Still alive? : No. Frederick Alfred Martin died September 30, 1983
Freddy Martin is probably one of the lesser known big band performers. In the great division of bands between “swing” and “sweet”, Martin’s band was definitely on the sweet side. Like sweet bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Lawrence Welk, Martin was able to keep his career going through the end of the big band leader. He was known as “Mr. Silvertone” due to the quality of his tenor saxophone playing.
According to Wikipedia, Martin conducted a tenor-saxophone based band. There was an all-tenor saxophone section and a violin trio, leaving the bombastic power of the traditional band cut down to two brass instruments and rhythm. It left the very sweet sound – non improvised, gentle – that Martin was looking for.
Martin had actually been part of the music scene since 1930 or so, getting his first break when he band substituted for Guy Lombardo’s band – Lombardo was another sweet bandmaster.
From the Wikipedia article, I learned that he had been raised in an orphanage and with various relatives but could find no specific details about his experiences. It could have been that Martin was a sort of self-effacing guy. From the Wikipedia article:
He used the banner "Music In The Martin Manner." Ironically, Russ Morgan used a similar banner when he finally landed a radio series with his own band in 1936. (Morgan’s title was "Music In The Morgan Manner"!) Russ had been playing in Freddy’s band and the two were good friends for years. Russ even used some of Freddy's arrangements when he started his band. Did Martin let the "Music In The ------ Manner" and the arrangement thing go? Yes. "Freddy Martin is such a nice man," said Larry Barnett. "He’s almost too nice for his own good."
Even though the recorded version is instrumental, Martin added words to the tune and the song became “Tonight We Love”. Once Martin hit upon the idea to rearrange a work by classical composer Tchaikovsky, he figured he’d keep at it. (According to Ivan Raykoff, “Piano Concerto in B-Flat” has spawned 16 different pop songs based on the melody.) It sounds like a rather uninspired way to put a song together until you realize that Tchaikovsky pretty much did the same with “Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor”, the source of Martin’s work. Tchaikovsky “borrowed” parts of French and Ukrainian folk songs for parts of the melody. As someone said on the internet, maybe inspiration is really one part creativity, two parts theft and four parts motivation. (I don’t think either Martin or Tchaikovsky were trying to hide their sources, either.)
So what happened to Freddy Martin after the well dried up? Somewhere on the net it claims that the appeal of swing bands was more immediate but the appeal of sweet bands was more durable, since sweet music could appeal to all age groups. One of his vocalists would be Merv Griffin, who toured with Martin for four years. Martin would appear with his orchestra in 1956 at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, where he would appear on the same bill with Elvis Presley in Presley’s first (disappointing) Vegas tour and serve as The King’s musical director.
Martin would keep on keeping on. His orchestra became the house band at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Los Angeles in 1969 and he led that band until around 1980, although only off-and-on near the end. Aside from a web site dedicated to classic cars – Martin was supposedly a car nut – there’s not a lot else to say about Freddy Martin.
Bonus: if interested, you can take a peek a Freddy Martin’s 1952 Muntz Road Jet.
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