“Piano Concerto in B-Flat” by Freddy Martin

At #1: October 4, 1941-November 27, 1941 (eight weeks)
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.

“Blue Champagne” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: September 27, 1941 (one week)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

There’s not a lot to say about “Blue Champagne”. It’s much more instrumental than the more popular Jimmy Dorsey tunes, which were a) Bob Eberly starts singing low-tempo, b) instrumental section, and then c) Helen O’Connell in swing tempo. Only Bob Eberly sings and he’s late coming in.

Enotes.com has an interesting assessment of the swing era:

Although illusory in nature, the world created by the music and the shared identity of the listeners "is perhaps the happiest and most significant aspect of the Swing Era," Schuller declared. That facet of swing faded, however, when the American consciousness was permanently changed by World War II. Stereo Review's Peter Reilly consequently dismissed the Dorsey brothers' music for modern listeners: "It doesn't have enough vitality or true style to bridge the years."

Indeed, what is amazing is how thoroughly this era of music has been eradicated. Not only that, the eradication came fairly quickly, within the living memory of the biggest fans of the genre. Oh, there were still hangers-on : Lawrence Welk was very popular on TV and the show wasn’t much more than all of those old big band hits played over and over. Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians could always expect a solid paycheck on New Year’s Eve. But the popular attitude toward the last of these big band dinosaurs was always one of derision.

Here’s a thought exercise: think about a musical style from a given decade from the 1940s to the 2000s – how likely is it that a song written under the musical tropes common to that era could make it to the 2012 Billboard Hot 100? Songs written in the style of the 1970s still have enough motive power to influence modern songwriters with their melodies and lyrical arrangements. (It seems that “classic radio” – what some called “oldies” – has been rolled up to 1970 – 1990, with only the biggest hits from the 1960s hanging on and virtually nothing from the 1950s.) If Jimmy Dorsey could be resurrected and arrange something new with Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell, even at the height of his power he’d never make the 2012 Hot 100. The landscape has changed too much.

You could hunt through a barrel of hypotheses as to why this is so. My pet hypothesis is the individualization of American culture, “every man a king and every woman a queen”. The thought of being one performer in a seventeen-piece big band is just hard to stomach. Better to be a bass player in a four-piece rock band. Or in 2012, better to be the lead vocalist with studio backup. (If you can barely carry a note, there’s always autotune.)

The above paragraph says that “the American consciousness was permanently changed by World War II” but that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason for the disappearance of big band. Big bands were still popular during wartime; it’s not like American GIs were exposed to hot rock ‘n’ roll acts on some Pacific island and flipped over to an undiscovered musical style.

More likely, big band music hit a demographic wall. The purchasing power of younger people was starting to make itself felt very slowly. The first wave that hit big band music was the economic post-war financial boom, when teenagers had purchasing power and decided that they didn’t want to spend their cash on big band music. (Either that, or they started watching television, which didn’t have the sonic fidelity afforded to a radio listener.) The second wave – the demographic wave that hit in the 1960s when the war babies became teens – smashed the 1940s era to smithereens.

Presently: Have made it to the 30 minute mark of “The Fabulous Dorseys”. Wow, Janet Blair is easy on the eyes, ain’t she?