VOLUME XXIV BIG BAND JUMP NEWSLETTER JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1993 been so busy over the years. We got the idea that Billy BM: I worked for Charlie for two years. That was May is a man who knows how to relate to people, but the first big band I went with. I left Pittsburgh in 1939 also knows how to cut through the conversational haze and went to New York and joined Charlie. I worked and get things done. for Charlie during ’39 and ’40, and on the day Roosevelt was elected I joined Glenn Miller. The He explained to us how it all started. reason I remember that was because everybody was wondering if F.D.R. was going to be re-elected, so The Interview nobody came in to hear the band and Glenn Miller was mad that business was bad. BBJ: How did you get into music in Pittsburgh? BBJ: You had Glenn Miller swinging for a while. BM: I started in the high school band, playing the tuba. Then I began to fool around with the other BM: I came into the band as one of the section trumpet instruments; there was a lot of music instruction in the players, but he gave me a couple of solos to play, and Pittsburgh Public Schools in those days. By the time I he liked it so well he put me over onto the ad-lib chair. got out of h igh school I was pretty proficient on the brass John Best and I did most of the ad-lib work. Ray instruments, the trombone, the tuba, and I played a little Anthony was in the band for a while. Ray used to be bit of trumpet. That was the beginning of the Swing a pretty good trumpet player. I did quite a bit of Era. I graduated from high school in 1935, and that’s arranging for Glenn Miller, but nothing that’s impor when the swing bands were just starting out. The tant because he had two really great arrangers, Jerry depression was on, and it wasn’t long before I was Gray and Bill Finegan. They turned out most of the working steadily as a professional musician....just Glenn Miller style stuff. about the time I got out of high school. BBJ: Back to Charlie Barnet. You did a lot of work BBJ: You started to arrange early in your career. with him. Wasn’t there great freedom in that band? How did you learn to do that? BM: Yeah, it was a really loose band. It was a BM: I mostly taught myself how to arrange, because pleasure to work in that band. The most popular I had an ego even in those days and playing the tuba record Charlie ever made was my arrangement of you sit in the back of the band just playing oompah, CHEROKEE, and then I did a couple oompah, you know. I got to thinking, why do the more... .POMPTON TURNPIKE... .they were all big different instruments do these things? Why does the records. (See RECORDS TO CONSIDER for new tuba have to do this, and why everybody does every Barnet release.) thing else, so I got intrigued with it and it worked out to be my life’s profession. I taught myself, more or BBJ: There was a story about Charlie having to buy less, orchestration and things like that. a soprano sax in order to play POMPTON TURN PIKE. BBJ: We were surprised to find your name on an Ozzie Nelson recording, and to discover you’d done BM: No, that’s wrong. He was playing soprano sax some arrangements for him. long before that.
BM: Oh, yeah. I wrote the music for Ozzie’s show BBJ: Maybe you can set us straight on the story that before he went on television... .when he was on radio. the A. & R. man didn’t like CHEROKEE and didn’t That was from about 1944 to about 1951. want to release it.
BBJ: Before that most of us recall your arrangements BM: Well, he didn’t like most stuff. (Laughs) I think for Charlie Barnet, and that dirty, growling trumpet he was a fan of B.A. Rolfe. Does that name mean you played with his band. anything to you? He was with the Cliquot Club Eskimos and bands like that before the swing era. 2