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| Paul Whiteman at the office. |
Paul Whiteman led the most popular “jazz” orchestra for the duration of the 1920s, but the internet doesn’t have much to say about him or that. All of what’s below mainly relies on just two sources (Wikipedia and a piece for Syncopated Times), and most of the information between those two sources repeats. Call it historical revisionism, call it historical correction, the memory-hole has by and large swallowed Whiteman’s legacy. Still, his life and career open a revealing window into how popular music and the way people talk about it has evolved.
Some part of the that follows from a latter-day controversy over his promotional nickname as “the King of Jazz,” an appellation that doesn’t work on at least two levels. First, and on a purely stylistic level, Whiteman discouraged improvisation - aka, the “heart of jazz” - to the point of excluding it outright; his orchestras played carefully constructed arrangements instead, in which no one went off script. Second, and more significantly, he borrowed a musical form created by Black artists - a lot of them his contemporaries - polished it up and presented it to White audiences. To repeat a phrase I read over and over in the light research I did, Whiteman wanted to “make a lady out of jazz.” Or, to borrow from a couple places:
“While most jazz musicians and fans consider improvisation to be essential to the musical style, Whiteman thought the genre could be improved by orchestrating the best of it, with formal written arrangements.” (Wikipedia)
“But for the ‘King of Jazz’ title to be given to a white musician who never took a jazz solo instead of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or any of a dozen other African-American jazz greats hurt Whiteman’s reputation despite his contributions to American music and the jazz age.” (Syncopated Times, 2020)
I appreciate that he had nothing to do with it, but the fact that his surname is “Whiteman” borders on Dickensian…
Paul Samuel “Pops” Whiteman was born in 1890 in Denver, Colorado, son of an opera singer (mother) and the supervisor for music of Denver public schools. His father insisted he play at least one instrument and pushed the violin, but Whiteman landed on the viola. He started at age 7 and showed enough aptitude to land a chair with the Denver Symphony Orchestra by his late teens. From there, he graduated to San Francisco’s Orchestra by his early 20s and, while in the Navy, conducted his first orchestra; he found his calling in the latter. Immediately after World War I, Whiteman left the Navy and formed the first orchestra. He was recording for the Victor Talking Machine Company by 1920, first as Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra - the “ambassador” came from the Atlantic City, NJ hotel that hosted his orchestra - but he cut that to Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra by November of the same year.
“Meteoric” describes his rise nicely. As Wikipedia notes: “By 1922, Whiteman already controlled some 28 ensembles on the East Coast and was earning over $1,000,000 a year.” (The words “controlled” and “ensembles” could stand some defining.) That haul was all the more impressive given the number of musicians he had to pay. Where most jazz acts of the day generally ranged between six to twelve members - and that’s where Whiteman started as well - he continued to grow his touring “ensemble” over the course of his career, until he conducted groups that numbered in the high twenties to mid-thirties. A classically-trained musician and composer, he (and his various collaborators) had the chops to lift what he wanted from jazz - rhythms, sounds and instruments - and blend that with both popular music and the classical tradition, thereby creating a form that mixed symphonic music and jazz. Musically, he struck a balance between embracing innovation and taming it, with an eye to, as Syncopated Times phrased it, “develop a music that was more ‘civilized,’ danceable and connected to Western classical music,” instead of pure jazz, which he viewed as “a bit barbaric, wild and jarring.”
That last piece brings up another dent in Whiteman’s reputation - charges that he was racist. Based on the few things I found on him, as well as the context of a famously racist decade, I'd argue the charges don’t hold up. He worked with the biggest Black artists of his time - e.g., Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday (late in his career), and he commissioned numbers from Duke Ellington, who returned the favor with this generous remembrance: “Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity."
He was also man of his times, and ambitious to boot. The times were complicated, as Wikipedia stuffs into one big-picture sentence:
“He encouraged upcoming African American musical talents and planned to hire black musicians, but his management persuaded him that doing so would destroy his career due to racial tension and America's segregation of that time.”
Neither enemy nor ally, in other words.
The first half of the same paragraph points to arguably the most important thing about Whiteman and his legacy: the man worked with damn near everybody not just in the 1920s, but into the 1930s, aka, when the Great Depression bit: he commissioned George Gerswhin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and had the composer play piano (with some improvisation, apparently) on its debut; as his reputation grew, he was able to grow his orchestra (thereby expanding what it could play) by poaching the best talent of the 1920s, including Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Steve Brown, Mike Pingitore, Gussie Mueller, Wilbur Hall, Jack Teagarden, and Bunny Berigan; he gave opportunities to future stars like Bing Crosby (e.g., "After You've Gone") and both Dorseys, Jimmy and Tommy. Hell, he even gave future-famous screenwriter/director Billy Wilder a leg-up after meeting him in Vienna in the mid-1920s, and in a completely different country and/or industry; the late 1920s saw him working with A-list actors like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore on a radio variety show titled, Film Star Radio Hour.
Whiteman’s popularity peaked in the late 1920s, when he fronted his largest orchestras (34 piece), ones that featured the biggest (White) musicians of those years - call it the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer era (of which, Beiderbecke’s career, featured in a prior post in this series, gives a sense of how Whiteman captured talent). Hollywood went for its piece of the action by making a vehicle for him that traded on his famous nickname, the 1930 bio-pic (and reported turd) titled King of Jazz. (“King of Jazz is a revue. There is no narrative continuity, only a series of musical numbers alternating with ‘blackouts’ (brief comedy sketches with abrupt punch line endings) and other short introductory or linking segments.”)
Whiteman was not big enough to survive the Depression - few artists were - but he also failed to update his musical selections to keep up with the times. Swing came in and finished off what the Depression started; he was reportedly considered “a nostalgia act” as early as the mid-1930s. He continued to find work - Wikipedia’s entry includes a list of all the radio and TV programs he played well into the 1940s - and even managed to pop up in the early television era (incredibly, he headlined a show called Paul Whiteman’s Teen Club as late as the early 1950s; again, that's "teen club"), but Syncopated Times pegs his career’s demise at 1942, when he folded his last orchestra. His last recordings included numbers like “The Old Music Master” with Johnny Mercer and the Billie Holiday collab teased above, “Travelin’ Light,” both of which sound more than a little like big-band numbers.
Harsh as it may be for Paul Whiteman, there’s some justice in the fact that most people think of Louis Armstrong, or even Jelly Roll Morton, when they think of jazz - and for the reasons acknoweldged up top. What’s less fair is his exclusion from the conversation about the famous bandleaders of the Swing era - e.g,, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, etc. For good (people liked it!) or ill (continued co-opting of Black musical forms without credit), Whiteman arguably created that template. I’d heard of all of those people before I started looking into American popular music, but never Paul Whiteman. I can’t explain it, but I do feel a little better now that I have.
About the Sampler
I failed to address, or otherwise organize, Paul Whiteman’s catalog above, but I have a defensible reason: he wrote more than 3,000 arrangements over his career and any one song doesn’t strike me as bigger than any other. One reason for that remarkable consistency was Whiteman’s long-time partnership with Ferde Grofe, who worked beside him as his “chief arranger from 1920-1932. A passage in Syncopated Times touches on Grofe’s influence on the Whiteman Orchestra’s music: "Grofé was among the very first significant jazz arrangers, a force in dividing the increasingly expanding orchestra into brass and reed sections.”
Whiteman did have his share of famous songs, with tunes like “Whispering,” “Wang Wang Blues,” "Japanese Sandman” and, later (i.e., during the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer era), “Mississippi Mud.” Thanks to my insufficiently tuned ear, the sampler draws heavily from the selection of songs listed as notable. Those include: “Hot Lips,” “San,” “Three O’ Clock in the Morning,” and “Wonderful One,” nearly all of which come from the first half of the 1920s. Also included in the mix are some of Grofe’s and Whiteman’s higher-brow selections - e.g., his (then; 1932) famous Grand Canyon Suite. Without digging too far into it, I believe I included the full suite, but tucked it at the end of the 25-song sampler due to how differently it sounds next to the rest of it.
From there, I rounded out the sampler with songs that must caught my ear for one reason or another, e.g., “Charleston” (the skatting), “Learn to Do the Strut,” “If You’ll Come Back,” and “Coquette,” which, based on their sound and the quality of the recordings, represent his early material (nm, "Coquette" was late '20s), and tunes like “Sugar” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (cute little number, btw) that show his later, bigger-band days. Finally, “Whiteman Stomp” splits the difference and, of course I had to get “Rhapsody in Blue” tucked in there somewhere. (That link goes to the original, more free-wheeling 1924 recording; the sampler includes the fuller, fleshed-out version.)
Till the next one…which will be a specific period of Louis Armstrong’s career, as it happens, a post that will, at long last, put the 1920s to bed.
Some part of the that follows from a latter-day controversy over his promotional nickname as “the King of Jazz,” an appellation that doesn’t work on at least two levels. First, and on a purely stylistic level, Whiteman discouraged improvisation - aka, the “heart of jazz” - to the point of excluding it outright; his orchestras played carefully constructed arrangements instead, in which no one went off script. Second, and more significantly, he borrowed a musical form created by Black artists - a lot of them his contemporaries - polished it up and presented it to White audiences. To repeat a phrase I read over and over in the light research I did, Whiteman wanted to “make a lady out of jazz.” Or, to borrow from a couple places:
“While most jazz musicians and fans consider improvisation to be essential to the musical style, Whiteman thought the genre could be improved by orchestrating the best of it, with formal written arrangements.” (Wikipedia)
“But for the ‘King of Jazz’ title to be given to a white musician who never took a jazz solo instead of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or any of a dozen other African-American jazz greats hurt Whiteman’s reputation despite his contributions to American music and the jazz age.” (Syncopated Times, 2020)
I appreciate that he had nothing to do with it, but the fact that his surname is “Whiteman” borders on Dickensian…
Paul Samuel “Pops” Whiteman was born in 1890 in Denver, Colorado, son of an opera singer (mother) and the supervisor for music of Denver public schools. His father insisted he play at least one instrument and pushed the violin, but Whiteman landed on the viola. He started at age 7 and showed enough aptitude to land a chair with the Denver Symphony Orchestra by his late teens. From there, he graduated to San Francisco’s Orchestra by his early 20s and, while in the Navy, conducted his first orchestra; he found his calling in the latter. Immediately after World War I, Whiteman left the Navy and formed the first orchestra. He was recording for the Victor Talking Machine Company by 1920, first as Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra - the “ambassador” came from the Atlantic City, NJ hotel that hosted his orchestra - but he cut that to Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra by November of the same year.
“Meteoric” describes his rise nicely. As Wikipedia notes: “By 1922, Whiteman already controlled some 28 ensembles on the East Coast and was earning over $1,000,000 a year.” (The words “controlled” and “ensembles” could stand some defining.) That haul was all the more impressive given the number of musicians he had to pay. Where most jazz acts of the day generally ranged between six to twelve members - and that’s where Whiteman started as well - he continued to grow his touring “ensemble” over the course of his career, until he conducted groups that numbered in the high twenties to mid-thirties. A classically-trained musician and composer, he (and his various collaborators) had the chops to lift what he wanted from jazz - rhythms, sounds and instruments - and blend that with both popular music and the classical tradition, thereby creating a form that mixed symphonic music and jazz. Musically, he struck a balance between embracing innovation and taming it, with an eye to, as Syncopated Times phrased it, “develop a music that was more ‘civilized,’ danceable and connected to Western classical music,” instead of pure jazz, which he viewed as “a bit barbaric, wild and jarring.”
That last piece brings up another dent in Whiteman’s reputation - charges that he was racist. Based on the few things I found on him, as well as the context of a famously racist decade, I'd argue the charges don’t hold up. He worked with the biggest Black artists of his time - e.g., Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday (late in his career), and he commissioned numbers from Duke Ellington, who returned the favor with this generous remembrance: “Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity."
He was also man of his times, and ambitious to boot. The times were complicated, as Wikipedia stuffs into one big-picture sentence:
“He encouraged upcoming African American musical talents and planned to hire black musicians, but his management persuaded him that doing so would destroy his career due to racial tension and America's segregation of that time.”
Neither enemy nor ally, in other words.
The first half of the same paragraph points to arguably the most important thing about Whiteman and his legacy: the man worked with damn near everybody not just in the 1920s, but into the 1930s, aka, when the Great Depression bit: he commissioned George Gerswhin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and had the composer play piano (with some improvisation, apparently) on its debut; as his reputation grew, he was able to grow his orchestra (thereby expanding what it could play) by poaching the best talent of the 1920s, including Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Steve Brown, Mike Pingitore, Gussie Mueller, Wilbur Hall, Jack Teagarden, and Bunny Berigan; he gave opportunities to future stars like Bing Crosby (e.g., "After You've Gone") and both Dorseys, Jimmy and Tommy. Hell, he even gave future-famous screenwriter/director Billy Wilder a leg-up after meeting him in Vienna in the mid-1920s, and in a completely different country and/or industry; the late 1920s saw him working with A-list actors like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore on a radio variety show titled, Film Star Radio Hour.
Whiteman’s popularity peaked in the late 1920s, when he fronted his largest orchestras (34 piece), ones that featured the biggest (White) musicians of those years - call it the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer era (of which, Beiderbecke’s career, featured in a prior post in this series, gives a sense of how Whiteman captured talent). Hollywood went for its piece of the action by making a vehicle for him that traded on his famous nickname, the 1930 bio-pic (and reported turd) titled King of Jazz. (“King of Jazz is a revue. There is no narrative continuity, only a series of musical numbers alternating with ‘blackouts’ (brief comedy sketches with abrupt punch line endings) and other short introductory or linking segments.”)
Whiteman was not big enough to survive the Depression - few artists were - but he also failed to update his musical selections to keep up with the times. Swing came in and finished off what the Depression started; he was reportedly considered “a nostalgia act” as early as the mid-1930s. He continued to find work - Wikipedia’s entry includes a list of all the radio and TV programs he played well into the 1940s - and even managed to pop up in the early television era (incredibly, he headlined a show called Paul Whiteman’s Teen Club as late as the early 1950s; again, that's "teen club"), but Syncopated Times pegs his career’s demise at 1942, when he folded his last orchestra. His last recordings included numbers like “The Old Music Master” with Johnny Mercer and the Billie Holiday collab teased above, “Travelin’ Light,” both of which sound more than a little like big-band numbers.
Harsh as it may be for Paul Whiteman, there’s some justice in the fact that most people think of Louis Armstrong, or even Jelly Roll Morton, when they think of jazz - and for the reasons acknoweldged up top. What’s less fair is his exclusion from the conversation about the famous bandleaders of the Swing era - e.g,, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, etc. For good (people liked it!) or ill (continued co-opting of Black musical forms without credit), Whiteman arguably created that template. I’d heard of all of those people before I started looking into American popular music, but never Paul Whiteman. I can’t explain it, but I do feel a little better now that I have.
About the Sampler
I failed to address, or otherwise organize, Paul Whiteman’s catalog above, but I have a defensible reason: he wrote more than 3,000 arrangements over his career and any one song doesn’t strike me as bigger than any other. One reason for that remarkable consistency was Whiteman’s long-time partnership with Ferde Grofe, who worked beside him as his “chief arranger from 1920-1932. A passage in Syncopated Times touches on Grofe’s influence on the Whiteman Orchestra’s music: "Grofé was among the very first significant jazz arrangers, a force in dividing the increasingly expanding orchestra into brass and reed sections.”
Whiteman did have his share of famous songs, with tunes like “Whispering,” “Wang Wang Blues,” "Japanese Sandman” and, later (i.e., during the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer era), “Mississippi Mud.” Thanks to my insufficiently tuned ear, the sampler draws heavily from the selection of songs listed as notable. Those include: “Hot Lips,” “San,” “Three O’ Clock in the Morning,” and “Wonderful One,” nearly all of which come from the first half of the 1920s. Also included in the mix are some of Grofe’s and Whiteman’s higher-brow selections - e.g., his (then; 1932) famous Grand Canyon Suite. Without digging too far into it, I believe I included the full suite, but tucked it at the end of the 25-song sampler due to how differently it sounds next to the rest of it.
From there, I rounded out the sampler with songs that must caught my ear for one reason or another, e.g., “Charleston” (the skatting), “Learn to Do the Strut,” “If You’ll Come Back,” and “Coquette,” which, based on their sound and the quality of the recordings, represent his early material (nm, "Coquette" was late '20s), and tunes like “Sugar” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (cute little number, btw) that show his later, bigger-band days. Finally, “Whiteman Stomp” splits the difference and, of course I had to get “Rhapsody in Blue” tucked in there somewhere. (That link goes to the original, more free-wheeling 1924 recording; the sampler includes the fuller, fleshed-out version.)
Till the next one…which will be a specific period of Louis Armstrong’s career, as it happens, a post that will, at long last, put the 1920s to bed.
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