10 O’clock Jump

Jazz in the Movies: Cathedral of Learning, Room 313, Thursday, September 6th, 10am.

I spotted my favorite seat—last row, next to the window. It was empty. I made a bee line for it.The room was nearly full. Nice turnout. Then John Wilson came through the door. I thought, huh, he’s taking the Reading Genres course too…then I thought, uh oh, something’s wrong here. I punched in the calendar on my cell phone and pulled up my Thursday schedule. Nothing. I pulled up the Wednesday schedule: Reading Genres at 10am, Room 313. I’d missed Reading Genres on Wednesday. Somehow or the other I’d gotten the idea that Reading Genres was on Thursday. Go figure. Hoping to make lemonade out of a lemon, I confessed my screw-up to Pat Szczepanski , and asked her if I could sit in on Wilson’s class. She cut me a break, and I settled in.

This week John screened the musical excerpts from The Benny Goodman/Glenn Miller Story movies.

The utterly fascinating aspect of this class is that John Wilson is a professional jazz musician who has played and hung out with many of the major jazz figures of the last 60 years or so–and he has the anecdotes to prove it. For example, he told us about the time he was in Hollywood with the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra (circa 1955). One day on the Universal lot he ran into an old army buddy who had been hired to compose additional music for the Benny Goodman Story–Henry Mancini.

“At that moment,” John recounted, “he was on his way to the Universal Studios film library, where they had all the scores of every movie Universal ever made. So they gave him the keys and said ‘go help yourself.’ So he spent several days just looking at these scores, getting the feel for the types of orchestration required. He was a little uptight about it, I think, but he did a good job because he was nominated for an academy award. He didn’t win it for this one, he won one later on. But this was a good first attempt for him.”

As a member of Goodman’s band in the late 40’s, John had plenty of opportunity to see Benny in action, so his statement that Steve Allen did a terrific job of mimicking Benny’s fingering and breathing technique was based on eye witness observation.

As for the films themselves, the music was perfectly fine, but John had edited out the love interest scenes, so they seemed more like documentaries. Hey, they probably should have been documentaries in the first place, because what back stories I did see were pretty boring. I did like Jimmy Stewart playing Glenn Miller, but I like Jimmy Stewart in just about anything. For my money though, I’d have cast June Allyson as Benny’s wife and Donna Reed, fresh “From Here to Eternity”, as Glenn’s wife, not the other way around. But I’ve had this thing for Donna Reed ever since FHTE, so I’m biased.

Len Z

ps: Prof. Wilson is handling the A/V chores like a pro now. Practice makes perfect.