Jazz: Big-Band Renaissance

Even at their happy best, big jazz bands evoke a sorrowful mood. They can't help it. They are spectacles of the past, like circuses or dirigibles, and no matter how good they are, their fans usually go home reminiscing about how great they used to be. The big bands began to slip with the death of swing in the early '40s; they grew even more obscure during rock 'n' roll's heyday.

Many collapsed—Stan Kenton jumped ship again last year—but those that have survived now seem to be gaining some of their old popularity. Despite the melancholy effort of swimming up stream against history, they are man aging a modest renaissance.

> Woody Herman's resuscitated band is so good that not even the great "First Herd" that Herman organized during World War II could have matched it. The aggregation speaks in a shout (as a good band should), and the rhythm section that propels it—Bassist Chuck Andrus, Drummer Jake Hanna and Pianist Nat Pierce—has enough drive and distinction to make three-quarters of an excellent quartet. All 15 players are occasional soloists, and Woody, at 50, yields to their youth. "I just duck and get out of the way," he says. > Lionel Hampton, 50, has always been the clown prince of jazz, and he still fronts his band tirelessly. His thesis, he says, is that a good band doesn't have to be dull. To prove it, he likes to leap up on a drum and stomp with both feet. His band is by far the least disciplined in jazz, and as a result his sidemen feel free to swing privately. Sometimes the players seem to be digging their own private scene, but on a good night they stir up a roomful of creative excitement. Hamp's arrangements are the raunchiest in the business, but when the band plays Flyin' Home, its audience seems content to forget all that jazz about jazz being an art.

> Maynard Ferguson, 35, plays the most complex and modern arrangements of any big band since Kenton's, though Ferguson sometimes swamps his sidemen with his outer-space approach to the trumpet. Every so often, like Kirk Douglas in Young Man with a Horn, he gets up and tries for the groovy sound of an ambulance siren. But most of the time the boys roll along smoothly in spite of him.

Last week Ferguson and his boys were back from a four-week tour of 24 campuses. Hamp was at Manhattan's Café Metropole, where the band is strung out behind the bar like a police lineup. Woody and his men were trudging through the sticks playing just the kind of one-nighters that build character and make big bands dear to novelists: Columbus, Neb., to Grand Island, Neb.; Grand Island to Fort Riley, Kans.; Fort Riley to Pryor, Okla.