Band Businessman

Les Brown's "Band of Renown" is one of the busiest and best in the land. Les Brown, a graduate of Duke University ('36), thinks he knows why. "We prefer sound to noise," Brown writes in Metronome. "We prefer the beat over 'effects,' we prefer consonance to dissonance, and we like the melody if it's good."

This formula has made Les & Co. a stand-by on Bob Hope shows since 1946. It has also won the approval of the jazz fans: in Down Beat's latest band popularity poll, Brown's outfit ran second only to "Progressive" Jazzman Stan Kenton's. Last week the band packed Los Angeles' Trianon ballroom on Saturday night, and also appeared in a local TV show.

The Fans Are Different. For nine months of the year, except for occasional forays with Hope, Les & Co. are set as solid as cement in Los Angeles. The take, including record royalties, is $350,000 a year. The musicians, most of whom have been with Les five to ten years, earn around $10,000 apiece, and are settled family men with permanent homes around Los Angeles. This gives the Band of Renown a respectable pipe & slippers atmosphere, in contrast to the breathless, upper-berth days of the middle '30s, when Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Jimmie Lunceford rocketed around the U.S. with their big bands, collecting frenzied worship. In 15 years the band business has settled down, and chunky Les Brown, who played his first dance date with a clarinet at 16, is one who saw the change coming.

For one thing, the bands lost a lot of musicians to the armed services in World War II, and, says Brown, "always the best guys seemed to go." They returned with most of the fire and wanderlust burned out of them, and headed for comfortable berths in movie and radio studios: marriage and one-night stands do not mix. And the fans themselves are different. Unlike the openmouthed mobs who used to jitter right into the bell of Benny Goodman's clarinet, the new generation seems to "dance easier than they used to. You don't see the place hopping as it did in the old days."

"Make Hit Records." The old circuit of "prestige houses," which included such famed spots as New Jersey's Meadowbrook and Chicago's Blackhawk, now scrambles for top soloists more than top bands. With rare exceptions, the theaters that used to pay Goodman and Shaw $10,000 a week are gone. Recording companies nowadays play for the hit song, the one-shot success; the disk jockey, who can make or break a record, rules the roost.

In a world where beat-and-swing-and-pack-'em-in no longer pays off, Les Brown advises: "Hire good men, make hit records, treat the men well, make hit records . . . hold on to the men, make hit records." For the Band of Renown, it works pretty well.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.