Woodchopper's Ball! - Woody Herman

 

Who Dat Up Dere?

Woodchopper's Ball

Woody Herman and His Orchestra

Decca Records DL 8133

1955

From the back cover: The wailing, deep-down, and lonesome Blues and the high-spirited, daring and swift-driving Jazz are pure American idioms. They are immediately recognized and have been imitated all over the world. The Blues have a special significance in this connection, for they formed the basis of the Herman Herd, as the Woody Herman organization has been nicknamed. In 1937, one year after the orchestra had made its debut, Woody had a new theme song, "Blue Prelude," and sported a tag line, "The Band That Plays The Blues." After that, Woody went from one success to another – always with the Blues as his background. Woody's successes have been as commercially rewarding as they have been artistically influential. The present collection includes some of his most spectacular numbers. It is headed by the item with which Woody and his orchestra made his first big record hit for Decca – none other than "The Woodchopper's Ball." Here it is, accompanied by seven other characteristic pieces in the Herman mood and rendered in the true Herman manner.

He was born Woodrow Wilson Herman, son of a member of a vocal group known as The White City Four. Before he was nine years old, when he bought his first saxophone, Woody was earning money as a singer and dancer. He learned to play his horn in his home town, Milwaukee. At eleven, Woody picked up his first clarinet and soon was doubling. He left the stage three years later for his first job as a musician and singer with a local band led by a Myron Stewart. Soon afterwards, Herman, slightly built and pucker-lipped, joined his first travelling band, a unit led by Joe Lichter.

Woody left Lichter to return to Milwaukee to complete his high school studies and to enter Marquette University. But barely after he completed his initial semester at the university, Woody got the call from Tom Gerun, whose band was one of the big things of the late twenties and early thirties. He joined the Gerun organization and stayed with it for four years. Aside from Woody, Gerun's vocal department was rounded out by a guy named Al Norris, who doubled as a saxophone player, and a pretty brunette named Virginia Simms. Both have since graduated to pretty fair success under the respective names of Tony Martin and Ginny Simms. From Gerun's band, Herman went to work with Harry Sosnik and Gus Arnheim. Early in 1934, he joined the Isham Jones orchestra, which, when Jones retired from the band business in 1936, became the basis for the first Woody Herman orchestra.

In 1939, after a couple of years of valiant struggle and fighting a constant battle to retain its musical principles, the band played a historic engament at the Famous Door, the 52nd Street night club. Woody's band began to draw engagements and captivate 'audiences in the leading showcases of the nation: the Strand, Paramount, and Capitol theatres on Broadway, the Hotel New Yorker, and others. Woody, the musician, is a clarinetist with a tone and technique that are all his own, (He plays excellent alto saxophone as well, though he didn't feature the horn with his band until recent years.) Woody, the singer, has a flair for phrasing and sings with such feeling that he has earned widespread recognition, both among trade and general public, as a true vocalist and top stylist.

Woodchopper's Ball

The Golden Wedding

Who Dat Up Dere

Yardbird Shuffle

Down Under

Indian Boogie Woogie

Blue Flame

Four Or Five Times

Irresistible You

Chip's Boogie Woogie

Las Chiapanecas

Woodsheddin' With Woody