Brick's Boys Go Riding"

One of the hottest bands in all the land has never been heard by the public. But Tin Pan Alley knows it well as Brick Fleagle's Rehearsal Band, vaguely describes it as a "jazz workshop." Brick's band consists of 16 key musicians from top-ranking bands who meet once a week to improve their techniques by moaning & groaning the blues and blaspheming the classics with arrangements too torrid for laymen's ears. One suitably muggy morning last week, Brick's boys cut their first commercial discs, "a blues, a mood and two jumpers"--which the Hot Record Society, purveyors of connoisseur's jazz, will market to hot platter "bugs."

The hour was musician's midnight (9 a.m.). Hulking, disheveled Roger "Brick" Fleagle--an ace arranger for such name bands as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford--lumbered into the studio, stared at his unshaven assemblage and lazily "sparked" (alerted) them with his pinkie finger. They played a few tired bars to warm up. Then Brick, his barrel-stomach protruding under a striped sweat shirt, gave his final orders: "We'll take SOS [Same Old Sheaves]. On the last two bars, Charlie, make it bumpa, bumpa, some Charleston, then a brrrrooom. O.K., we're rolling. . . ."

Sheaves to Rye. Three trombonists--blond Eddie Anderson (from Sonny Dunham's band), slicked Norman Conley (Eddie Stone's) and curly-haired Chuck Maxon (Paul Whiteman's)--growled "Pedal G," their lowest possible note. The reeds began to wail. When the melody of the old hymn, Bringing in the Sheaves, roared through, Brick nodded happily: "It's in there." He lit a cigaret, drank a glass of water and visited the control room, all the time directing the band with his pinkie, and rocking his head like a strutting turkey gobbler.

Soon the musicians, unable to resist their feverish rhythms, stood up and swayed while they played. "Now we're rocking," said Brick. Even the engineers in the control room began to get rhythm. The trombones growled another G, then faded out. The Sheaves were cut, and the club circulated a bottle of rye.

Later they recorded three more sides: the mood, Pastiche, a violent Rimsky-Korsakov; the two "jumpers," Double Doghouse (using two bass fiddles instead of one) and A Slight Case of the Shakes, Brick's version of a hangover. "Not a clinker" (sour note), said the maestro happily.

Little College. Sleepy, sloppy, 38-year-old Brick Fleagle organized his 16-man club after commercial bands rejected many of his arrangements as too hot to handle. Today the band has a "book" of 50 compositions, 48 of them by Brick (Fried Piper, Frost on the Moon, Swamp Mist, etc.). It also has a waiting list of about fifty musicians.

When a backer once proposed to commercialize him, Brick quoted the club's potential payroll, compiled from what the boys make on their regular jobs. The backer dropped the idea, and Brick was relieved. "We don't want any commercialism," he said. "We're a self-endowed institution . . . a little college. . . . It's mutual learning [as to] what will make us jump or rock or ride better."

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