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| Think both are in there.... |
I’ll be running into the biggest, bandiest names of the 1930s soon enough, but what started as a quick study into a bandleader whose name I kept seeing wound up detouring into the more interesting story of a member of not just his band, but just about every big band of the day. To start with the bandleader.
James “Hal” Kemp was born in 1904 in Marion, Alabama, but he made his name in Charlotte, North Carolina. A precocious kid, he formed his first band, the Merrymakers, while still in high school; by age 19 he led the Carolina Club Orchestra, a band associated with the University of North Carolina. The university showed a surprising willingness to let its band tour, even internationally, and Kemp’s Carolina Club Orchestra drew attention on its tour to England. The press passed on word of the tour and the orchestra had the honor of the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII (the one who later abdicated) sitting in for a session (he loved both jazz and American women).
A fair number of the guys Kemp played with in the Carolina Club Orchestra stuck with him for much his career. They included Ben Williams and Horace “Saxie” Dowell (one guess what the latter played, and they both played it), but also John Scott Trotter, a pianist who served as Kemp’s long-time musical arranger, and Edgar “Skinnay” Ellis, a drummer who became the voice of the Hal Kemp Orchestra when it took its successful, final shape. Per the Big Band Library, that line-up first came together in 1925 with Kemp doing the composing, co-arranging, playing clarinet and, his favorite, alto saxophone (sometimes “through an oversized megaphone with holes cut in the sides so his hands could work the keys”). That first line-up started playing standard 1920s jazz, but they switched over to the “sweet dance” jazz by 1930.
Sources describe Kemp’s sound with adjectives like “distinctive” (Wikipedia) and “intricate,” but Big Band Library wrote the more efficient paragraph on it:
“For decades afterwards, his fans and his former musicians continued to cherish the unique sound of Kemp’s band, with its muted, staccato trumpets (playing phrases, accented by four-note clusters of dotted 16ths - like a typewriter) and intricate clarinet and saxophone ensemble passages.”
When they broke in as professional performers, they started in New York. Rather than bang out the path of his career in my own words, I’m going to quote a long paragraph from a site called Oldies.com, because it gives a helpful impression of how careers in music looked in the early 1930s:
“They gradually found a foothold in New York first at the Strand Roof, then the Hotel Manger and New Yorker Hotel. Their biggest break, however, came when Otto Roth booked them at his Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago in 1932. A long engagement here ensured radio play over the WGN and Mutual Networks, quickly establishing them as a top drawer dance band attraction. They were only able to break their contract with the Blackhawk’s management to cash in on this new-found fame when Kemp discovered Kay Kyser, whose band replaced him. Engagements at premier venues followed, including the Waldorf-Astoria, Pennsylvania, the Drake and the Palmer House, while a series of sponsored radio spots, including the Chesterfield Program, The Quaker Oats Program, and The Gulf Gas Program, secured national exposure. Their records too, released on RCA - Victor at this time, were selling in large quantities. The Cocoanut Grove (Los Angeles) and the Mark Hopkins Hotel (San Francisco) were booked for the band as their Californian debut.”
From what I understand, that takes in the full geographic span and timeline of the Kemp Orchestra’s career. And all sources agree that the Blackhawk Restaurant gig sent them on their way. If nothing else, that opened up their recording career, first with Brunswick Records, then later with Victor Records. A fair chunk of the famous ones made the sampler (see below), but I wanted to flag a couple listed among the sources that I couldn’t find on Spotify. Kemp arranged the theme song, “(How I'll Miss You) When the Summer Is Gone,” but other popular recordings included “In the Middle of a Kiss,” “There’s a Small Hotel,” “This Year’s Kisses,” and “Where or When.”
Kemp et. al. recorded nearly all of those in the second half of the 1930s. The band also came apart bit by bit over the same period. Some of it involved personnel moving on - e.g., Trotter left in 1936, and Ennis in 1938 - but a fair amount of it followed from newer, more famous names like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey shoving them out of the spotlight. And it’s here where the crossover comes in, because a one-time member of Kemp’s Orchestra, a trumpetist named Bunny Berigan, was present for what is widely considered to be the official birth and/or mainstreaming of the big band/swing sound: Benny Goodman’s 1935 shows at McFadden’s Ballroom in Oakland, and its later three-week engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. Hard as it is to imagine it in connection with music (some of) your grandparents listened to, the crowds really did go wild.
Based on the several things I’ve read, Bunny Berigan was lucky to be there. And, true to apparent form, he walked away at precisely the wrong time. Here’s his story, with an introduction from a site called Jazz Hot Big Step:
“A tall handsome dark-haired Irishman, Berigan was deeply adored by his fans and admired by fellow musicians. The inspiring sound of his horn soared above the finest bands of the Swing era, gracing some of the biggest hits of Glenn Miller, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. More than 600 surviving recordings are evidence of his remarkable ability to make a tune his own and his mastery of his instrument.”
Ronald Bernard “Bunny” Berigan came into the world just four years after Kemp (1908) and in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin) instead of the South. Berigan played just as young and at a similar level, playing with the University of Wisconsin’s jazz ensemble despite not attending as a student. His first crack at joining the pros came when he auditioned for Kemp’s orchestra - multiple times, apparently, because he didn’t make the cut on the first - but he joined Kemp’s orchestra in 1929, toured Europe with them in 1930, and recorded his first solos for Hal Kemp 78 rpms. And it’s here where Berigan’s real, peripatetic story begins.
Wikipedia aside - which is solid on the basics - I mined and recommend two sources on Bunny Berigan’s life and career. One, a thorough and smartly-written post on a music blog called Art Music Lounge, casts a colder eye on Berigan’s career and errors, so I’m calling that one “the Devil”; the other, Jazz Hot Big Step, already linked to above, takes a softer, more understanding approach to its subject’s considerable foibles, so I’m calling that one “the Angel.” Readers will learn more from either of those than they will reading this - and it’s a good story, if a tragic one. Neither source questions Berigan’s talent, Art Music Lounge just makes more noise about what could have been.
As noted in the quote above, Berigan spent large chunks of his career as a session trumpetist for some of the biggest names his era; the handful of names included in there leave out major luminaries like Bing Crosby. In between all that, however, he came in and out of a succession of some of the 1930s biggest orchestras. Some associations - for instance, his friendship with the Dorseys - opened the door to some those recording sessions, but Berigan also built a reputation that put him in the conversation with some of the greatest trumpeters in music history. From Jazz Hot Big Step:
“By the late 1920s a clear dichotomy arose in jazz trumpet and cornet style between the extroverted outlook of Louis Armstrong versus the more introverted, nuanced manner of Bix Beiderbecke. To the subtle lyricism of Beiderbecke, he welded Armstrong’s vast power, range and dynamics. In fact, his skills were often compared favorably with Satchmo, who himself declared ‘To me, Bunny can’t do no wrong in music.’”
For all this talent, Berigan made terrible choices, some professional, some personal. The latter owed to the life-threateningly heavy drinking that started in 1931 and ended with an early death by cirrhosis in 1942. Like more than a few musicians (and writers), he reached for the bottle to calm his nerves and may even have embraced the myth that it made him “better”; as time wore on, it just made him unreliable and, in the darker moments, saw him falling of the bandstand while performing. It’s hard, if not impossible, to know how much his alcoholism influenced his bad professional decisions, or how much of that followed from a preference for operating in a personal comfort zone, but Art Music Lounge is particularly ruthless on the question regardless.
The author counts leaving the Casa Loma Orchestra - who played “tremendously complex and exciting jazz” - for Paul Whiteman’s more restrained, formal and, by that time, declining orchestra. (Whiteman was profiled earlier in this series). Art Music Lounge goes so far as to call Berigan’s two years with Whiteman as “wasted years,” but he moved on to brighter things from there. When Benny Goodman was assembling the band that played those two famous California engagement, word that Berigan was on board the prompted drummer Gene Krupa to get over past clashes with Goodman and get on board. Despite being there for the literal moment, and despite making some of his most revered recordings with Goodman’s orchestra - e.g., “King Porter Stomp,” “Sometimes I’m Happy” and “Blue Skies” - Berigan checked out of Goodman’s orchestra just as he was beginning to peak.
From there, he spent some time with (I think) Tommy Dorsey - enough to star on the famous recording of “Marie” - but he kept the roof over his head and his wife happy with session work. [Ed. - Without wanting to push a “Yoko broke up the band” narrative too far, Art Music Lounge craps all over Berigan’s wife, arguing that she indulged his drunkenness, while the smart and level-headed Lil Hardin helped Armstrong on his way to his legendary career (profiled earlier as well).] Try as he might to avoid the spotlight, when CBS decided it wanted in on the big band/swing craze, it tapped Berigan to lead his own orchestra. It took him three tries to get it off the ground, but he assembled a strong collection of talent, even sobered up a bit, to front the first outfit to play under his own name. Berigan borrowed the somewhat obscure Ira Gershwin/Vernon Duke composition titled “I Can’t Get Started” for a theme song and led a middlingly successful band until his drinking ran them into the ground. As his talented trombonist/arranger Ray Conniff recalled:
“It was a tight little band, just a family of bad little boys, with Bunny the worst of all. We were all friends . Oh it was a mad ball. You should have seen those hotel rooms! Ribs, booze and women all over the place.”
Again, when your grandparents try to tell you about the how different things were back in the good, clean old days...
Berigan went bankrupt within three years and the end, when it came, was not pleasant:
“On April 20, 1942, while on tour, Berigan was hospitalized with pneumonia in Allegheny General Hospital Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, until May 8. His doctors discovered that cirrhosis had severely damaged his liver. He was advised to stop drinking and stop playing the trumpet for an undetermined length of time. Berigan did not do either. He returned to his band on tour and played for a few weeks before he returned to the Van Cortlandt Hotel, on 49th Street, where he made his home in New York City and suffered a massive hemorrhage on May 31, 1942.”
Hal Kemp also died young, albeit under very different circumstances. He was killed in a head-on collision with another vehicle in Madera, California on a drive after a show in San Francisco. The driver responsible was charged with “negligent homicide” for “attempting to pass (a truck) with insufficient clearance,” and on a foggy night to boot. The accident left him with a punctured lung, then subsequent exposure to pneumonia, which put him in his grave too soon, 1940 to Berigan’s more irresponsible 1942.
I have two hopes for this chapter in the series. One, I hope it builds on the story of the transition from the jazz of the 1920s to the swing era that I somewhat accidentally started with the last chapter on Bennie Moten. Second, Berigan’s story provided what looks like a rare opportunity to talk about a member of one of the big bands, as compared to the bandleaders who are the more famous names of the 1930s music scene.
About the Sampler
I split the sampler between Kemp and Berigan, but, because I started later on Berigan, the lion’s share went to Kemp. That selection started with one of his earliest recordings, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” before winding through some earlier material from a couple mid-1930s collections with “Brown Sugar,” “Go, Joe, Go,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Summertime” (the opening lines should sound familiar), and “The Eyes of Texas.” All the rest, and there are quite a few, come from a collection on Spotify called Featuring All the Hits! That brings in a handful of Hal Kemp’s most famous songs - e.g., “A Heart of Stone,” “Got a Date with an Angel,” “You’re the Top,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” and “Lamplight” - and you’ll hear Skinnay Ennis all over those (his story is pretty thin, but he also met a tragic, too early end when he choked on a bone in a Beverly Hills restaurant). I rounded out the Hal Kemp material with a grab-bag of songs that caught my ear: “I’ve Got a Torch Song to Sing,” “Strange,” "Goodnight Angel,” “Remember Me,” “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” and “Three Little Fishies.”
Apart from the songs already linked to above, the songs I selected for Bunny Berigan is mostly low-hanging stuff - e.g., from the top 5 songs listed under the several Spotify collections I found by searching his name. Those include: “Get Rhythm in Your Feet,” “Candlelights,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “The Pied Piper” and, an early tune that Berigan wrote, the “jaunty” “Chicken and Waffles.”
Till the next one…which will return to the most famous purveyor of the Kansas City jazz sound.
James “Hal” Kemp was born in 1904 in Marion, Alabama, but he made his name in Charlotte, North Carolina. A precocious kid, he formed his first band, the Merrymakers, while still in high school; by age 19 he led the Carolina Club Orchestra, a band associated with the University of North Carolina. The university showed a surprising willingness to let its band tour, even internationally, and Kemp’s Carolina Club Orchestra drew attention on its tour to England. The press passed on word of the tour and the orchestra had the honor of the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII (the one who later abdicated) sitting in for a session (he loved both jazz and American women).
A fair number of the guys Kemp played with in the Carolina Club Orchestra stuck with him for much his career. They included Ben Williams and Horace “Saxie” Dowell (one guess what the latter played, and they both played it), but also John Scott Trotter, a pianist who served as Kemp’s long-time musical arranger, and Edgar “Skinnay” Ellis, a drummer who became the voice of the Hal Kemp Orchestra when it took its successful, final shape. Per the Big Band Library, that line-up first came together in 1925 with Kemp doing the composing, co-arranging, playing clarinet and, his favorite, alto saxophone (sometimes “through an oversized megaphone with holes cut in the sides so his hands could work the keys”). That first line-up started playing standard 1920s jazz, but they switched over to the “sweet dance” jazz by 1930.
Sources describe Kemp’s sound with adjectives like “distinctive” (Wikipedia) and “intricate,” but Big Band Library wrote the more efficient paragraph on it:
“For decades afterwards, his fans and his former musicians continued to cherish the unique sound of Kemp’s band, with its muted, staccato trumpets (playing phrases, accented by four-note clusters of dotted 16ths - like a typewriter) and intricate clarinet and saxophone ensemble passages.”
When they broke in as professional performers, they started in New York. Rather than bang out the path of his career in my own words, I’m going to quote a long paragraph from a site called Oldies.com, because it gives a helpful impression of how careers in music looked in the early 1930s:
“They gradually found a foothold in New York first at the Strand Roof, then the Hotel Manger and New Yorker Hotel. Their biggest break, however, came when Otto Roth booked them at his Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago in 1932. A long engagement here ensured radio play over the WGN and Mutual Networks, quickly establishing them as a top drawer dance band attraction. They were only able to break their contract with the Blackhawk’s management to cash in on this new-found fame when Kemp discovered Kay Kyser, whose band replaced him. Engagements at premier venues followed, including the Waldorf-Astoria, Pennsylvania, the Drake and the Palmer House, while a series of sponsored radio spots, including the Chesterfield Program, The Quaker Oats Program, and The Gulf Gas Program, secured national exposure. Their records too, released on RCA - Victor at this time, were selling in large quantities. The Cocoanut Grove (Los Angeles) and the Mark Hopkins Hotel (San Francisco) were booked for the band as their Californian debut.”
From what I understand, that takes in the full geographic span and timeline of the Kemp Orchestra’s career. And all sources agree that the Blackhawk Restaurant gig sent them on their way. If nothing else, that opened up their recording career, first with Brunswick Records, then later with Victor Records. A fair chunk of the famous ones made the sampler (see below), but I wanted to flag a couple listed among the sources that I couldn’t find on Spotify. Kemp arranged the theme song, “(How I'll Miss You) When the Summer Is Gone,” but other popular recordings included “In the Middle of a Kiss,” “There’s a Small Hotel,” “This Year’s Kisses,” and “Where or When.”
Kemp et. al. recorded nearly all of those in the second half of the 1930s. The band also came apart bit by bit over the same period. Some of it involved personnel moving on - e.g., Trotter left in 1936, and Ennis in 1938 - but a fair amount of it followed from newer, more famous names like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey shoving them out of the spotlight. And it’s here where the crossover comes in, because a one-time member of Kemp’s Orchestra, a trumpetist named Bunny Berigan, was present for what is widely considered to be the official birth and/or mainstreaming of the big band/swing sound: Benny Goodman’s 1935 shows at McFadden’s Ballroom in Oakland, and its later three-week engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. Hard as it is to imagine it in connection with music (some of) your grandparents listened to, the crowds really did go wild.
Based on the several things I’ve read, Bunny Berigan was lucky to be there. And, true to apparent form, he walked away at precisely the wrong time. Here’s his story, with an introduction from a site called Jazz Hot Big Step:
“A tall handsome dark-haired Irishman, Berigan was deeply adored by his fans and admired by fellow musicians. The inspiring sound of his horn soared above the finest bands of the Swing era, gracing some of the biggest hits of Glenn Miller, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. More than 600 surviving recordings are evidence of his remarkable ability to make a tune his own and his mastery of his instrument.”
Ronald Bernard “Bunny” Berigan came into the world just four years after Kemp (1908) and in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin) instead of the South. Berigan played just as young and at a similar level, playing with the University of Wisconsin’s jazz ensemble despite not attending as a student. His first crack at joining the pros came when he auditioned for Kemp’s orchestra - multiple times, apparently, because he didn’t make the cut on the first - but he joined Kemp’s orchestra in 1929, toured Europe with them in 1930, and recorded his first solos for Hal Kemp 78 rpms. And it’s here where Berigan’s real, peripatetic story begins.
Wikipedia aside - which is solid on the basics - I mined and recommend two sources on Bunny Berigan’s life and career. One, a thorough and smartly-written post on a music blog called Art Music Lounge, casts a colder eye on Berigan’s career and errors, so I’m calling that one “the Devil”; the other, Jazz Hot Big Step, already linked to above, takes a softer, more understanding approach to its subject’s considerable foibles, so I’m calling that one “the Angel.” Readers will learn more from either of those than they will reading this - and it’s a good story, if a tragic one. Neither source questions Berigan’s talent, Art Music Lounge just makes more noise about what could have been.
As noted in the quote above, Berigan spent large chunks of his career as a session trumpetist for some of the biggest names his era; the handful of names included in there leave out major luminaries like Bing Crosby. In between all that, however, he came in and out of a succession of some of the 1930s biggest orchestras. Some associations - for instance, his friendship with the Dorseys - opened the door to some those recording sessions, but Berigan also built a reputation that put him in the conversation with some of the greatest trumpeters in music history. From Jazz Hot Big Step:
“By the late 1920s a clear dichotomy arose in jazz trumpet and cornet style between the extroverted outlook of Louis Armstrong versus the more introverted, nuanced manner of Bix Beiderbecke. To the subtle lyricism of Beiderbecke, he welded Armstrong’s vast power, range and dynamics. In fact, his skills were often compared favorably with Satchmo, who himself declared ‘To me, Bunny can’t do no wrong in music.’”
For all this talent, Berigan made terrible choices, some professional, some personal. The latter owed to the life-threateningly heavy drinking that started in 1931 and ended with an early death by cirrhosis in 1942. Like more than a few musicians (and writers), he reached for the bottle to calm his nerves and may even have embraced the myth that it made him “better”; as time wore on, it just made him unreliable and, in the darker moments, saw him falling of the bandstand while performing. It’s hard, if not impossible, to know how much his alcoholism influenced his bad professional decisions, or how much of that followed from a preference for operating in a personal comfort zone, but Art Music Lounge is particularly ruthless on the question regardless.
The author counts leaving the Casa Loma Orchestra - who played “tremendously complex and exciting jazz” - for Paul Whiteman’s more restrained, formal and, by that time, declining orchestra. (Whiteman was profiled earlier in this series). Art Music Lounge goes so far as to call Berigan’s two years with Whiteman as “wasted years,” but he moved on to brighter things from there. When Benny Goodman was assembling the band that played those two famous California engagement, word that Berigan was on board the prompted drummer Gene Krupa to get over past clashes with Goodman and get on board. Despite being there for the literal moment, and despite making some of his most revered recordings with Goodman’s orchestra - e.g., “King Porter Stomp,” “Sometimes I’m Happy” and “Blue Skies” - Berigan checked out of Goodman’s orchestra just as he was beginning to peak.
From there, he spent some time with (I think) Tommy Dorsey - enough to star on the famous recording of “Marie” - but he kept the roof over his head and his wife happy with session work. [Ed. - Without wanting to push a “Yoko broke up the band” narrative too far, Art Music Lounge craps all over Berigan’s wife, arguing that she indulged his drunkenness, while the smart and level-headed Lil Hardin helped Armstrong on his way to his legendary career (profiled earlier as well).] Try as he might to avoid the spotlight, when CBS decided it wanted in on the big band/swing craze, it tapped Berigan to lead his own orchestra. It took him three tries to get it off the ground, but he assembled a strong collection of talent, even sobered up a bit, to front the first outfit to play under his own name. Berigan borrowed the somewhat obscure Ira Gershwin/Vernon Duke composition titled “I Can’t Get Started” for a theme song and led a middlingly successful band until his drinking ran them into the ground. As his talented trombonist/arranger Ray Conniff recalled:
“It was a tight little band, just a family of bad little boys, with Bunny the worst of all. We were all friends . Oh it was a mad ball. You should have seen those hotel rooms! Ribs, booze and women all over the place.”
Again, when your grandparents try to tell you about the how different things were back in the good, clean old days...
Berigan went bankrupt within three years and the end, when it came, was not pleasant:
“On April 20, 1942, while on tour, Berigan was hospitalized with pneumonia in Allegheny General Hospital Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, until May 8. His doctors discovered that cirrhosis had severely damaged his liver. He was advised to stop drinking and stop playing the trumpet for an undetermined length of time. Berigan did not do either. He returned to his band on tour and played for a few weeks before he returned to the Van Cortlandt Hotel, on 49th Street, where he made his home in New York City and suffered a massive hemorrhage on May 31, 1942.”
Hal Kemp also died young, albeit under very different circumstances. He was killed in a head-on collision with another vehicle in Madera, California on a drive after a show in San Francisco. The driver responsible was charged with “negligent homicide” for “attempting to pass (a truck) with insufficient clearance,” and on a foggy night to boot. The accident left him with a punctured lung, then subsequent exposure to pneumonia, which put him in his grave too soon, 1940 to Berigan’s more irresponsible 1942.
I have two hopes for this chapter in the series. One, I hope it builds on the story of the transition from the jazz of the 1920s to the swing era that I somewhat accidentally started with the last chapter on Bennie Moten. Second, Berigan’s story provided what looks like a rare opportunity to talk about a member of one of the big bands, as compared to the bandleaders who are the more famous names of the 1930s music scene.
About the Sampler
I split the sampler between Kemp and Berigan, but, because I started later on Berigan, the lion’s share went to Kemp. That selection started with one of his earliest recordings, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” before winding through some earlier material from a couple mid-1930s collections with “Brown Sugar,” “Go, Joe, Go,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Summertime” (the opening lines should sound familiar), and “The Eyes of Texas.” All the rest, and there are quite a few, come from a collection on Spotify called Featuring All the Hits! That brings in a handful of Hal Kemp’s most famous songs - e.g., “A Heart of Stone,” “Got a Date with an Angel,” “You’re the Top,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” and “Lamplight” - and you’ll hear Skinnay Ennis all over those (his story is pretty thin, but he also met a tragic, too early end when he choked on a bone in a Beverly Hills restaurant). I rounded out the Hal Kemp material with a grab-bag of songs that caught my ear: “I’ve Got a Torch Song to Sing,” “Strange,” "Goodnight Angel,” “Remember Me,” “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” and “Three Little Fishies.”
Apart from the songs already linked to above, the songs I selected for Bunny Berigan is mostly low-hanging stuff - e.g., from the top 5 songs listed under the several Spotify collections I found by searching his name. Those include: “Get Rhythm in Your Feet,” “Candlelights,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “The Pied Piper” and, an early tune that Berigan wrote, the “jaunty” “Chicken and Waffles.”
Till the next one…which will return to the most famous purveyor of the Kansas City jazz sound.
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