Still alive? No. Woodrow Charles Herman died on October 29, 1987
By the time Woody Herman was 15 he was a professional musician and by the time Woody Herman was 23, he already had his own band, called “The Band that Plays the Blues”. This was an era where a guy with the name of Paul Whiteman (!) could be called “The King of Jazz” so it makes you wonder just how bluesy Herman’s sound was.
It appears that Herman’s sound went through a lot of changes; 1950s Herman isn’t the same as 1940s Herman. Herman’s band would begin to shift away from the blues and toward jazz but by 1942 this hadn’t happened yet. (Give it another year.) He was at least a couple of years from the peak of his popularity in 1945.
Things, however, wouldn’t come up roses for Herman. He’d make an aborted attempt at retirement in 1946, disbanding his band but by 1947 he started up again with a new band informally called the “Second Herd”. He was definitely one of the icons of jazz in the 1950s. Unfortunately, his finances had been horribly mismanaged by one of his employees and he went on the a decades long tour which should be called “the IRS tour”. (Herman did call keeping a big band “a costly hobby.”)
He owed the United States Government over $1.6 million in payroll taxes. That must have been a lot of money back because he stopped touring only when he became so sick that he couldn’t tour anymore. At the end, he weighed less than 100 pounds due to a host of physical ailments and was nearly evicted from his home for not being able to pay rent. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett stepped in to pay some of Herman’s bills, but Herman would soon be playing jazz at heaven’s gate.
Charles Champlin said this about Herman:
From the beginning, Woody made uncommon demands on his sidemen: The don’t-stop-for-nothin’ tempos, the high, precise, wailing brass sections, the reeds galloping as one were central to the Herd signature. I thought that night that if you could measure it somehow you could prove that the young musicians were breaking the B-flat equivalents of the four-minute mile.
As for “Blues in the Night”, it was a song written for the 1941 movie of the same name. Harold Arlen wrote the music and Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics. More information about the story of “Blues in the Night” can be found at the Wikipedia link.
Both “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Blues in the Night” would be nominated for Best Original Song of 1942, but both would lose to Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris”. According to this thread, someone at MGM had heard “The Last Time I Saw Paris” on the radio and purchased it for the movie “Lady Be Good” - unlike “Blues in the Night”, which was written for the movie. Kern and Hammerstein II petitioned the Academy to change the rules for Best Original Song. From that point on, the song had be heard for the first time ever in the movie to win the Oscar.
The rules changed again in 1949 after “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” won. The first time that song had been heard in a film was for Neptune’s Daughter but it had been performed informally at parties. The winner got the rules changed again so that the song had to be written explicitly for the film. In general, to win Best Original Song a song must be played either during the movie or as the “start-up song” during the closing credits.
Extra: Trumpeter Neil Hefti once worked for Herman. He was the man who composed the title theme for the 1966-68 TV series Batman, which he said was the hardest piece of music he ever wrote.
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