Word: sax
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...Mass. Avenue. Despite the foolish economy of cutting the band to six pieces removing Eddie Hawley's fine bass and Bob Chestnut's trumpet work, the band still swings. High Diggs (piano) and Dave Chestnut (drums) "kick" right along while Bill Stanley's trumpet and Daniel Potter's excellent sax work are worth catching...
...Music" by Gene Krupa and added stars is a very interesting record. Done in 1936 (February), it forecasts what was to happen to the Goodman band a year later: loud but powerful rhythm and fast, amazingly technical solos. Benny Goodman (clarinet), Roy Eldridge (trumpet) and Chu Berry (tenor sax) play the solos on this record. With the exception of Chu's, the solos are repetitious as the dickens and sound like every solo the men had made--and Chu's are just fair...
Unfortunately, Glenn's record doesn't fit as well as it might. While beautifully arranged, with good sax and trumpet solos, and obviously painstaking rehearsal, the rendition is completely dead and lifeless. The reason is quite simple: Glenn Miler has an eight man brass section and a five man sax section. To provide life for a band that size would require a rhythm section of geniuses--and Glenn's rhythm men are just competent musicians, no more...
When I talked over the situation the other night down in New York with Coleman Hawkins, who has been living sadly on his sax ever since he returned from France last fall, he agreed completely with me. He then went on to play for me, in the style that I have always considered to be tops on tenor sax, a full hour of "Limehouse Blues," Improvising all the while around a little riff that I swiped from Chu Berry down at the Southland last week...
...always been my favorite tenor sax man. Some time ago he made a record of "Limehouse Blues" with some of the boys from the band for Variety Records. There was one lick in the record that I like especially, and when I next heard the band, I asked him to play me some "Limehouse" and especially that one phrase. So sitting in his dressing room, with one of the trombone men playing guitar, Mr. Berry played me twenty minutes of "Limehouse Blues" at a murderous tempo--all of it built around this one idea I had mentioned...