Search - Glen Gray :: The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Hits

The first outstanding white big band

Michael Laprarie | Oklahoma City, OK USA | 06/21/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The Casa Loma Orchestra started out as one of the great oddities of the music scene in the late 1920's. At the dawn of the great depression, they decided to model their sound after the great hot jazz bands of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson rather than the sweet ballroom styles of contemporary white dance bands. They also incorporated the band, with each member holding shares of stock and receiving dividends based on the band's earnings. Needless to say, the band experienced very few changes in personnel over the years.The result was a remarkably polished and tight ensemble that blew furiously through barn-burners like "White Jazz" and "Limehouse Blues". The arrangements and original compositions by the band's guitarist, Gene Gifford, featured part writing for brass, woodwinds, and rhythm section that clearly provided the basis for instrumental arranging in the 1930's, and in doing so, laid the foundation for the big band era. While the Casa Loma Orch. did not have star soloists of the calibur of Bunny Berigan or Artie Shaw, they did have several capable players including reedman Clarence Hutchenrider and trombonist Billy Rausch, who modeled his playing on Tommy Dorsey's smooth trombone phrasing.But in addition to being a fine hot jazz outfit, Glen Gray was a realist and understood that in order to make it big he would also have to compete with white bands like Anson Weeks, Guy Lombardo, and Leo Reisman, who featured 'sweet' music. So the Casa Loma Orch. also became one of the finest interpreters of ballads, aided greatly by the romantic (if not sometimes overly campy) crooning of sax man Kenny Sargent. Sargent's voice propelled tunes like "For You", "Under A Blanket of Blue", and "I Never Had A Chance" into top hits.Naturally, the band's sweet numbers did not sit well with jazz fans, who considered them to be a sellout to commercialism. But the band, with its perfect mix of sweet and hot, became the number one band in America until it was unseated by Benny Goodman. Unfortunately, the Casa Loma Orch. was more adept at playing the older 'hot' style of jazz than the newer, more sophisticated 'swing' style, and though the Casa Loma Orchestra charted several more big hits during the 1930's, they were never serious competition for the great swing bands of Goodman, Count Basie, or Chick Webb. By the early 1940's, the glory days of the band were gone.This CD presents 25 hits recorded by the band during the days when they were at their peak - 1929 to 1934. The formatting of the CD seems to indicate that the tunes were chosen based on relative popularity and overall record sales. Unfortunately, this results in some of the band's finest jazz work ("I Got Rhythm", "Ol' Man River", "Panama", "San Sue Strut") as well as the band's theme song, "Smoke Rings" being omitted in favor of the pop tunes which sold more records.Aside from this minor complaint, this CD presents a good overview of the Casa Loma Orchestra during their most successful and influential period. The sound quality of the digitally-remastered selections is good. With Columbia's "Best of the Big Bands" CD featuring the Casa Loma Orchestra now out-of-print, this CD is my suggestion for a compilation to fill that void."