Play It Again, Sam

No, the big bands are not coming back. They probably never will. At least not in the way they flourished 30 years ago, doing up to six shows a day at theaters like Manhattan's Paramount, playing for dancing at spots like the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, N.Y., echoing over the radio networks every night from hotel ballrooms across the U.S. All that has been relegated to memory--and to the big-band buffs. These are the forlorn breed of fanatics who can not only instantly identify Artie Shaw's 1940 recording of Stardust but can even name the trumpet and trombone soloists on it (Billy Butterfield and Jack Jenney), and who thrive as much on nonmusical nostalgia as on genuine musical connoisseurship.

Such a man is George T. Simon, 55, executive director of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. At Harvard in the early 1930s, Simon was so excited by the Casa Loma Orchestra's flashy beat that he used it as the style for his own college band; later he became a drummer for Glenn Miller, a writer and editor for the old Metronome magazine, and a producer for records, radio and TV. Now, drawing heavily on his Metronome files, he has packed all he knows about the peak of swing (1935-46) into an encyclopedic volume, The Big Bands (Macmillan; $9.95). Like the zealots of whom and to whom it speaks, the book is cheerfully biased, sometimes repetitive, often superficial--and just as often stirringly evocative of the fervid period when so many groups (Simon mentions some 450) "swung freely and joyously," filling listeners with "an exhilarated sense of friendly well-being."

Jealous Rim Shots. Best of them all, says Simon, was Tommy Dorsey's orchestra. Others may have been more creative, hard-driving or distinctive, but, all around, Dorsey's band "could do more things better than any other." At one time or another, it featured such talents as Drummer Buddy Rich and Trumpeter Bunny Berigan, Singers Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, Arrangers Paul Weston and Sy Oliver--and, always, the warm, silken trombone of T.D. himself, from whom Sinatra learned most of what he knows about breathing and phrasing.

Dorsey raided other bands so mercilessly that one rival, Joe Marsala, wired him: "How about giving me a job in your band so I can play with mine?" Egos clashed within the ranks--Drummer Rich jealously shattered Sinatra's romantic numbers with noisy rim shots until Sinatra exploded and tossed a full water pitcher at him. The touchiest ego of all belonged to the quick-tempered, perfectionist leader. Arrogant, yet gregarious, shrewd at finance, yet at times childlike and yearning for a less complicated life, Dorsey was one of the most powerful and enigmatic personalities of the era.

Apart from a probing sketch of Dorsey, Simon provides little that is fresh on such familiar figures as Miller, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington, but he gives appropriate recognition to some of the brilliant though now largely forgotten ensembles of the period: the sizzling band headed by tiny, hunchbacked Drummer Chick Webb, featuring Ella Fitzgerald, which triumphed at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in a 1937 battle of the bands with Goodman's group; the lush, colorfully textured Claude Thornhill band; the showmanlike Jimmie Lunceford unit, whose buoyant two-beat style influenced such latter-day bands as Billy May's; and one of the rare curiosities of big-band history--the 35-piece, all-reed-and-woodwind ensemble of the 1940s fronted by Shep Fields, otherwise an undistinguished leader of ricky-tick commercial groups.

45 Burps. Simon also squarely faces a fact often obscured by sentimental hindsight: a great many bands of the era were inevitably cheap, slick or inept. He quotes Arranger Gordon Jenkins, after an evening of listening to the radio in 1937: "I heard 458 chromatic runs on accordions, 911 'telegraph ticker' brass figures, 78 sliding trombones, four sliding violas, 45 burps into a straw, 91 bands that played the same arrangement on every tune, and 11,006 imitations of Benny Goodman."

Then there was the frantic competition, the whole complex economic side of bandleading that the restless, sensitive Artie Shaw said "just plain stinks." In the end, it was this side that helped kill the bands. World War II changed the U.S. entertainment atmosphere: the draft called away many top musicians, and those who were left traveled less; the musicians' union imposed a ban on recording that lasted two years; ballrooms converted to bowling alleys.

"The girls at home and the boys overseas were equally lonely, equally sentimental," writes Simon. "The time was ripe for the singers, with their more personalized messages. In December 1946, almost a dozen years after Benny Goodman had blown the first signs of life into the big-band bubble, that bubble burst. Inside of a few weeks, eight of the nation's top bands broke up. The world that was once theirs now became the property of their most illustrious graduates--the singers."

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