The Hit-and-Run

You don't really know loneliness unless you do a year or two with a one-night band. Sing until about 2 a.m. Get in a bus and drive 400 miles. Stop in the night for the greasy hamburgers. Arrive in a town. Try to sleep. Get up and eat.

--Singer Georgia Gibbs

It was a hot. muggy, starlit night in the dusty Ontario lake town of Port Stanley (pop. 1,480). The fish flies swarmed, and the rickety Stork Club Ballroom had just disgorged 800 jazz fans. By 2:25 a.m., all 23 bandsmen had clambered aboard the big silver, red and white bus, followed by Bandleader Stan Kenton carrying a cardboard carton with 30 ham sandwiches. Somebody snapped on the switch of a blue light that signified drinking time, and the bus began to roll.

Jazzed Up Dissonance. Stan Kenton's crew, which last week was midway through a nine-month tour, is riding the crest of a post-rock 'n' roll revival of interest in bands. The revival has not yet risen to the peak of the '30s when the bands roamed the countryside in gaudy caravans, carrying a whiff of the wide world with them. But, although there are fewer bands today, the top ones are making bigger money and getting more bookings. If they wanted to, such men as Ray Anthony, Harry James, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman and Les Brown could probably work every day of the week playing at colleges, in high school gymnasiums and under the tents. Stan Kenton nearly does work a seven-day week.

Touring the summer circuit, Kenton keeps his men in a state of near exhaustion that, strangely, seems to add to their cohesion and musical esprit. To the usual jazzed-up dissonances that are his musical trademark, Kenton this year has added the sound of the mellophonium, a kind of straightened French horn that he developed to fill in a range of sound that usually remains unexploited--somewhere between the trumpet and the trombone. Whipped by the rhythm section's artfully lagging beat, the buttery mellophonium sound satisfies the taste of as many as 5,000 a night. As a result, the Kenton band is this summer's briskest moneymaker.

The Way We Live. In the Kenton band, the ritual of the hit-and-run--two one-nighters laid back to back--is a commonplace, if still nightmarish, feature of touring life. Kenton himself has been at it for 21 years, as has his driver, who first wheeled a Kenton bus in 1941. The hit-and-run from Port Stanley was typical: the destination was Cleveland, 300 miles away, where the band had a concert the following afternoon. As soon as the bus pulled out. the bandsmen settled down to the jazz world's two favorite antidotes to boredom--poker (rear of the bus) and drinking (front). Kenton rode in the well at the front door. A few lucky musicians were able to sleep, notably Saxophonist Joel Kaye, who at 140 lbs. is small enough to slip into the overhead luggage rack. A couple of other bandsmen listened over individual earphones to the tape recorder that Kenton had installed at the start of the tour. Favorite listening: Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Puccini.

At 3:50 a.m., the bus stopped at an all-night diner for a 45-min. breakfast break (the band had not eaten since 6 p.m.). By 9:30 a.m., the bus was within "14 hands" of Cleveland (distances are invariably measured in poker hands), and the bandsmen hoped they might have time for some sleep before the concert. As it turned out, they had time only for showers before piling out into 90-degree heat in the big tent where they were to play. For all that, the band blew its lungs out for two hours; in such numbers as Malaguena and Waltz of the Prophets it produced the most exciting big-band sound around.

Is the hit-and-run life worth it? "There's loneliness here on the road," says Trumpeter Marvin Stamm, "but then there's loneliness anywhere in life." Says Kenton, who believes that this band is the best he ever had: "It's not really a grind; it's the way we live."

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