aboard.'
Seven, that's the time we leave, at seven. I'll be waiting up for heaven, Countin' every mile of railroad track That takes me back.
The Day-Brown combination on "Sentimental Journey" sold a million records for Columbia. The song stayed on the radio's hit parade for 16 weeks, became the nation's No. 1 song for five weeks and can still be heard on classic pop radio stations. It also provided a major boost to the career of Ms. Day, who was the band's popular girl singer in the war years.
Most of the other Brown hits were instrumentals, including "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," "Bizet Has His Day," "Midnight Sun," "Mexican Hat Dance," "Ramona" and "Leap Frog," a jerky uptempo number that became the orchestra's signature piece. In 1941 the band also had a novelty best seller with "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio," inspired by the Yankee center fielder's 56-game hitting streak. The band continued to get requests for its songs years after they were recorded.
Mr. Brown credited the freshness of his music not just to his arrangers, but to his players as well. He liked to tell interviewers that the musicians he hired were generally not big-name soloists but sidemen who were excellent readers and who worked especially well in sections.
"Good soloists aren't necessarily good section men," Mr. Brown said in The Instrumentalist. "There's nothing worse than an all-star band with no teamwork."
That team varied over the years, but at times included well-regarded musicians like Matt Uttel, alto saxophonist; Bud Madison, Wes Hensel and Don Fagerquist, trumpet players; Don Rader, who played fluegelhorn and trumpet; Lou Ciotto, tenor saxophonist; Abe Most, the jazz-flavored clarinetist and alto saxophonist; Tony Rizzi, guitarist; Jeff Clarkson, pianist; and Warren Brown, Si Zentner, Andy Martin and Ray Sims, tenor trombonists. Mr. Brown's younger brother, Clyde Brown, who was known as Stumpy, was a long-time stalwart on bass trombone.
The "regular" vocalists came and went. In addition to Ms. Day, they included Jo Ann Greer, Butch Stone, Lucy Ann Polk and Ellen Wilson. In the early days, when the occasion called for guest vocalists Mr. Brown called on Johnny Mercer and the songwriter Richard Whiting's young daughter, Margaret. The chemistry of the group was such that people who knew little about music loved to dance to the Band of Renown; people who knew a great deal about it listened with equal enthusiasm.
The band had quite a consistent approach to its music over the years, even though Mr. Brown sometimes tinkered with the size and scope of the instrumentation.
"Although I started with a 12-piece band in 1938 that has grown and shrunk in size over the years, the instrumentation never went through radical changes," Mr. Brown said. "Instead of the four 'bones we used in 1942, we use three today. We started with three trumpets, but had to compete with Goodman and Dorsey, so we hired a fourth."
Lester Raymond Brown was born on March 12, 1912, in Reinerton, Pa. His father was Raymond Winfield Brown, the town baker, who had a good ear for music, played a fine soprano sax and always wanted to be a professional musician but never went beyond being named conductor of the town's concert band. In those days, many towns and villages across the nation had concert bands that would play the works of Franz von Suppe, John Philip Sousa and Victor Herbert in park bandstands on a summer's evening. The band under the elder Mr. Brown's baton played for tired Pennsylvania coal miners and their families.
Les Brown and his two brothers were expected to help out in the bakery but they soon learned that the one way out of it was to agree to take music lessons. Les started out playing cornet and switched over to soprano saxophone and learned clarinet and bassoon.
In 1926 he showed enough promise so that his father permitted him to enroll in the Patrick Conway Military Band School in Ithaca, N.Y., named after a e fabled Civil War-era bandmaster. The school was later absorbed into the Ithaca Conservatory of Music and ultimately became Ithaca College. At Conway he studied theory, harmony, counterpoint and composition with Wallingford Rewigger, who encouraged young Brown's interest in symphonic music. He became especially fond of Mahler, with Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Debussy and Ravel not far behind.
After three years at Conway, Mr. Brown received a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy in Cornwall, N.Y., which awarded scholarships to instrumentalists who could benefit its military band. He played saxophone in the band and began to write music. He also became infatuated with big band music, listening to radio programs and records that featured Gene Goldkette, Paul Whiteman, Red Nichols, Fletcher Henderson and Bix Beiderbecke. .
Mr. Brown aspired to study at the University of Pennsylvania but in 1932 he went to Duke University instead because it had the best-known college swing bands, the Blue Devils. He became its leader and toured the east coast with the band, playing one-nighters for more than a year. Most of the Blue Devils returned to Duke in September 1937. Mr. Brown went to New York City and wrote arrangements for the bands of Isham Jones, Jimmy Dorsey, Larry Clinton and Mr. Nichols. In 1938 he gained the backing of Victor Records and started the orchestra that became Les Brown and His Band of Renown. For a time the band was a fixture at the Edison Hotel in Times Square.
Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Evelyn, and their son, Les Jr., and daughter, Denise Marsh.
Over the years, the Band of Renown played for broadcasting stars like Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Dean Martin. Mr. Brown's association with Mr. Martin lasted from 1965 to 1974, the band's longest run on television. But its longest gig was in the employ of Mr. Hope. It started in the middle 1940's, when Mr. Brown was appearing at the Hollywood Palladium and had a drink with Mr. Hope's agent, who invited him to play for the Hope radio show.
Mr. Brown remained with Mr. Hope when he made the move to television and also accompanied the comedian on his tours to entertain American troops. The association lasted more than 40 years and more than 800 shows. Mr. Hope used to say that he never left home without Les Brown.
The Band of Renown's songs were released, rereleased and sometimes rerecorded to take advantage of superior sound technology. Three of the more recent issues were "Anything Goes" and "Les Brown: The Best of the Big Bands," both in the 1990's, and "The Les Brown Story," in the late 1980's. Mr. Brown worked well into his later years, refusing to retire, even as he saw his bookings decline.
"Let's face it," he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. "We're going to fade out. There won't be much demand for big bands soon."
George Simon, Big Band Jazz Critic, Dies at 88
By Ben Ratliff, courtesy of The New York Times
George T. Simon, a jazz critic best known for his writing during the big band era, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 88 and lived in Brooklyn.
Mr. Simon became a jazz critic in 1935 when, just out of Harvard, he joined the staff of Metronome magazine. In 1939 he became the magazine's editor in chief. Metronome was primarily a dance-band publication when he began working there, but between the late 1930's and the early 50's, largely through Mr. Simon's efforts, it became the jazz magazine second only to Downbeat.
A drummer who had a band in college and performed on the early Glenn Miller recordings, Mr. Simon played avocationally for most of his life. Though his criticism tended to be more eyewitness journalism than musicology, his insight went beyond the surface.
"As a critic, he was best known for his big-band reviews during the swing era," said Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. "He paid attention to section work, lead trumpeters, arrangers - things other than just the soloists. He had a good handle on the inner workings of bands."
Mr. Simon's knowledge of big-band history was collected in his book The Big Bands, published in 1968 and often reprinted. He also wrote The Sinatra Report (1965), Glenn Miller and His Orchestra (1974) and The Best of the Music Makers (1979). He was a regular critic at The New York Post and The New York Herald-Tribune in the 1960's.
Aside from his work as a writer, Mr. Simon was active in the recording industry. During World War II, serving in the Army's special services unit, he produced many of the records known as V-Discs for American servicemen overseas. Among the sessions he supervised was the first recording by the trumpeter Clark Terry.
In the 1960's he was also executive director of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization that manages the Grammy Awards.
Mr. Simon is survived by his wife, Beverly; a daughter, Julie Ann Simon of Oakland, California; a son, Thomas Simon of New York; and three grandchildren.
Stanley Kubrick, Film Director With a Bleak Vision, Dies at 70
By Stephen Holden, courtesy of the New York Times
Monday, March 8, 1999 - Stanley Kubrick, the famously reclusive director of such classic films as Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, died yesterday at his home in England, his family said. He was 70.
The police were summoned to KubrickÕs rural home in Hertfordshire, north of London, yesterday afternoon, when he was pronounced dead.
"There are no suspicious circumstances," a police spokesman said. KubrickÕs family announced his death and said there would be no further comment.
One of the few American directors who had the prestige to make big-budget movies while working outside the Hollywood mainstream, Kubrick directed coldly brilliant films that explored humanityÕs baser instincts with great visual flair and often savage wit. Although those films won eight Academy Awards, none were for best director.
That may be because his subjects were often dark. The comic satire Dr. Strangelove, made at the height of the cold war, portrayed the military as a collection of incompetent, jingoistic yahoos itching for an chance to unleash nuclear devastation.
The film was a harsher and much funnier version of the same vision of military pathology and hypocrisy found in Paths of Glory, the movie that brought him to prominence in 1957, and that was reiterated 30 years later in Full Metal Jacket.
KubrickÕs sarcasm and ironic humor flared memorably in Dr. Strangelove in the juxtaposition of Vera Lynn singing "WeÕll Meet Again" against images of nuclear catastrophe. It was also evident in The Blue Danube Waltz accompanying a space-docking sequence in 2001 and in a scene of Malcolm McDowell jauntily crowing SinginÕ in the Rain while delivering a brutal beating in A Clockwork Orange. That filmÕs savagery was so pointed that some critics complained that the movie glorified violence.
Kubrick withdrew the film from distribution in Britain after it was said to have inspired copycat crimes. But if KubrickÕs misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity. KubrickÕs chilly outlook coincided with his reputation for being an extreme perfectionist who insisted on control over every aspect of his films, from casting and screenwriting to editing, lighting and music. It often took him many months and sometimes years to complete a film. He was known to film up to 100 takes of a scene.
Increasingly reclusive, he announced in 1974 that he was settling permanently in England. Refusing to give interviews, he withdrew so completely that an Englishman impersonated him for several months before being discovered.
Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, in the Bronx. As a child he was encouraged by his father, a doctor, to take up still photography, and when he was 17 he was hired as a staff photographer by Look magazine, which had been impressed by a picture he had snapped the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.
While working at Look he attended film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and later said that seeing so many bad films gave him the confidence to do better.
"I was aware that I didnÕt know anything about making films, but I believed I couldnÕt make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing," Kubrick once said. "Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie."
In 1950 he quit his job at Look to make his first film, Day of the Fight, a 16-minute documentary, which he sold to RKO-Pathe.
He completed two more documentary shorts before making his feature debut in 1953 with Fear and Desire, a low-budget film that was financed with family money, and that he wrote, directed, photographed and edited.
After making a second feature, KillerÕs Kiss, he formed a production company in 1954 with a producer, James B. Harris, and made The Killing, a drama about a racetrack heist starring Sterling Hayden.
KubrickÕs fourth full-length film, Paths of Glory, established him as one of the most promising postwar American filmmakers. The World War I drama, starring Kirk Douglas, was a devastating indictment of military duplicity that still stands as one of the most powerful antiwar movies.
He made The Killing and Paths of Glory for a percentage of the profits, and both received critical acclaim while faring indifferently at the box office. Two years later, in 1959, Kubrick was invited to replace Anthony Mann, the director of the high-budget Roman epic Spartacus, which starred Douglas as the leader of a slave rebellion against the Roman state. The film, released in 1960, was noticeably more intelligent than most Roman spectacles of the era and was an enormous box-office success.
Soon after, Kubrick moved to England, where he hoped to maintain greater creative control of his films than he could in Hollywood. But he soon returned to the United States to scout locations for Lolita, an adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel in which James Mason played Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged lover of the pubescent Lolita (Sue Lyon).
The directorÕs taste for the controversial and bizarre sharpened with the nightmarish comic satire Dr. Strangelove (subtitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"), which imagined nuclear Armageddon as a macabre joke. More than any other film Dr. Strangelove established KubrickÕs reputation for coldness.
The successes of Spartacus, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove gave Kubrick the rare freedom to choose his subjects and to control his projects. For the next several years, he worked on the science fiction epic 2001 (1968), which he wrote with Arthur C. Clarke. Its spectacular psychedelic effects earned the film a reputation as the eraÕs quintessential "head" movie. In its visual grandeur and dazzling special effects, 2001 paved the way for George LucasÕs Star Wars trilogy.
In an interview with Playboy magazine, Kubrick said that in 2001 he had "tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content... just as music does... YouÕre free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning."
After the spaced-out fantasies of 2001, in which the hero is reborn as an angelic child, KubrickÕs pessimism reared up savagely in his adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange. The work was voted the yearÕs best in 1971 by the New York Film Critics Circle, which also named Kubrick best director. The film paints a portrait of Alex ( McDowell), a violent, homicidal thug who is sadistically brainwashed into placidity by the state, and it has no sympathetic characters.
Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange were the high-water marks in a career that stumbled with Barry Lyndon (1975), a visually stunning but static film based on a Thackeray novel in which the director took enormous pains to evoke a lighting and imagery that would recreate an authentic 18th- century ambiance. The costly movie took 300 shooting days to complete and fared only modestly at the box office.
Five years later came The Shining, an icy Gothic fable based on a Stephen King novel in which a writer (Jack Nicholson) holes up with his family in a Colorado hotel and goes mad, turning into a homicidal maniac.
KubrickÕs next film, Full Metal Jacket (1987), adapted from Gustav HasfordÕs novel "The Short-Timers," was a grim near-horror movie about the Vietnam War.
Kubrick was married four times. His marriages to Toba Metz in 1948, Ruth Sobtka in 1954 and Susanne Harlan (with whom he had three daughters) in 1958 ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Christiane, and his daughters Katharine, Anya and Vivian.
Kubrick had recently finished editing his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, a psychosexual thriller based on Arthur SchnitzlerÕs "Traumnovelle" ("Dream Story") and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as psychiatrists. Filmed in Britain in an atmosphere of military secrecy, it took 15 months to shoot. The film is to be released on July 16.
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