Word: hirt
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Tues., April 17 Rainbow of Stars (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Robert Goulet hosts a variety show from Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, with Nancy Walker, Dick Button, Carol Lawrence, Al Hirt, Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A reappraisal of imperialism on the Indian subcontinent, filmed in Lahore, written and narrated by Novelist John Masters...
Casual Kazoo. Last week, fresh off the road, Hirt was packing them in at the Pier 600 Club on Bourbon Street, where his success began. A huge (6 ft. 2 in., 300 lbs.), bush-bearded man, he stands on the bandstand, his trumpet like a toy kazoo in one hamlike hand. With his other hand, he sketches out a casual beat. Then he may break into a surprisingly agile buck and wing and lead his combo (trombone, clarinet, drums, bass, piano, trumpet) into a searing chorus of Down by the Riverside. Snarling, growling, shivering into a remarkably clean vibrato...
...style, by Hirt's own definition, is "roving Dixieland." Programs that include numbers like Tin Roof Blues and South Rampart Street Parade are leavened with tricked-up standards-Lover Come Back To Me, All the Things You Are. But Dixieland or standard, the audience vibrates to everything Hirt & Co. produce-even, a critic remarked last week, if it is sometimes "a little hard to hear the trombone...
Jazzy Exterminator. Until recently, it was even harder for anyone outside New Orleans to hear Hirt-mainly because the responsibility of a wife and eight children kept him from hitting the road. Son of a New Orleans policeman, he was given a pawnshop trumpet when he was six, studied classical music through high school, entered the Cincinnati Conservatory on a scholarship. At Cincinnati he noticed less gifted students picking up $5 a night for appearances with dance bands. The money, Al decided, lay outside the long-haired classics, and with the aid of Harry James and Roy Eldridge records...
After a while, New Orleans musicians recognized Hirt as a "great trumpet," and when he organized his own small band in 1955, he began to build a local following. Last fall he was persuaded to try his luck out of town. This year Hirt expects to clear more than $200,000-a change from his lean eating days that astounds him (his fair-weather breakfast ration: a dozen eggs). "I'm really not doing anything different," says Al Hirt. But he also admits: "I've called off the elopement drills for my daughters...