Here’s a ‘drum-off’ between the legendary Buddy Rich and Ed Shaughnessy, the drummer for the Tonight Show band for two decades. The big band arrangement that kicks things off belongs to a genre of music I always think of as ‘heart-attack jazz’, a very specific over-wrought big band mayhem sound
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SOpqyg5fpUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkOpHJ_PgDk In yesterday’s post I mentioned how the members of the ‘Tonight Show’ band (aka ‘Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra’) lent their own comedic talents to the show. One of the strangest examples is that of trombone player Ernie Tack. The show would occasionally do a ‘Stump The Band’
To those of us who remember the Johnny Carson incarnation of ‘The Tonight Show’, the band (or the ‘NBC Orchestra’ as they were formally known) looms as an important piece of the magical synthesis of talents that produced the greatest talk show in TV history. (If you haven’t delved into
It wasn’t easy to become a member of the premium-level all-girl 1920s orchestra ‘The Ingenues’. As you’ll see, you not only had to be a woman who’d mastered one of many instruments that, for various reasons, were not necessarily associated with female players (saxes, trombones, tubas etc.) but you had
Here’s another Fats Waller short made for jukebox consumption in 1941 (see yesterday’s post for ‘Your Feets Too Big’). ‘The Joint Is Jumpin’, written by Waller, Andy Razaf and J.C.Johnson, is another of his hit novelty numbers and it’s given a rowdy treatment in this dramatization of what a Harlem
Last Friday I posted about a beautifully restored jukebox that was equipped to show films of the bands performing the songs in the jukebox. These films, known as ‘soundies’, are a great preservation tool as far too little film of performers of the day exist, especially black performers who were