Part 5 - Big Bands and Strip Clubs
Los Angeles to Reno 1949 - 1959
Frank and Shirley
“No, that’s not what happened at all.”
I’m speaking with my cousin Susie by phone as we try to reconstruct the family’s early days in Los Angeles.
“I’m sure he met your mom in LA, not in New York, because it was the same night that my mom and dad got together. It was in some nightclub, after hours, probably at a late night jam session because everyone was there; Harry James’ band members and some other local players. Uncle David arranged the whole thing.”
Our two moms, cousins Shirley and Norma, had both arrived in LA just a few months earlier. Shirley, traveling with her parents and her brother, jazz guitarist Dave Goldberg had recently arrived from England. Cousin Norma came out from New York to visit them a few weeks later. The two gals were no strangers to the jazz world. They had heard Dave play many times, and were the jazz “groupies” of their day. Norma met Al Pellegrini at the club that night and he joined the girls at their table. Then Frank joined them. Like in a Hollywood movie, both couples fell in love that night: Shirley left the club with Frank, and Norma with Al.
My grandparents did not approve of either of the romances.
“Uncle Harry was not happy,” said Susie of my grandfather, “Not because Frank and Al were jazz musicians, but because they weren’t Jewish.” For the family, Orthodox Jews of that war-time generation, it was a scandal. He refused to attend Norma and Al’s wedding in November, 1948, but did host their reception in his home. In this contentious atmosphere, after dating for almost three years, Shirley and Frank would at last decide to elope in 1951.
The Big Band Beat in Los Angeles
It was March, 1949. Bebop was having its day in Los Angeles. By the time Uffe’s fans in Scandinavia learned he’d beat out 40 other drummers contesting for the drum stool in the prestigious Harry James Orchestra, Uffe had already recorded with the band on the album Swingtown and he was readying to go on tour.
Listen to this fun foxtrot, Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, recorded Feb 14, 1949 in Hollywood, with Frank on drums and future cousin-in-law Al Pelligrini, clarinet.
Harry James Orchestra
Harry James was a virtuoso trumpeter and a popular, long-time bandleader. He was known for his musicality, flamboyant style, and the prescience to be the first major big bandleader to hire the young singer Frank Sinatra. Biographer John Rosie writes:
“After the war, when bebop became the ascendant jazz style, James’ popularity started to wane, despite a brief experimental interest in bebop [through 1950]. The album, Swingtown, and the subsequent tour, showed the wide range of the James repertoire, from schmaltzy love songs to the bebop sounds of Duke Ellington.”
Duke Ellington’s great composition, Cottontail, shows off the finesse of the Harry James Orchestra’s Septet, and the piece fairly flies. It’s so full and so fast, with Frank on drums, that it must have been a gas to rehearse and perform. Take a listen.
Cottontail by Duke Ellington, Harry James and His Orchestra, 1949
Claude Thornhill Orchestra
The next we hear from Frank is April 10, 1950 and he’s recording and touring with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Pianist Claude Thornhill’s band played a wide range of dance tunes, from ragtime to bebop, with some dreamy slow dances mixed in too. Here’s a rollicking number, a new bebop rag, with Frank on drums having a good time.
Sugar Foot Rag
Life was good as Frank continued to tour with Claude Thornhill for the next months.
Ray Anthony’s Big Band
Although Frank certainly privately sneered at the “corny” and “square” tunes (like The Hokey Pokey and The Bunny Hop,) made popular by the Ray Anthony Orchestra, he wasn’t above seizing the opportunity in 1951 for a solid three month tour of one-night stands with the band. The itinerary shows they played at concert halls and colleges from St. Louis to the east coast with a final show at the Paramount Theater in New York City in April.
New Realities for a Growing Family
These three tours provided solid employment for Frank and, on their wedding day in 1951, the future looked bright for Frank and Shirley. But with changing music tastes, less touring, and smaller ensembles, the new realities of the music world confronted the young couple as they established house and home in the San Fernando Valley. As always, Uffe kept in touch with old friends from back home. Freddy Albeck made what looks like a fun visit to the young couple in the early ‘50s.
Early in 1952 Frank and Shirley drove to visit old friends Bob and Iris Laine in Palm Springs. In September, a baby was born (me) and then, five years later, another (my sister.)
Jobs for Frank grew fewer. The Musician’s Union #47 in Hollywood became a regular hangout for job seekers studying the call boards: calls for band positions, calls for short term “casuals” - gigs of even just one night - and even calls for on-screen extras in films and television. Local musicians continued to keep their chops by jamming together. They showed up for the Monday night sessions at The Haig, at smaller local clubs and even at private homes.
Piecing Together Our Memories
My sister Lise and I compare memories and stories about how our parents made ends meet during those times. Our mom always worked. A speedy typist and stenographer, she was employed at Universal Studios during the day, transcribing for the screenwriters. She met the stars, ate at the commissary, and took ballet class on the lot.
Our dad worked at night, picking up local gigs and going on the road as he could. The rest of the time he spent jamming with buddies, or hanging out at the Musician’s Union in Hollywood reading the call board, with occasional recording sessions and film shoots. Lise remembers Daddy saying he had a job as an on-screen drummer in a scene from the 1953 spectacle The Robe. If so, he was likely one Roman in a row of uncredited drummers in the first scene of Caligula’s arrival in Rome. If they actually played during the shoot, they were not on the soundtrack; that was the Alfred Newman Orchestra.
Likewise, he appeared in at least one scene (season 2, episode 1) of the hit TV series Peter Gunn, as a drummer in the house band at the club “Mother’s.” Again, he did not play in the soundtrack; that was Henry Mancini’s Orchestra.
Quite a comedown from the prestige of the big band touring jobs of just a few years earlier.
In 1955, Frank was able to join top LA bassist and longtime family friend Red Callender on a single album, Swingin’ Suite. Here’s Frank, on bongos, in Red’s Bihari:
Lenny Bruce
By 1957, Daddy was down to playing in a strip club in the Valley, but he was not only providing percussion for the bump and grind of the strippers. He was also backing up a young stand up comic named Lenny Bruce.
Lenny was the master of ceremonies, introducing the strippers while trying out his own material. According to Albert Goldman, his primary biographer, The Valley clubs provided the perfect environment for him to create new routines.
“It was precisely at the moment when he sank to the bottom of the barrel and started working the places that were the lowest of the low that he suddenly broke free of all the restraints and inhibitions and disabilities that formerly had kept him just mediocre and began to blow with a spontaneous freedom and resourcefulness that resembled the style and inspiration of his new friends and admirers, the jazz musicians of the modernist school."
Lenny was a frequent late night visitor to our duplex on Laurel Canyon Blvd in 1957 and at our other homes well into the 1960s. I was 5 years old and I’d wake in the wee hours to loud jazz and laughter and the smell of frying onions and burgers as Daddy and Lenny wound down from the show, smoking and drinking and who knows what else. Wide awake, I would get up to play, and Lenny would take me by one ankle and wrist and “fly” me around in circles. I’d have a glass of milk and eventually go back to bed.
Moving On
There was so little work for Frank in LA by the end of the ‘50s that in the fall of 1959 he took a job in a casino house band in Reno, Nevada. Our family moved reluctantly into a little duplex there. The future looked bleak. But then, right after Christmas Daddy got a call that would change our lives. Singer and actress Rhonda Fleming was putting together a new nightclub act at the ChiChi in Palm Springs and they needed a drummer. The contract paid well, it might lead to more work, and, best of all, we had friends in Palm Springs, Bob and Iris Laine and their little daughter, Lisa.
Once again, Frank packed up his drum kit, this time into our old green Buick, and drove 500 miles south, to the desert. Already enrolled in school, we girls stayed behind in Reno with Shirley.
Many thanks to Lars Westin and others for their research, translations, memories, and reflections of the times, and to the jazz archives at University of Copenhagen, Swedish jazz magazine Orkesterjournalen/Jazz (OJ), Benny Goodman Archives at Rutgers Jazz Institute, and University of Southern Denmark. - VBG
More to come in Keep the Beat - A Jazz Life
6 - Palm Springs / Elvis Presley, Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, Kitty White
7 - Keep the Beat / Red Callender, Cal Bailey, Lars Laine, Shirley Bandar
So many details I never knew!