Music: Blow It Down

Igor Stravinsky, like 1,000,000 other U.S. record buyers, liked Woody Herman’s scat-and-screech-filled Caldonia (“What makes your big head so hard?”). Stravinsky liked it so well that he wanted to write music for Herman’s band too. The result was an eight-minute Ebony Concerto, which had its premiere last week.

For a month, between theater dates,

Woody’s bandsmen huffed & puffed through the Concerto’s snarled rhythms. Said Woody: “We were pretty befuddled until Stravinsky . . . sang it to us. We usually know what’s going to happen in our own things.”

Stravinsky rehearsed the 18-piece Herman band for four hours one day, and advised Woody to hire Walter Hendl, 28-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, to conduct it, so that Woody could concentrate on the clarinet solo. In rehearsals, the Philharmonic’s Hendl sometimes had to get Woody to translate his instructions to the band. “He’s not slurring right,” Hendl complained of the tenor sax. “He’s not quite on the pitch. How do you say it?” Woody explained “Don’t bend it. A little more legit on those accents.” Another time Hendl, dissatisfied with the way a trumpeter ended a note, said: “Do something with the trumpet. Take it away.” Woody translated: “Blow it down.”

“We All Steal.” Stoop-shouldered, skinny Woodrow Wilson Herman, an earnest jazz veteran at 32, is currently the top U.S. jazz favorite, having outdistanced Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman in polls conducted by Downbeat and Metronome magazines. Woody’s slow climb to his million-dollar-a-year gross began as a brilliantine-haired, ten-year-old saxophonist in vaudeville. At 14 he joined a roadhouse orchestra; before he was 20 he was sharing the vocals in a minor West Coast band (Tom Gerun’s) with Virginia (Ginny) Simms and Tony Martin. In 1936 Woody took over the remnants of Isham Jones’s once-great band, and got nowhere with it, trying to make it “The Band That Plays the Blues” while everyone else was playing swing. (One exception: in 1938 he recorded Woodchoppers’ Ball, which sold 2,000,000 discs.)

He started to rise when he started imitating. His five trumpets now sound like Harry James, only louder, and his tricky tonal effects like Duke Ellington. He also borrowed from Ravel and Stravinsky. When he acknowledged this debt to Stravinsky, the composer replied: “We all steal. But never steal from yourself. Then you’re not being progressive.” Says Woody: “I think that sums up jazz.”

Ebony Was No Panacea. Last week’s audience in Carnegie Hall was filled mostly with bobby-soxers who came to hear Woody, not Stravinsky. They whistled their approval of Caldonia and Superman with a Horn. Then Hendl came on to conduct Ebony Concerto, and a French horn player and a harpist, dressed in tuxedoes, joined Woody’s bandsmen, who were in midnight blue zoot suits.

Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson, a longhair visitor from the New York Herald Tribune, raved: “Never [have I] heard any work by this author, no matter whom it was written for, played with such impeccable comprehension and exactitude.” The bobby-soxers gave it a polite hearing for a minute or two, then coughed restlessly. They came to life again on Panacea and Your Father’s Mustache. Stravinsky didn’t send them. Woody did.