Out There Forever

He was no Benny Goodman on the clarinet, but he got by. His bluesy, hard-driving howl on Caldonia (1945) showed him to be a catchy singer--as big-band leaders go, that is. But what really enabled Woody Herman to climb to the top 30 years ago and stay there was two quite different talents: a high sense of musical style and a genius for leadership. He had a rare ability to fuse a collection of raw young musicians into a polished and pulsating band. He could also yield to the prevailing pop taste without losing a certain acerbic jazzy quality all his own. Today Woody is as much the debonair man of the times as ever. As he puts it: "If I had to play the same music in a locked-in style that I played in the '40s, I would have taken the gas pipe a long time ago."

What excites Herman these days, as it does almost everyone else, is rock--a far cry from the free-blowing kind of blues on which Woody's first band, formed in the late 1930s, pegged its fortunes. His next band (1944-47), the first and best of a long succession that bore the name Herd, was a hard-driving ensemble with a precision-drilled brass attack, modulated by a sophisticated Ellingtonian touch. The first Herd's explosive rendition of such numbers as Apple Honey and Northwest Passage appealed to just about everybody--including Igor Stravinsky, who wrote the Ebony Concerto for Woody in 1946. The second Herd (1947-50) tried to hitch up with bebop, but muffled its big beat in the process and dropped $175,000. In the '50s and early '60s, Herman leaned toward one pop trend and then another, but basically stuck to a swinging style that never buried the beat.

Not by the Book. The big bands seem to be in the midst of a muted renaissance. Oldtimers like Count Basic and Duke Ellington, along with such comparative juniors as Buddy Rich and Don Ellis, have developed large and eager audiences for their gigs and records. None of them, though, have demonstrated Woody's resiliency or adaptability. The style of his current group is a near-symphonic fusion of rock and the toe-tapping, old-gold sound that was the trademark of his earlier bands. Mixing updated versions of old Herman specialities with ear-blowing arrangements of such contemporary tunes as the Doors' Light My Fire and Jim Webb's Mac Arthur Park, the latest Herd has a rare ability to bridge pop music's generation gap. It is equally welcome at the hip Fillmore West and Manhattan's touristy Copacabana, where Woody and Songstress Dionne Warwick have just begun a joint two-week engagement.

Herman finds contemporary rock more interesting than pop music a generation ago: tunes are longer and more complex, rhythms more diverse. Fortunately, the 16 young members of his current Herd--many of whom came from such music schools as Boston's Berklee and Indiana University--can play whatever Herman's arrangers ask. Woody returns the favor by giving them a remarkable measure of freedom. The group's spontaneity--perhaps the strongest remaining link to Herman's jazz past--attests to that. So does the individual success of such former Herman sidemen as Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Shorty Rogers, Pete Candoli and Neal Hefti. Says Drummer Jake Hanna. an ex-Herd man: "Woody goes along with the wav the band feels, instead of sticking strictly to the book. If a man's really blowin'. Woody doesn't stop him after eight bars because the arrangement says to."

On the Road. Born Woodrow Charles Herman on May 16. 1913, in Milwaukee, Woody was only six when his show-business father began pushing him onto home-town stages as a singer-dancer. By the age of 17, he had become a member of the Tom Gerun band. A few years later, he joined the old Isham Jones band, and when Jones dissolved the group in 1936, Woody reorganized it as "the Band That Plays the Blues." By the early 1940s, he was ready to gallop with the Herds. For the past 24 years he has spent only about six weeks a year in the hilltop Hollywood home overlooking Sunset Boulevard that used to belong to Humphrey Bogart. The rest of the time he is on the road, playing 200 or more concerts a year, taking his wife Charlotte along on the bigger trips.

Woody never speaks of retiring, and there are quiet moments when he is impressed by his own durability. "It does seem." he admits, "that I've been out there forever."

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