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My First 50 Years with Society Bands

February 2, 1961 By From the Archives

Gordon (Whitey) Mitchell is the noted jazz bassist, the brother of another fine bassist, Red Mitchell. Whitey, 28, has played in the rhythm sections of such groups as those of Tony Scott, J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding, Charlie Ventura, Gene Krupa, Johnny Richards, Oscar Pettiford. He also has had his own group. A gifted musician, Whitey demonstrates in this article that he is also one of those rare jazzmen who can express himself as well in words as in music.

It hasn’t been easy for me, as a jazz player, to devote 50 years of my life to playing with society bands, especially since I’m 28.

But if someone had kept track of all the choruses of Lady Is a Tramp I’ve had to play; all the hours I’ve had to spend looking for private residences on unmarked, unpaved, and unlit streets in Nassau and Fairfield counties; all the dry chicken sandwiches I’ve choked down in one dismal country-club kitchen after another; all the time spent in fellowship with musicians who know more about the Dow-Jones industrial average than the contents of a C7 chord; all the hours spent absorbing hysterical-emotional abuse liberally dispensed by tone-deaf baton-wavers under working conditions that would have interested Marx and Engels — then that someone could only conclude that an estimate of 50 years of servitude is a conservative one.

There seems to be a curious relationship between jazzmen and society music, and it is one that has existed for a long time.

Every successful society leader I know of depends on the ability of his band to play any tune at any moment and without benefit of music. A surprising amount of jazz is required at society functions, and it’s well known that not very much jazz can be produced by a lone man waving a stick. Hence society leaders are always ready to ensnare good jazz players, and Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Bobby Hackett, Urbie Green, and scores of others, at one time or another, have earned money playing society music.

The society music of today is a hodgepodge of warmed-over music of the ’20s, Broadway show tunes, movie themes, naughty French or Italian songs, and standards, all superimposed on a cut-time kickbeat rhythm called “businessman’s bounce” in an incongruous medley that lasts all evening.

Individual musicians with proof of a heart condition or weak kidneys may be excused from the stand from time to time, but the band plays on. This is known as “playing continuous.” And union scale for this type of work is high. So, I expect is the mortality rate.

Our beloved union insists, with a display of rare insight, that each musician must have at least a five-minute break for every hour on a continuous job and allows that these five-minute breaks may be accumulated to form one glorious intermission. But by the time you’ve found the men’s room, the kitchen, your dry chicken sandwich, the mayonnaise, a coffee cup, coffee, cream, sugar, and spoon, you’ll be lucky to have 90 seconds left of your intermission.

All this time, of course, a skeleton crew remains on duty pounding out melodies for the dancers. The band sounds a little empty, but by this time the people are in no condition to notice, and the bandleader invariably makes up for the lack of volume by increasing the tempo. The music must never stop, you see, for if it does, some couple might leave the floor, and some other couple might realize how asinine they’ve been dancing all this time, and still another couple might notice how much their feet hurt, and all these people leaving the floor at the same time might precipitate a rush for the door that might end the party, infuriate the hostess, blackball this particular orchestra leader with this particular social set, and eventually drive him into the dry-cleaning business with his brother-in-law.

No wonder, then, you get a withering stare if you stop momentarily, after hours of relentless pumping, to see if gangrene has set in anywhere.

You may wonder why any self-respecting musician would seek to earn his living this way. But the uncertainties of the music profession are enough to unnerve anyone, and if you throw yourself wholeheartedly into the club date society field, you can earn a good living.

My problem has been that I don’t call this living. I would agree that a jazz musician who quits low-paying jazz cellars for high-paying society work is a prostitute. I would like to point out, however, that only a handful of jazzmen in the world can afford to play exactly what they want, when they want to play it. The rest of us have to compromise our talent to some extent, no matter what kind of work we do. Think of the countless movie and television dramas with jazz-oriented plots that inevitably have their “night-club scene” in which a five-piece combo (led by Jack Lemmon) plays an involved cacophony (arranged for the full studio orchestra by Pete Rugolo) and in which someone like Gerry Mulligan has been hired to say, “Man, let’s split.”

I would like to offer illustrations of some of my experiences in society work, and I’ll attempt to boil all of them down into one job, on one occasion, and under the baton of one maestro, whom I shall call Julius Martinet.

On the union exchange floor, where musicians mill around like a mob of stevedores waiting to be hired for unloading a banana boat, Julius’ contractor, Melvin, asked me if I had been hired yet for the following Saturday. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say that I had, so I wrote down the directions and was hired for the Waltney party at the Sandtrap country club near Old Quogue on Long Island. The occasion, as I understood it, was the first anniversary of the AT&T stock split.

Saturday night at 9:05, in the ballroom of the Sandtrap country club, as the drummer finished setting up and as the other musicians applied rosin or valve oil or adjusted their rugs, Julius was busy thinking up schemes for by-passing an intermission and trying to decide which members of the orchestra he would pick on during the evening.

Mr. and Mrs. Waltney were stationed at the entrance to the ballroom, waiting to greet their first guests. A car engine was heard, and the Waltney social secretary signaled to Julius that the first group was arriving.

Julius started slapping his thigh at the approximate tempo we would be pursuing for the rest of the engagement, and was screwing up his face trying to think of some appropriate music for the host and hostess, who are of Roman Catholic persuasion. Unable to think of an opening tune, Julius whispered to the band at large, “What do you play for Catholics?” and without missing a beat, the first trumpet player whispered back, I’m Confessin’. Julius gave the down beat, and we were off.

After the medley had been in progress for an hour or so, a friendly waiter appeared at the bandstand with a full tray of gin and tonics for the band. Before Julius could utter his famous line “My boys don’t drink or smoke,” one of the saxophone players pulled Julius’ coattail and pointed significantly to the rear of the room.

Julius put on his glasses, turned around, and peered into the crowd for about 15 seconds. Seeing nothing unusual, he turned back to the band, put away his glasses, and scowled at the saxophonist who now was involved in a chorus of Sweet Georgia Brown. Meanwhile, the tray of drinks had been looted, and a large cloud of tobacco smoke enveloped the brass section.

At about the two-hour mark, the party began to move into high gear, with emphasis on the word high. Julius sensed that the orchestra’s esprit de corps left something to be desired, so he flagged down a waiter and asked him to bring glasses of water for the musicians. By prearrangement with a certain bartender, some of these glasses were filled with the type of water that leaves one breathless, and to the amazement of nobody but Julius, the band began to rally.

Then it came time for the nightly contest between the brass and reed sections to determine which group could skip bars more gracefully than the other. At the high point of this meter-losing set, we established a new world’s record by playing St. Louis Blues in five bars and two beats.

Failing to get any satisfactory reaction from either Julius or the guests, the band turned eagerly to the bar-adding contest to see who most casually could add eight, 10, or 20 bars or music to a 32-bar song. For instance, Julius called Tramp and then turned around to sign a few autographs. The band took up the challenge and played:

I get too hungry for dinner at eight,
I like the theater, but never come late,
I like the theater, but never come late,
I like the theater, but never come late,
I like the theater, but never come late,

At this point, Julius whirled around, with a wounded expression, and the band continued:

I never bother with people I hate,
That’s why the lady is a tramp!

Two grueling hours and three rounds of water later, Julius seemed to be inspired anew, judging from the semaphoric activity of his arms.

He tripped over another of the many glasses of water that had been finding their way to the vicinity of his feet throughout the evening and complained to the rhythm section that the tempo was rushing. Possibly this occurred to him because we had just finished California, Here I Come and now were attempting to play My Funny Valentine at the same tempo.

After a series of audible groans, which seemed to swell with each passing moment, Julius reluctantly fished out his watch, and with a secretive screening, announced it was five minutes to 1 and time for the Good Night, Ladies medley.

We all had our own watches, and they all said at least 10 after 1, and we all knew that there would be at least two hours’ overtime, having been informed of this at the time we were booked, but everyone good-naturedly went along with the farce.

At the first strains of Good Night, Ladies, those of us who didn’t have horns in our faces began to moan, “No…no…no” without moving our lips. Soon the guests who were still coherent took up the cry, and Mrs. Waltney came rushing up to Julius and insisted that the band stay at least another hour. We went right into Everything’s Coming up Roses, and Julius was so pleased that he forgot about finding out who the fink in the band was who had yelled, “Hooray!”

An hour later the same stunt was employed. Only this time, the ratio of “no” to “hooray” seemed to be reversed. Julius had knocked over two more water glasses and was by now soaked to his knees. The band, too numb to care, played on.

During the third hour of overtime, one couple began dancing on the high diving board of the pool outside. Of course, they were soon pushed in, and as soon as they climbed out of the pool, they grabbed some of the curious onlookers and made participants out of them.

It soon became more fashionable to be in the pool than out, and posses were formed to round up all the squares who were still dry. Julius had just asked Mrs. Waltney about the fourth hour of overtime when 12 husky dripping guests arrived and dragged her, screaming, into the pool. This left only the band dry, and after a chorus of By the Sea, we departed in record time. Julius had to stay over in Old Quogue that night because he didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone to ruin his car upholstery on his behalf.

This may sound like a lot of fiction, but it’s not. As they say on television…only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Besides, I’m still open Saturday.

By Whitey Mitchell

[Originally published in Down Beat, February 2, 1961, pp.20–21]

Filed Under: Miscellanea

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