Big Band Bash

Hello everyone and welcome to Part one of my Black History Month Celebration. I apologize for missing last week as it could not be helped as I tested postive for Covid-19. I am much better now and so for the next three weeks I am going to run a three part program from 2014 that I produced celebrating Black History Month. I picked two songs each from many different bands and had enough songs for th...

January 20th, 1922 is the birthday of bandleader Ray Anthony. I am going to continue our birthday celebration on today's show. The first half of the program has some assorted cuts including the first solo on record that Ray recorded with the Glenn Miller orchestra. Then for the second half I'll be playing some songs that Ray and his band recorded for a 1953 summer television show. These feature vo...

January 20th, 1922 is the birthday of bandleader Ray Anthony. He just celebrated his 100th about ten days ago so to honor Ray on his 100th birthday I produces this two part program celebrating his career. Another little known fact is that Ray is the last surviving member of the original Glenn Miller Orchestra. I have a few selected songs by the Anthony Orchestra in the first half of today's show a...

Hello everyone. This time of the year is usually cold in my neck of the woods. Well Mother Nature did not let us down here in the United States. The eastern states reported record low temperatures and it hs been cold at my house. I have never done a show about the cold so I searched for songs with cold, winter, and wind in the title. Some of them turned out to be about something else but they all...

This is part two of the Time Life records set I started last week. These records were originally recorded in 1971 by Billy May and His Orchestra/Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra. Those were recreations featuring many of the musicians who were on the original recordings. Today's program features the music from the set of 1938-1939. I have this box set and thought that instead of hearing the recreati...

This is another volume in Time Life records ambitious project called "The Swing Era". It was a ten volume set with three records included in each volume. Today we turn to the years of 1938-1939. The songs were rerecorded by the bands of Billy May and Glen Gray. I have this set and thought that instead of hearing the recreations that it would be interesting to listen to the originals. So I'm borrow...

Happy New Year everyone. For this program, the first of 2022, I decided to see how many songs I could find that had the word Party in the title. The reason being is that many people go to parties on New Year's Eve or they recuperate from the party from the night before on New Year's Day. It was a fun exercise and an added bonus was finding a radio remote from the Glenn Miller orchestra on New year...

This December 15th will be the 110th Anniversary of the birthday of the late bandleader Stan Kenton. In 2011 I put together a show celebrating the centennial anniversary of Stan's birth. I haven't played this show in ten years so to keep from reinventing the wheel I am going to play this show. There are lots of your Kenton favorites on this show as well as a biography of Stan. I hope you enjoy thi...

This December 7th will be the 80th Anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. To honor the men and women who lost their lives that day, I have put together some of the songs associated with World War Two as well as explained a little bit about why and how the attack took place. There are lots of songs from 1941 through 1945 and I hope you remember that fateful day which prompted our entry into Wor...

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday. I am taking this week off as I present part two of a program I produced back in 2012. It is kind of a sampler of the many vocalists that were popular during the swing era, a kind of potpourri if you will. Last time, I presented many different singers and today is a continuation of the many great vocalists. I was a little rough back in 2012 but the m...

Since I have produced twenty new shows, I am going to take a break for the next two weeks and turn to a rerun of a two part show I did way back in 2012. It was a show I did focusing on the vocalists. I put together many different vocalists into a sampler. I think you'll enjoy this rerun as it has a lot of the popular vocalists from the swing era. I hope to be back after the Thanksgiving break with...

Well, with this last episode we come to the end of a series that I have really enjoyed presenting. Our local PBS station runs reruns of the Lawrence Welk show every Saturday at 6:00pm. I was watching it and the show they were doing was a salute to the swing bands of the 30's and 40's. So I thought let's run a series highlight ten of the top bands and present many of their hit songs. We've been thr...

I've been listening to Gene Krupa's band since 1973. That is the year he passed away and the local jazz show had a tribute to Gene. On this Part 9 of This Is The Best Of,  I will be playing some of the hits of Gene and his band.  The band that had Anita O'Day and Roy Eldridge was always my favorite but any band he was the drummer for was a very exciting band.  There is not a lot of patter on this...

In the movie, The Nutty Professor from 1963 there is a scene towards the end with Jerry Lewis dancing to the sound of Les Brown playing Leap Frog. It is a swinging song and that is the way I feel about the music of The Band of Renown. On the show today, I am going to continue with part eight of my ten part series I call This Is The Best Of. The band in the spotlight today is Les Brown. We will be...

Today we are going to look at the best of Jimmie Lunceford and his Orchestra on part 7 of This Is The Best Of. Jimmie Lunceford's band differed from other great bands of the time because it was better known for its ensemble than for its solo work. Additionally, he was known for using a two-beat rhythm, called the Lunceford two-beat, as opposed to the standard four-beat rhythm. His band was also kn...

This is The Best of continues this week with a focus on the music of Harry James. Harry had a great tone and an excellent technique that made him one of the leading trumpeters of the swing era. He started his band in 1938 and struggled for a while until he added strings and started playing sentimental favorites that struck a chord with many people during World War 2. He also had an ear for great v...

This is one of my favorite Best of programs. Today on Part 5 we are going to be listening to some of the best of Artie Shaw's hits. Although they were two different players on the clarinet, I liked them equally well. I came to listen to the Shaw band after my listening stints with Goodman and Miller. I enjoyed the songs and Shaw's star sidemen such as Georgie Auld, Tony Pastor, Buddy Rich and Hele...

Part Four of This is the Best Of features the great music of Count Basie. These are some of his popular recordings from the late 1930's plus a few from the 1950's. Some of the songs feature the vocals of blues singer Jimmy Rushing. Count Basie featured a style of music called Kansas City Swing. These are some great soloists in his band like Lester You, Buck Clayton, Herschel Evans and the Count hi...

Part Three of This is the Best Of features the hits of Tommy Dorsey. He had more hits than I could fit in one hour but this is a good representation of many of his hit recordings.  I started with his theme song and tried to find a good cross section of many of his hits. We'll be hearing the golden trombone sound of Tommy plus vocalists Edythe Wright, Jack Leonard, Frank Sinatra plus Jo Stafford an...

This is Part Two of a ten part series highlighting the hits and best recordings of ten of the top bands of the swing era. I got the ides from watching the Lawrence Welk show on our local PBS station. His show that week was a salute to the swing bands. Since we just went through a series called revisited where we looked at some of the lesser known bands I thought let's play some of the hits of the...

This is Part one of a ten part series highlighting the hits and best recordings of ten of the top bands of the swing era. I got the ides from watching the Lawrence Welk show on our local PBS station. His show that week was a salute to the swing bands. Since we just went through a series called revisited where we looked at some of the lesser known bands I thought let's play some of the hits of the...

Well with this tenth part we are bringing to a close my revisited series. Today's show features the band of the great trumpeter Charlie Spivak.  He played with some of the top bands in the late 1930's like Bob Crosby (1938), Tommy Dorsey (1938–1939), and Jack Teagarden (1939) before launching his own band. The vocalist on most of these recordings is his wife Irene Daye. I hope you enjoy these grea...

In Part 9 of this ten part series, we are going back to a show that I did in 2019 on a very fine trumpet player by the name of Randy Brooks. He played with several big bands such as Claude Thornhill and Les Brown before starting his own band in early 1945. He married Ina Ray Hutton and moved to Los Angeles where he suffered a stroke and was unable to continue as a musician. He died at the age of 4...

This week's Revisited episode is on the band of Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Andy Kirk was an American jazz saxophonist and tubist who led the Twelve Clouds of Joy, a band popular during the swing-era. Their pianist, and the band's arranger, was Mary Lou Williams, who went on to become a prominent figure in jazz. There is some great music in this programs and I hope you enjoy Andy Kirk...

On Part 7 of my revisited series, I'm going back to a program I produced in 2012. I called it Two Kays because I highlighted Kay Kyser and Sammy Kaye. They had two very good bands and played in what is called the sweet style of swing. There is some good music in this program and I hope you enjoy the music of Kay Kyser and Sammy Kaye. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com