Woody Herman--Elegy for a Swing Giant : Tragic Coda to a Life That Spanned Half a Century of Musical Achievement

If you weren’t there, it is easy enough to think of the Big Band Era as a single homogeneous mass of sound. Put it on the track of a movie, with a trumpet section, a sax section and a sock-cymbal (a. k. a. the hi-hat) chu-chooshing the choirs along and you’ve got the ‘30s, the ‘40s, the ‘50s.

But if you were there, with your ear to a small radio, straining to catch late remotes from the Log Cabin at Armonk, N.Y., the volume turned down to the threshold of audibility so you wouldn’t get warnings from the living room, it wasn’t like that at all.

Even the sweet bands, the dance bands, of which Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians was the role model, had their mildly distinctive styles (each, if you were into swing, more boring than the other).

But the big swing bands were another matter. Each of the great bands had its own signature. You may not have heard the tune or the arrangement before, but you didn’t need more than a couple of bars to know it was the Duke, the Count, or Stan or Artie or Benny or Tommy or Harry. Or Woody.

There were other names, other bands that had shorter nights of glory: Bunny Berigan, Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Barnet, Erskine Hawkins, Buddy Rich, the great instrumentalists whose own presence mattered more than their surroundings. That shining number would include Earl Hines and the immortal Louis Armstrong.

The greatest of the swing bands outlasted their time, it seems now, surviving despite terrible management, the disruptions of war and then of peace, the rise of the vocalists, the evolution of other styles (bop and beyond), the decline of the clubs and dance halls where the bands played, the punishing hand of time itself.

Woody Herman was a miracle of survival. And although he kept going, as we all came to know, because he was an honest man trying to pay off undeserved debts to a tone-deaf Uncle Sam, what you had to believe was that he was really out there on the road, playing high school gyms in towns that didn’t even have a movie house any more, because there wasn’t anything else quite as satisfying as making music.

He said, with a touch of bitterness, that keeping a big band was a costly hobby, a folly in which (as Dylan Thomas once remarked of his life) lack of money rolls in.

When I last saw him, at Donte’s a few years ago, Herman was already in his late 60s, a surprisingly small, trim man with what you were tempted to call muscular cheeks and lips, from blowing the clarinet so high and hard for so long.

Some of the sidemen on that gig could have been not just his children but his grandchildren. They played with the old-time driving spirit that always marked the Herman band, but they also had a technical virtuosity and a sure command of their instruments that made it hard to believe what you were hearing.

From the beginning, Woody made uncommon demands on his sidemen: the don’t-stop-for-nothin’ tempos and the high, precise and wailing brass sections, the reeds galloping as one were central to the Herd signature. I thought that night that if you could measure it somehow, you could prove that the young musicians were breaking the B-flat equivalents of the four-minute mile.

As you remember the bands, you think of Goodman and the bright, crisp precision he gave you, lit by his own rippling solos; or of Basie and that matchless and driving rhythm section, punctuated by his wonderful waste-not, one-finger piano inserts. Ellington meant those bluesy tone colorings and arrangements that seemed to take shape as they went along. And then there was Woody, crying, “Charge!” and dashing hellbent for the future.

He was not alone in pushing at the limits, if any, of the big band sound, and as somebody has already remarked, he had a gift for recruiting the arrangers and the players who were ready and willing for his journeys into unexplored country. But what Woody held onto for dear life was the beat. Ballad-slow or breakneck fast, the beat was steady and you always knew where it was.

Jazz music is propulsion and Herman and his herds never forgot it.

The big bands, in a sense, live on. The ghost bands play the old charts, for nostalgists. New bands try for new sounds, but there’s no steady money in it, and for the most part the bands exist only intermittently, labors of love for musicians who make their bread reading other charts.

It’s always a temptation to blow “Taps” for the end of an era, but this time maybe we better pick up the horn. You look around for the other survivors, any other still-living, still-playing bandleaders from that majestic half-century of American popular music.

But there doesn’t seem to be anybody else in the darkened club. The chairs are upended on the tables and there’s a crumpled piece of paper on the bandstand, a request from the party in the corner for “Four Brothers.”