Crash Course Timeline, No. 45: The Andrews Sisters...For Fans of the Tabloids

The good times were good. Which makes the bad times worse.

“The following night, they sat in the Edison's soda fountain, hoisting a final toast to their failed dreams.”

“In her 1993 memoir Over Here, Over There, Maxene wrote about that night. As they sat in the soda fountain, in walked a man with pointed-toe shoes and a wide, snap-brim hat. In a gruff New York tone, he announced he was looking for the Andrews Sisters.”

“’Who's asking?’ they responded. ‘Jack Kapp from Decca Records,’ the man said. ‘He wants them to come audition.’”

“In unison, they declared, ‘We're the Andrews Sisters!’”
- MNopedia, short bio (2017)

The Andrews Sisters did plenty in unison – singing, dancing, acting, the classic triple-threat – but long, incredibly bitter feuds defined their lives off-stage, particularly after their parents died. The only performer who out-performed them through the 1940s was Bing Crosby (covered in an earlier chapter, because how could I avoid it?) – but he out-performed (literally) everybody – but Andrews Sisters helped him score several of his biggest hits, including “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and (I love this damn song) “Don’t Fence Me In.” (And that was the tip of the iceberg: Bing and the Andrews Sisters shared 47 recordings through the ‘40s, 23 of them hits.)

With Bing or without him, they recorded over 600 songs, moved 90 million units, and earned 15 gold records on the back of jukebox play and 46 Top 10 hits. The peak of their fame coincided with World War II to the extent that they went a long way to defining the pop culture of the war years – and it goes way beyond “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (that's a video-clip for a V-disc, btw) Their pop culture footprint both was and is, frankly, stunning (you’ll see). Their success only makes the way they started more surprising.

By birth-year and vocal range, the Andrews Sisters were, LaVerne Sophia (1911; contralto), Maxene Anglyn (1916, soprano) and Patricia “Patty” Marie (1918, mezzo-soprano); there was a second sister, between LaVerne and Maxene named Anglyn, but she died at eight months in 1916. Their mother, Olga “Ollie” Sollie, came from Norwegian stock, while their father, Peter Andreas, was Greek; the Norwegian side didn’t approve of the union, but they got over it after LaVerne’s birth. And, reading between the lines, they went with Andrews as a stage-name.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 43: Kay Kyser, the Big Band Era's Funnest Bandleader

The Ol' Perfessor

For this last chapter of the Big Band leaders of the late 1930s-early 1940s, the topic turns to the happiest and, all things considered (Exhibit A and Exhibit B) the least sociopathic.

“This band was secure enough to be downright silly, something the Millers and Goodmans would never have done.”

I’m not sure why they dragged Glenn Miller into this. He seemed like one of the nice ones. Also, this:

“He was one of the most outrageous, over the top performers of the whole swing era. From the late 30s to the late 40s he was the physical embodiment of the word success, with eleven #1 records and thirty-five top tens! He starred in seven feature films with such co-stars as Lucille Ball, John Barrymore, Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre. Kyser kept his radio show, Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge in the top ten for eleven years on NBC, yet if you ask the average swing fan about him today, they'll likely reply, ‘Kay Kyser. Who's she?’”

James Kern Kyser, who later found fame as Kay Kyser, was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina to a solid middle-class, two-income family; his mother, Emily Royster (nee Howell) was the first female licensed pharmacist in the state of North Carolina. Unlike the titans of the swing era, Kyser had neither a favored instrument nor a deep passion for music. He did learn the clarinet and played well enough to record a couple sides early in his career, but the role of master entertainer was his true calling. And he would lean into that eventually.

Kyser met North Carolina’s most famous bandleader, Hal Kemp (profiled here) while still in college and Kemp would give him two major lifts to his career. Recognizing his charisma and indefatigable energy, Kemp handed the reins of the University of North Carolina’s band, the Carolina Club Orchestra, to Kyser when he departed to start his own professional band in 1927. Kyser walked in his mentor’s footsteps after graduation, forming a band of his own (ft. saxophonist Sully Mason and with George Duning handling the arranging) and, by touring night spots across the American Midwest, he built up his own following.

Kemp handed Kyser his second break – and this was the big one – when he recommended Kyser’s band to take over his spot at Chicago’s famous Blackhawk Restaurant in 1934. Having a stable job helped him land talent – he had Merwyn Bogue, aka, “Ish Kabibble” (a spin on “Ish Ga Bibble” which loosely translates to “I should worry”) since 1931, but he added future stars Ginny Simms and “Handsome” Harry Babbit during his time at the Blackhawk – and the band started to record Duning’s arrangements, the most famous being the song that would become his theme, “Thinking of You.” But it took a brainstorm Kyser, et, al. to make him a household name during the war years.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 41: Artie Shaw, "Musically Restless" Is a Euphemism

I will never see this photo the same way.

I reviewed just two sources for this shallow dive into Artie Shaw - his Wikipedia page, plus a fairly lengthy article titled "The Trouble with Artie Shaw" on a site called Jazz in Europe - but those gave me the essential yin and yang that, based some earlier reading, matches my impression of Shaw. The Jazz in Europe piece unsparingly examines the great clarinetist’s flaws - the word “sociopath” repeats like a refrain - while the Wikipedia page leans into his preferred reputation of a frustrated genius. To start with an odd bit of framing:

“A self-proclaimed ‘very difficult man,’ Shaw was married eight times. Two marriages were annulled; the others ended in divorce: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37); actress Lana Turner (1940); Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern (1942–43); actress Ava Gardner (1945–46); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56), and actress Evelyn Keyes (1957–85).”

Shaw abused Turner emotionally to the point of a nervous breakdown. That sense of anger and disdain for others - to really drive this home, when asked about his kids, Shaw came back with, “Why should I bother? I didn’t get along with their mothers, why should I try to get along with them?” - very likely drove Shaw to seek out creative pathways that would set him apart from his peers. If he got over them, all the better. Jazz in Europe acknowledges his “massive talent” as a clarinetist, but, for lack of a better phrase, shit all over Shaw’s pretentiousness and his abilities as a composer. Time to tell his story.

“I thought that because I was Artie Shaw I could do what I wanted, but all they wanted was 'Begin the Beguine.’”

Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in 1910, Shaw grew up introverted and pissed-off in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jewish - his mother from Austria, his father from Russia - but he wasn’t raised in a musical household. He came to the career as a self-starter, working to buy his first saxophone by age 13. By age 16, Shaw had switched to the clarinet and left home.

Jazz in Europe’s article opens on a long paragraph that shows how Shaw’s career mirrored his life-long rival, Benny Goodman, but always a step behind (and I could have used several of these for my write-up on Benny Goodman). Like most of his contemporaries, Shaw fell in and out of performing and recording bands through the 1920s, and into the 1930s. He also got knocked off course in a way that few of them did: he ran over and killed a pedestrian. Though cleared of blame for the accident, Shaw lost his cabaret card and two years of resume-building, but he used the time. From Jazz in Europe:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 40: Tommy Dorsey, aka, The Angry One

The beginning...of this story.

Far too many weeks ago, I profiled one half of the famous, tumultuous Dorsey Brothers. In this post, I talk about the brother who made it tumultuous. First, to set the scene:

“Dorsey was also an occasionally mean drunk who was known to fire many of his sidemen if they had an off night. He had an erratic personality, loving a good fight but also being warm and generous much of the time, as long as things went his way.”
- Syncopated Times biography (best of the bunch, fwiw)

“Tommy was always punching someone out.”
- Swingmusic.net biography

“…and so began Dorsey's long-running practice of raiding other bands for talent.”
- Radio Swiss Jazz biography

Finally, from a mash note to both Dorsey and the Swing era, in a post within a post on Swingmusic.net:

“He could be a rugged guy offstage or to work for, but on stage, he was there for the paying customers...and for the kids. In 1946, when the bottom dropped out of the band biz, he was one of the first leaders to cut his price to venues so that not only would he keep his guys working, but so that 'the kids will have something to come dance to' again.”

Tommy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in 1905, 21 months after his older brother Jimmy. Their father, Thomas Francis Dorsey, Sr., was a bandleader, taught them play, they played with literally any musician 9/10th of the people who know something about the era could name, they recorded for the first time starting in the second half of the 1920s, they had formed the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra by then (though they recorded as the Dorsey Brothers Concert Orchestra, the Dorsey Brothers Novelty Orchestra, and the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra from 1928-33), but they only officially debuted it in 1934 at a ballroom up in New England. If that reads rushed, my apologies, but I touched on most of the details in my post on Jimmy Dorsey, and I’d direct anyone who curious about that to that post. For those who feel like they can do with less, this paragraph should catch you up nicely:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 30: How Chick Met Ella

“This is it. I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants.”
- Chick Webb, NPR review of a Chick Webb box-set (2013)

No one really knows the year of William Henry “Chick” Webb’s birth - some say 1905, but they wrote 1909 on his tombstone - but he was born in Baltimore, MD. While he would become one of the most famous drummers of his era, the path he took to playing that instrument has to be rare in music history, if not unique. A spill down the household stairs as (according to Wikipedia) an infant crushed several vertebrae; tuberculosis crept into his spine furthering the damage, “leaving him with short stature and a badly deformed spine which caused him to appear hunchbacked.” In a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the times, a doctor suggested Webb pick up the drums in order to “loosen up” his bones. Whether medically-sound or not, doctor's orders paid off...but Downbeat Magazine’s 1937 edition used some tres passe phrasing to  hail Webb at the height of his success:

‘The Rise of a Crippled Genius”

Webb never let his childhood injury hold him back. He moved to Harlem at age 17, where he signed on to a number of tours and sustained other acts through residencies and generally established himself in one of jazz’s hottest scenes. It didn’t take long either, as noted in an article posted on the site Modern Drummer:

“In 1926, the drummer formed his first band and began performing at various NYC jazz clubs, including Black Bottom, Roseland, The Cotton Club, and the Strand Roof. As the ’20s came to a close, Webb’s band—dubbed The Harlem Stompers—gradually picked up more members, eventually growing into a full-size eleven-piece big band.”

By 1931, Webb established his orchestra as the house band for the Savoy Ballroom, a premier club in Harlem. Though unable to read music, he managed his band just fine by memorizing the arrangements and guiding them through from a platform in the middle of stage. His reputation grew through the early 1930s, but, per the quote up top, he thought it would take a star vocalist for him to breaktrough. Webb’s orchestra played behind a guy named Charles Linton, “an old-school crooner…with pre-jazz-age enunciation.” And then came 1935 and Ella Fitzgerald…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 29: Basie, A Count and a King

Think of the date as beyond time...

This chapter introduces another member of jazz royalty (Duke Ellington, who's early days I covered earlier), if only to the first part of his long career. Even on that shortened timeline, the biography of the auteur in question touches so many members of his musical generation that it tells not just his story, but the story of his times.

William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.

Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.

For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 28: The Hal Kemp Orchestra & The Trumpetist He Launched

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:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 25: Cab Calloway, So Much More than the "Hi De Ho Man"

For those who first saw him in 1980.

“Cab Calloway is hip-hop.”
- Jon Landis, Director (The Blues Brothers, among others)

I’m a big fan of Landis, that movie and several others, but…yeah, that feels like a bridge too far to an anachronism. Related, raise your hand if The Blues Brothers was the first time you saw Cab Calloway perform. [Raises hand.]

At the same time, those few words from Landis hint at how unique, innovative and just plain massive Cab Calloway was in his 1930s-1940s heyday. As much as he had to claw (and disappoint his solidly-middle-class parents) to get there, once Calloway took over the house-band at the Cotton Club after Duke Ellington (profiled earlier) departed in 1931, he wouldn’t more than glance back for the next two decades. He hosted a twice-weekly radio, appeared in movies, wrote a succession of books on slang (1938’s Cab Calloway’s Cat-alogue was the first jive language dictionary available for circulation in New York’s public libraries), and featuring in a Bettie Boop cartoons (e.g., “Minnie the Moocher,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and “Snow White”) with his own dance moves translated to celluloid by the miracle of rotoscoping. In between all that, he invented The Moonwalk (though, as he remarked, “it was called the Buzz back then.”)

Calloway made a splash in every media available to him at his peak and, though racial discrimination was very much alive and unwell at that time, the hip ‘n’ high-brow felt the change in the air. When he starred opposite the then-fading Al Jolson (profiled earlier) in 1936’s The Singing Kid, film critic Arthur Knight saw a passing of the torch:

“…when Calloway begins singing in his characteristic style – in which the words are tools for exploring rhythm and stretching melody – it becomes clear that American culture is changing around Jolson and with (and through) Calloway.”

To think, had a followed his parents advice and gone to law school, none of that would have happened.

He was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, in 1907 to two college graduates, his father, Cab Calloway, Jr., a lawyer with a sideline in real state, his mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, a teacher and church organist. (Not everyone who grows up with music in the household becomes a musician, but a lot of musicians grew up with music in the household.) The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland when Calloway III was 11…which put him close to Pimlico, which gets a little closer to where his story begins. He skipped school often to work, selling newspapers, shine shoes and, when he could get out to the horse track, cool down horses after a race. A taste for gambling followed like a chaser and, after someone caught Calloway III “playing dice on the church steps,” his mother and stepfather (Calloway, Jr. died shortly after the move) shipped him to a reform school called Downington Industrial and Agricultural School.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 24: The Cotton Club and The Duke

Hail, hail, the band's all here.

At some unknown date in 1923, but shortly after getting out of Sing Sing, a “prominent” bootlegger/gangster named Owney Madden bought a night club on the upper floor of a building on the corner of 142nd and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and renamed it the Cotton Club. It wouldn’t hit its prime for a couple years, but the venue would become synonymous with the Jazz era, and the glamor that surrounded it. For all the careers it launched and sustained - beyond counting, honestly, including the artist/legend featured in this post - life on the talent side of the stage looked very different from what audiences saw.

First, it’s easy to forget that the Jazz era coincided with Prohibition - a function of how many people ignored it, I imagine. Wikipedia’s entry on the Cotton Club notes that the authorities shut it down for selling liquor in 1925, but that’s the only hint that the authorities cared what went on inside. Madden plied the club’s well-to-do clientele with “his #1 beer” and a schedule of the biggest entertainers of the 1920s. It even hosted "celebrity nights" to give audiences a shot at something fresh, which expanded the baseline who’s who list to include (lifted straight from Wikipedia): Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.

The regular programming at Cotton Club patrons were shows called “musical revues,” extended performances that featured singers, dancers, and comedians, all of it anchored with music by the house orchestra at the time. I imagine a space between vaudeville and the (early) modern variety shows aired on TV when I was a knee-high, only live and on stage. A guy named Andy Preer led the first orchestra, and for a while (1923-27), but the Internet recalls him only dimly. This was the musical revue's hey-day, when the hip and swell considered it a hot ticket, a detail that only makes the relationship between the entertainers and the entertained more coarse and distasteful. First, some framing:

“[The Cotton Club] reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as ‘darkies’ in the plantation South. The menu depicts this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.”

In keeping with that theme, the Cotton Club literally segregated the (largely? entirely?) black talent from its white clientele. The black singers, musicians and dancers - all of the latter cast to fit the “tall, tan and terrific” profile; “at least 5'6" tall, light-skinned, and under 21 years of age” - had to enter through a separate entrance and were barred from mingling with guests in the club itself. The superintendent’s basement at 646 Lenox was either offered or found as a place for the entertainers’ after-parties, “where they imbibed corn whiskey, peach brandy and marijuana.” Everything else reeked of spectacle and a cultural tourism bordering on outright exploitation. Wikipedia cobbled together a paraphrase of Langston Hughes’ contemporary notes:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

The medium of the moment.

This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.

The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.

1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.

Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:

“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 21: The (Paul) Whiteman Cometh

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…