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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:
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:
