One Night Stand (CHCD 71051)

Biography:

Woodrow Charles Herman was born in Milwaukee in 1913 and died in Los Angeles on October 1987.

From 1934 to 1936 Woody was featured with the Isham Jones Band and made his first recordings with the band for Decca.  When the Jones band broke up, Herman took the key men and organised a group of his own on a cooperative basis.  The orchestra rapidly became famous as “the band that plays the blues2 though its repertoire also included many pop songs and non-blues instrumentals.  Its biggest hit, the fast blues ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’, recorded in April 1939 eventually sold a million records.

Changing gradually from a semi Dixieland and blues identification, the band modernised itself in the early ‘40s.  Before the band break-up in December 1946, they had earned many honours.  It was voted best swing band in the 1945 Down Beat poll, given Silver Award by critics in ’46 and ’47 Esquire polls and won the Metronome poll (band division) in 1946.

Herman led another big band in the late forties and took a small group to Cuba in late ’49 after which he reorganised ‘The Second Herd’ which at one time or another included Stan Getz, Terry Gibbs, Urbie Green, Red Mitchell, Milt Jackson, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn and which was also known as the Four Brothers Band.

Personnel kept changing and the 1951band heard on this CD, fits somewhere in between the Second and Third Herds (formed in 1953).

The Herman bands were all ‘road’ bands and Woody spent almost his entire life travelling from Coast to Coast and touring Europe.  One in a while though, an engagement of several weeks presented itself and everyone looked forwarded to the regular residence at the Hollywood Palladian.

Here on these two atmospheric ‘One Night Stand’ broadcasts from the legendary venue in the Spring of 1951, we get a chance to hear typical programmes that Woody’s working band played every night for dance concerts all over the USA.

Featured arrangements by Ralph Burns, Shorty Rogers and George Shearing and highlights are solos by Phil Urso, Shorty, Urbie Green and Woody himself.