Biography

Stanley Newcomb Kenton was born in Wichita, Kansas, on December 15, 1911, and grew up in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from high school, he played in several small groups in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas.

He studied piano and composition, first with his mother, Stella, who sparked his profound interest in the impressionists; then with Frank Hurst, a theater organist; and with Earl "Fatha" Hines, whose piano lessons were often conducted in Hines's hotel room, using a cane-backed chair with a Masonite seat for a keyboard (both had good enough sense of pitch that they didn't need the actual piano).

In 1933 Everett Hoagland offered Stan the piano chair in his band, which played at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach, California, and whose book included charts by another youngster, Gil Evans.

Hoagland, realizing audiences would respond more lucratively to a society band sound than to his current progressive sound, changed course and went on the road. Stan stayed behind with Hoagland's successor, Russ Plummer.

After piano jobs with Gus Arnheim, Vido Musso, the NBC house band, and the orchestra for Earl Carroll's "Vanities", he decided the only way to realize his creative ambitions was to start his own band. In 1941 he holed up in a cabin in Idyllwild in the San Jacinto mountains with his wife Violet, and wrote the arrangements and compositions (including the song that would become his band's theme, "Artistry in Rhythm") that became the core of the book for his own band.

Kenton's bands, or orchestras, as he perferred to present them to the public (privately, they were always "The Band"), produced a string of alumni whose influence on jazz is incalculable, from folks everyone knows as alumni (June Christy, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Maynard Ferguson, Kai Winding) to folks who you'd never associate with Stan Kenton's music (Stan Getz and Laurindo Almeida).

Indeed, Kenton is so well known for his alumni and for the arrangers who wrote for the band that it's often forgotten that his own compositions and arrangements were the cornerstone on which all his arrangers built. As Noel Wedder remarked, "At no time could any of the material written for the Band in the 60s & 70s be attributed to any other group than Kenton's." And, though the very best musicians in the world sat in his band, Kenton's playing was good enough that he could have easily won the audition for his chair. His modesty and desire to show off the other musicians in the band seldom permitted him to play up to his abilities, but every now and then he let it slip out, and we pianists treasure those moments.

It's significant that Stan's music is found in the jazz section, and not the "big band" section of most record shops even today. By constantly pushing audiences to accept more challenging music, and by hiring the very best musicians and pushing them even harder, Kenton made it clear that his heart was always in the future of jazz, not in its nostalgic past. And in the process, he reaffirmed something too few musical directors, from rock through classical music, understand: audiences like good music.

With only the occasional years off to regain his health or his bankroll, or when he became fed up with the state of music (declaring at one point "Jazz is dead") and the 12 months when his final illness forced him to disband his orchestra for good, Stan kept a band on the road, pursuing and largely attaining his artistic visions, until his passing on August 25, 1979.

A personal reminiscence: In 1972 we were hosting the Kenton band in a Jazz Orchestra in Residence program. I sat down next to some of the kids from my YMCA that I'd got to help my wife Kelly run the affair to hear the band play their opening song. I'll never forget the expression on the face of a tough little 12-year-old street kid as Mike Vax went for that high E in "Here's That Rainy Day". Truly, Stan was reaching out and influencing new generations of musicians and fans to the very last.

This biography has been immeasurably improved by the kindness of Noel Wedder, whose correspondence I shall always treasure.

The Kenton Bands

On May 30, 1941, Stan Kenton's first band opened at the Rendezvous Ballroom on Balboa Island, California. This band was fully equipped for the time: 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 5 saxes, and 4 rhythm. The band was named after his theme "Artistry in Rhythm." Between 1942 and 1947 the trumpet and trombone sections grew to 4 each.

In 1947 the band, called the Progrssive Jazz Orchestra, had a brass section expanded to its final complement of 5 trumpets and 5 trombones. Buddy Childers, long-time lead trumpeter for the band, explained that the accretion was due to people leaving and coming back, and rather than bumping the low man, Stan wrote another part for them. As time went on, the last two trombones would become bass trombones, instead of just the 5th, and the saxes would settle into a low-pitched 1 alto, 2 tenors and 2 baritones (after a flirtation with a bass saxophone on the low end). The band had a guitarist through the mid 1950s and, since 1947, carried an extra percussionist, first on bongos, then on congas (though everybody could be expected to hit something on stage, and perhaps even sing, some time during his career with Kenton). The Progressive Jazz Orchestra played challenging works and played concerts nearly as often as they did dances.

In 1950 Stan kicked off a tour of the largest band he'd ever fielded: the Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra, which numbered forty hungry mouths, adding horns and strings to the already huge Kenton band. This band miraculously managed to stay together for two years, and introduced composers Bob Graettinger and Shorty Rogers and stratospheric trumpeter Maynard Ferguson to an unbelieving world.

In 1952 Stan cut back to a much more manageable 19 people, the New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm Orchestra, which produced a string of memorable jazz albums by new kids William Russo, Lennie Niehaus, and Bill Holman (and later Gerry Mulligan, Bill Mathieu, and Johnny Richards) along with old standbys Gene Roland and Pete Rugolo.

As early as 1956, Kenton had added two French horns to the personnel roster, but in 1960 he added a full complement of four mellophoniums, now a fixture in drum corps and college bands that want to sound like drum corps. The Mellophonium Orchestra, as it came to be called, performed such arrangements as "Malaguena," on the Grammy-winning Adventures in Jazz, and Johnny Richards' West Side Story, Adventures in Time (both Grammy winners), and a string of other records that hardly anyone bought -- now we dearly wish we had.

In 1965 Stan decided to showcase his more adventuresome concert music in the Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra, essentially a slightly expanded big band, with horns (real French horns: the mellophoniums were nearly impossible to play in tune) and lots of reed doubling. The road band was still his mainstay during the two years the Neophonic held forth.

In the late 1960s, Stan became unhappy with his label Capitol Records, and set out to form his own label which would distribute to stores, but which would sell more by mail order and at concerts. By the 1970s, the band which nobody seems to have named, but as Website Czar I'll now christen the Creative World Orchestra was back in full force, producing Live at Redlands, the first Kenton record DownBeat had given five stars to in some time. As always, Stan was seeking out new talent, most notably Hank Levy, who had written for Don Ellis, and Alan Yankee, though some of us treasure the charts that long-time Kenton arrangers Dee Barton, Willie Maiden, Bill Holman, and Ken Hanna wrote for this band.

The Rendezvous

On May 30, 1941 the Kenton band opened at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, Newport Beach, California, and the Rendezvous was the band's home base for several years. The band returned in 1958 to record Back to Balboa. Here's a Google map of the site, between Palm and Washington Streets. And here's a web page commemorating the ballroom.

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