That Happy Feeling

In a musical Manhattan cellar called Basin Street one night last week, a thin-haired bandleader used an unorthodox method to get his crew going on a fast number. Dropping into a distance-runner's stance, he stamped out four beats and shouted a hoarse, rapid-fire "Bow! Bow!" On the next beat the 15-man outfit exploded into a shrieking blast that turned out to be a wild-eyed, half-humorous version of Lover, Come Back to Me. To start quieter numbers, such as Pres. Conference, the bandleader preferred to count out the beat or snap his fingers, and the band followed through with a brooding performance that played off a glassy-toned trumpet against the lush grumblings of a baritone sax, while the rhythm section boomed and sizzled in the background, and here & there the brasses split the air with steely stabs.

Forty-one-year-old Woodrow Wilson ("Woody") Herman was back in town --and back on top of the musical heap--with his Third Herd, the most versatile band he has ever led.

"The most exciting thing in jazz is when a big band can make it," he says, trying to explain the obsession that returned him so often to the precarious profession. His first to make jazz was called "The Band that Plays the Blues," which blew its way around a swing-crazy countryside from 1936 until it was broken up by the draft. In 1944 he organized the Herman Herd, the band whose piledriver precision so bemused Composer Igor Stravinsky that he wrote his Ebony Concerto for it. The outfit made Herman the top bandsman in the land. He disbanded it because it left him too little time for wife and daughter--"I just hadda go home, that's all"--but his daemon kept driving him, and a year later he had another standout herd. It was a disastrous venture because it was dedicated to the dying bop style and cost him a cool $175,000 before he could break it up. Three years ago, unhappy fronting small combos with his clarinet and sax, Woody Herman was rounding up his Third Herd, by last week had groomed it to top form.

"This band swings more than anything since the bop era began," he says without false modesty. It took hard work to get it that way, and Woody has trouble putting his finger on just what made the difference between the good band it was and the exciting one it became. "It's like one day you get up and it's not the greatest, and the next day you can whip the world.

We're getting the spirit again, and it's good . . . Jazz has made a lot of zigs in its day. If the world is upset, our music is upset . . . Jazz is a happy feeling . . .

These kids in the band want to prove something. There's a whole generation that doesn't even know what a big jazz band is."

Bandleader Herman is ready to show that generation what it has been missing.

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