Music: Purple Moodmaker

With the football season came the weekends of the Big Game and the dance in the college gym or the local ballroom afterwards. The collegiate circuit, which had brought many a big-money dance band (Glen Gray, the late Glenn Miller) to the top, was in full swing. This season a new face, and a surprisingly young one, had cornered the market: 21-year-old Elliot Lawrence.

Last week Elliot Lawrence’s fast-climbing band* played for the homecoming dance at the University of Michigan’s Intramural Building. About 700 of the 3,400 students who showed up hovered admiringly around the bandstand all evening while Lawrence played schmalzy ballads like Buttermilk Sky and To Each His Own. Lawrence’s autumn schedule covers nine universities, including such profitable dates as Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska. His nearest competitor—Veteran jazzman Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra—has five big college dates.

Elliot Lawrence is a University of Pennsylvania graduate who likes to wear purple plaid jackets, yellow monogramed shirts and flowered ties. His band is almost as youthful (average age: 23) as his public. He organized his first orchestra—15 kids who called themselves the Band-busters—when he was twelve. They played high-school dances in Philadelphia. Five of Lawrence’s current bandsmen are original Bandbusters, including the singer, brunette Rosalind Patton, who sang an uncertain treble for the orchestra when she was eleven, is now a limpid-voiced contralto of 20.

Elliot’s detractors say he had a head start. His father is program director of WCAU, the CBS station in Philadelphia, and got the kids radio time. CBS also owns Columbia Records, and the Lawrence band has snared a profitable recording contract. But even allowing for a starting push, Lawrence’s band is doing well on its own. Their college dates were paying as high as $3,000 a night and their first record, I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time and Strange Love, has been a steady seller for two months.

Their style is a draggy, lush melodic line trimmed with Elliot’s piano solos. For sugar-spinning, the band has a symphonic wind section (bassoon, oboe, French horn, English horn and clarinet) which Elliot calls a Woodwindtette. Says he: “We’re trying to get more classical sounds. That way we get a sort of purple mood. Overseas the kids loved wild razzmatazz. But now they’re back, they want sweet music. They just want to put their arm around their gal friend and romance slowly. Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s why they like my band.”

-Last spring, in a nationwide poll of collegians by Billboard magazine, be placed third to Stan Kenton and Tex Beneke among best “new” orchestras.