Word: sax
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...Beethovan Sonata Pathetique. The band puts on a terrific show, plays an easy bounce style of dance music, and has excellent soloists. Jimmy Young (trombone) ranks in the top three. Paul Webster (trumpet) is recognized as the highest in the business. Willie Smith and Joe Thomas can play sax for anybody's all star swing band--in short, this is a band of a kind that you very rarely hear, and it's fronted by a man with enough personality, brains, and musical ability to bring his outfit up from small one-nighters to one of the few steady...
...Little Dixie-the best of the town's Harlem points. Jack Hill's band is one of the finest jump combos in this vicinity and is worth hearing. They play much like Basic with some very good sax solo work and some fine arrangements done for them by a Harvard Med. School student. Place usually has some good dancers and a singer who gets away with a good imitation of Helen Morgan. . . Raymor Ballroom while inhabitated by jitterbugs and the like, has some good jazz in Les Brown's band. . . Roseland State Ballroom much the same type as the Raymor...
...himself is recognized as the greatest technician on the alto sax in all the surrounding territory. His "Flight of a Bumble Bee" is often done so fast that it gets done about two seconds before the people at end of the hall have begun to hear it. Drummer Buddy Schutz and trombonist Don Matteson are two of the best. Besides having a marvelous classical background, one of tenor saxman Herby Haymer's joys in life is to work in things like "Hymn to the Sun" in arrangements of "Liza"--also making faces that only a mother could love...
Most overlooked but one of the best men in the band is first saxist Milt Yaner. And if you don't think that having a first sax that knows how to lead a section is important, listen to Benny Goodman's orchestra right now. He has one of the best alto solo men around, but when the section plays together, it sounds like a battle royal. With Jimmy's bunch, however, it's just one smooth tone, and Yaner is the gentleman responsible for this very telling factor...
While occasionally on numbers like "Echoes of Harlem," the band begins to sound something like Ellington, the only outstanding thing about the band is Barnet himself. His tenor sax playing on the Lester Young (Count Basie) idea is usually good, although it occasionally sounds a little like a taxi-horn on a foggy night. His alto sax work is much better, and is probably the best imitation around of Ellingtonite Johnny Hodges. All in all, it would seem to me that the slogan. "Swing and sweat with Charlie Barnet" still holds...