-Funding for this program has been made possible by Chiaroscuro Records, home of fine jazz recordings since 1970.

For more information, visit chiaroscurojazz.org.

[ "Wham (Re-Bop-Boom-Bam") playing ] ♪♪ -♪ Wham, Re-Bop-Boom-Bam ♪ -♪ I can swing and I can jam ♪ -♪ Wham, Re-Bop-Boom-Bam ♪ -♪ I'm a killer-diller, yes, I am!

♪ -Eddie Durham invented himself.

There was never an Eddie Durham before.

There was never an Eddie Durham after.

He took what he had -- a guitar, a trombone, and a great passion for music and created waves of influence that, frankly, have gone around the world.

♪♪ -He was only in Texas until he was about 12.

He grew up, I think, in Terrell, Texas, because he said that his father was a sharecropper, so they moved from place to place.

His father was also a bronco, and he also was the town fiddler.

And he said he was a great whiskey drinker as well.

-I know my father was, like -- He was a cowboy or something.

Like, he -- You know what I'm saying?

He lived on a ranch and a farm.

Like, they -- That's real, everyday work.

-His dad had a cigar-box violin.

-Take a piece of horse hair.

and he was -- Cat gut -- and cutting out this and that and drilling holes here and there to make his own instruments.

And I think seeing his father do that sort of thing gave Eddie Durham a sense of invention, the sense that "I don't have an instrument.

I think I'll make myself one."

-His older brother is the one that actually received the first musical training.

They had some correspondence course that -- U.S. government had a school of music.

Man, we should start that again.

And he taught it to Eddie.

-He took, you know, his family with him everywhere because it was the Durham Brothers Orchestra.

His two eldest brothers, Earl and Joseph Junior, were perhaps 10 and 12 years older than him, and as long as he was with them, he didn't have to learn to speak English because they spoke Spanish.

But at some point, you know, when he went out on his own, then he did learn English.

-For Black Americans then and -- and now, there are limited possibilities.

-And if you think about the world that he came into, you know, less than 60 years after the end of the Civil War, born just a stone's throw from Mexico and the deep south of Texas.

-At that time period in the early 1900s, let's say he had stayed in a small town in Texas.

You know, what kind of life would they have had, really?

-There were these musicians, though, who decided they were going to play the music that they loved and that they had dedicated themselves to, and they were gonna be on the road.

You look at the history of Eddie Durham and the world that he knew, sometimes that meant sleeping in the bus when the gig didn't make what you thought it would, or even sometimes the bus got sold and you didn't know how you were gonna get home.

But you took those risks because of the joys of being on the road, the sheer joys of the kinetic energy of movement.

You were not confined in a way that the nation had designed for you to be.

-So there were all these experiences that he had as a young man growing up in San Marcos, Texas, going out with circus bands, with minstrel troupes.

-Going on the road with the circus, they had regular pay, whether it was meager or not.

They had meals.

They toured.

They traveled from place to place.

It was essential because there was no television, no radio.

This was the entertainment -- the town fiddler and the circus.

Having all the White performers who were at the top of their craft and the Black bands together, traveling, you know, they had their own microcosm of integration, and nobody cared about it because it was like the freak show, right?

It was all the White performers during the day.

And then the last, the finale were the Black bands, the minstrel band and the, you know, the jazz band or whatever.

-For him to be able to go through all of that, all those challenges, and still decide to invest as much as he did into the way that he wrote and the way that he played, and to -- to becoming a better writer, a better musician, and to eventually becoming a groundbreaking writer and musician, I'm sure he didn't even realize his impact.

-And given the lack of "formal" education but the appearance of practical education, he figured out these things for himself.

And so by the time that he got to the great band of Walter Page's Blue Devils in Oklahoma City in 1929, it was, like, the right time, the right place, the right thing, and look who he was with.

A young piano player named Bill Basie, who had a lot of great ideas but knew nothing about how to have a band play them.

Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, and "Hot Lips" Page, and Walter Page himself.

-In Kansas City at the time, there were rival bands and playing at major clubs all over town all the time.

-Back in the day, that city was wide open.

There were bands everywhere.

Bennie Moten band was there.

Count Basie band started out of the Bennie Moten band.

That's where Eddie Durham was.

Those joints in Kansas City were just some of the best in the world for having a good time.

-And some of the leaders were stealing band members back and forth.

-Eventually, all these musicians were hired by Bennie Moten and, boom, it was just one of those things.

It was really at that point that Eddie made his great innovation to take this kind of jazz that was evolving out in that part of the southwest and kind of the same way that Ellington was to do, the same way that Jelly Roll Morton was to do, and to take this music that had great solos, but that the written part of the music wasn't so wonderful and figure out a way to write the music so it had all the qualities of the great solos and then create places for the solos to be played.

So it had all the great qualities of great composition.

-The United States had gone through a rough patch in the late '20s and early '30s, once they hit the Depression.

Jazz had incubated itself in the 1920s and become part of the national scene.

People got out and not only listened to the music, but they went there to flirt and to drink and to party and to take their best boyfriend and girlfriend out for a swing.

-This was music that was originally intended to be danced to, to be enjoyed, to have a social function.

-The whole nation was dancing to this music that said, "Let's have fun.

But let's also think about the fact that we're living through a world full of trouble.

Not just as human beings in this world, but as Americans facing the Depression, trying to get through it and yet, you know, having a good time on the dance floor."

-Eddie Durham really kind of invented what would become known later on as Kansas City Swing, as the Count Basie style.

By the time Count Basie got to it with his old band, Eddie had already done it.

Eddie had already moved on.

He left Bennie Moten, he went with Cab Calloway.

When he got with Cab Calloway, he realized, like, "This band --" It was a great band, wonderful musicians.

But they didn't want to swing, and they didn't want to have a lot of improvisation and spontaneity.

And Eddie told the story that he just got up, left his trombone, left his guitar, and just walked off the bandstand one night.

Now, whether he went back and got him later, I have no idea.

But the idea was that he just -- he -- he was gonna follow his own thing.

And so he went with a band that was ultimately kind of the antithesis of what the Basie band was, but higher level of jazz than, let's say, Cab Calloway's band.

And that was Jimmie Lunceford's Orchestra.

-He was that guy.

He was that guy that they said, "You know what, Eddie?

We have a problem.

It's an Eddie Durham problem.

And we need you to look at this.

What do you think of this arrangement?"

And he would come in and go, "Eh.

I think we're gonna do it this way."

And they go, "What?"

And that would be the thing, you know, and -- and then all of a sudden, everybody was copying them.

-He became known as a person who could transform a band.

-Everything that he was involved in, even if he didn't write it, it seemed like he had a hand in the presentation.

-Things that his orchestrations, his concept of writing taught us set the groundwork for the way that we still organize the jazz ensemble today.

-One of the things to listen for in Eddie Durham's music is his use of riffs, short, melodic phrases that are almost like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, where you have a short ♪ Duh duh duh duh ♪ And that becomes the kernel for the entire movement.

Similarly, in jazz, blues-based riffs are used like in "One O'Clock Jump" and other pieces to really create the entire arrangement.

[ "One O'Clock Jump" playing ] -If you listen to "One O'Clock Jump," this was a jam-session-ready group hired for their capacity to come up with riff figures that they could build on, and that Eddie Durham has his signature all the way through.

-Recognizable melodies and infectious, rhythmic call and response that backs it up.

And that call and response is not an easy thing to do.

It can easily be messed up.

And this is what Eddie Durham was a master of.

He was a master at doing just what needs to be done in order to make this section sound like it's talking to that section.

-He began to be in demand to come -- come and transform my band like Basie's.

So he got calls for Glenn Miller, for Artie Shaw, for Benny Goodman.

You know, the White bands wanted to compete with the Black bands.

-When Count Basie came to New York, everybody tried to put a little bit of what Basie had into what they did.

Duke Ellington's rhythm-section sound changed after Basie came in '37.

A lot of them started looking for that, how to get some of that in here.

♪♪ -Glenn Miller hired a young man named Bill Finegan as a full-time arranger in 1938, and Bill Finegan was doing a lot of work with the ballads.

Because, remember, a lot of the band repertoires at that time had a lot of swing, a lot of jazz, but there were far more sweet bands.

What the radio networks liked to hear was a big bunch of ballads.

It wasn't hard to book Guy Lombardo or Kay Kyser, for example, if you were their agent.

So in '39, when Miller is just starting to get popular and he gets the NBC national radio hookup, he needs some help and he needs a spark.

-We're dancing with the waters of Long Island Sound breaking gently just a few yards from the Glen Island Casino, which is just off the Shore Road in New Rochelle, New York.

Here, a new king of the swing trombone, an ace arranger, Glenn Miller and his orchestra are presenting their interpretations of your musical favorites.

-Well, Jimmie Lunceford gave him the clue, that Count Basie's arranger, Eddie Durham, was freelancing and available.

A good investment.

A very good investment.

Between first part of June of '39 and the end of '39, Eddie would write 20 arrangements for the Miller Band.

Legitimate, fast-paced, hard-hitting swing that caught the attention of the audience.

You know, he had the so-called "Glenn Miller sound" -- the clarinet lead, the romantic ballads, all of that.

If you wanted to be a legitimate band that young people at the time wanted to hear, they wanted to dance to it, and they wanted to swing.

-The ultimate swing, the way he would write phrases, the way he would write the melody, and also the blues.

Everything is heavily influenced by the blues with Eddie Durham.

As an audience member, you might not even think you're listening to the blues because it's sort of sophisticated, but it is the blues.

-You want to listen for the structure of how he plays the brass against the saxophones.

-That's the kind of thing that a listener who knows nothing about music can hear.

They can -- they can understand that if you go ♪ Bee Dee Dee Dee ♪ and the brass and then the saxophones answer ♪ Wee dee dee da ♪ "Wait.

Something -- One of those two things had to do with each other.

You know, I don't know what.

I don't know about the keys.

I don't know the notes, but that had to do with that.

I can hear that."

-The idea determines the style of that piece.

That's how Eddie Durham's music strikes me.

[ "Topsy" playing ] You have something like "Topsy."

That's a dark groove.

It's got a lot of import to it.

Then you take something like "Moten Swing."

Totally different vibe, totally different treatment.

Of course.

The material is different.

[ Trombone playing ] -Miller's first gig at the Paramount Theater, that was a good deal in New York.

And Bob Weitman, the owner of the Paramount, suggested to Glenn and Glenn agreed that an up-and-coming vocal group would greatly accentuate the Miller band if they wanted to pair them together, and maybe they should take the risk and do it.

And that up-and-coming, young vocal group were the Four Ink Spots.

-♪ I don't want to set the world on fire ♪ -What Eddie did for Miller and the Ink Spots was extraordinary, and nobody remembers this.

To get the Ink Spots to coordinate properly with the band and to do the performances right, Glenn had Eddie Durham do the vocal charts for the Ink Spots to match up with the instrumental charts that the band was playing.

-♪ I'm just... ♪ -When we say this is America's music, yes, it's the music of the Savoy Ballroom and of Black America, definitely that.

But there's Eddie Durham writing "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire."

And that became a hit, not just in Black -- That was a hit everywhere.

-"I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" was a fall '41 tune, and that's when it was on the charts.

This would have been two full years before that.

So the whole thing worked out beautifully, you know?

But it was Eddie Durham that did it.

-♪ Your heart ♪ -My father... you talk about thinking out of the box.

He was the king.

-He would come into a band.

He would solve their problem.

You know, whatever their problem was, he would come into your life and he knew how to extract your strong points.

-Now, you would hear this about some people.

"Oh, you know, your mother, your father was the greatest guy."

And then their kids would be like, "No, he wasn't.

He was a tyrant, you know?"

No.

That's the way he was all the time.

-Very laid back, very calm.

I think I may have only seen him get angry once.

And that was at me.

[ Laughs ] He was also, like, handyman, fix it.

-He was curious.

One thing about Eddie Durham was he seemed to know how everything worked.

I saw him, you know, fix a car on the way to a gig once, you know, in the hills of New York State.

And he just -- He just did it.

-You know, I never saw a level in the house before.

And that's why, you know, he built cabinets from scratch.

And... On a good day, things would be -- would be level and even.

-Musicians and bands being in the house... it never dawned on me that that was a special thing.

This is what dads did.

You know, they played music.

-Every time they'd perform, somebody would announce each musician and then give their accolades.

You know, I could be biased, but I kind of remember, like, you know, when they would give my father's list, it was, like, kind of longer than everybody else.

♪♪ -Why I think Eddie Durham is important... because he gave us the electric guitar.

How about, for starters?

[ Electric guitar playing ] -When people introduce their innovations to the world, everything is mostly raw.

It's raw, very raw.

-Before amplified guitar, you couldn't hear a guitar in a big band.

You just couldn't hear it.

So he initiated acoustically enhanced guitars.

-He invented, or at least first played the electric guitar in the early '30s.

-That recording with the Kansas City Five of him playing "Love Me or Leave Me," he was playing some things...

I mean, you listen to him play on that recording and you hear echoes of things to come.

♪♪ -The freeness of his conception, I mean, rhythmically so clear.

But he's so free.

It still sounds like like modern guitar music to me even today.

-The guitar was really essential to his musicianship.

You know, it's one thing if you play the piano and the notes are all laid out for you.

You play the guitar and there's a totally different spatial relationship of where the fingers go and where the notes go.

So I think one of the ways to understand Eddie's genius as an orchestrator and arranger is that it wasn't as a pianist does it.

It's as a guitarist does it.

And that really kind of makes him unique.

-When it came time for him to remake what the jazz guitar could do, it had been the instrument that you could count on to keep the beat.

To be able to solo with that same instrument meant that, at times, in the southwestern units in those territorial bands, there would be one guitar player making sure the time was right and the other one on solo flights.

-Now, if you're not careful, that can become a train wreck if nobody -- if they're not listening to each other and not staying out of the way.

-Eddie Durham as both a trombonist but a guitarist and as well as arranger, was fluent in that rhythm-guitar style.

But he also was -- was more of a soloist even just as a guitarist.

[ "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans" playing ] ♪♪ We had heard those -- the Kansas City Five and Kansas City Six records, and Duke Robillard, the great blues guitarist, famously said, "Yeah, I love -- I love Eddie's tone.

It sounds like bedsprings."

-Eddie played downstrokes -- more definition and the attack is stronger.

It's like... -So the solo guitar, here we have this, you know, early version of amplified electric guitar, but not even played in the typical Charlie Christian fashion.

Charlie Christian was really the pioneer of the sort of the solo voice in single-note electric-guitar playing.

Eddie Durham did some of that, but he also had all these harmonized figures that he -- that he did, as well as his whole approach and attack.

-Eddie Durham and Charlie Christian knew each other, and Eddie Durham actually advised Charlie Christian.

-If you listen to Eddie Durham play, you can hear where Charlie Christian came from.

♪♪ -Eddie was a tall guy.

He had really long fingers.

He could bring that thumb all the way around this side of the neck and play the lower two strings on the guitar, and then these fingers were still pretty darned long, so he could finger all sorts of different kind of chord shapes.

-As well as there's all these rule=breaking things, a lot of parallel fourths, you know, little double-stop figures which actually really have more in common with, like, I don't know, 1960s rock or something like that.

-There's something so rural about his sound and approach.

Now, later on, this became a huge part of rock 'n' roll and a huge part of R&B, that kind of guitar playing that he does.

There's that stamp of rural music and not only just rural, but Texas.

-I gave him my guitar.

I mean, he just started doing some of that stuff.

I'm looking at him like...

I remember somebody else actually at the club.

We're both sitting there.

We're all sitting there watching Eddie do this, and he says, "I bet you never heard a guitar played like that before," and I ain't seen it since.

-He was a total pioneer in all ways.

♪♪ -And who else at that time -- Nobody, answer nobody [laughs] -- would interject an electric guitar solo in the middle of some big-band, swing arrangement that fit just perfectly?

Made so much sense.

And the horns come in.

They sound fresh to your ear again.

-He knew how to open the door for soloists, and you hear him on guitar saying, "Lester, I know you're ready to come in here.

Here you are.

I'm gonna set the table for you, baby."

Bam!

And then Lester obviously had an influence on him.

Eddie's running those solos as if the guitar were a saxophone.

I find not only experimentally interesting, but just incredibly moving for me.

"Way Down Yonder in New Orleans."

-What was I listening to?

Maybe it was "Topsy."

Durham writes these paths that are underneath the rhythm section playing and as should be, as is the Basie formula, the guitar is the most present and as it should be.

And Basie is tinking on top of it, tinkling and twinkling on top of it.

But the -- but the volume at which those paths are being played, you can only achieve that volume if somebody told them, "Listen to the guitar."

And I would think that's Eddie Durham that told them, "Make sure that you can hear the guitar when you're playing this, make sure you hear it because this is really our sound."

The guitar is what really governs what the sound of the Basie band is.

♪♪ -The language of the guitar, especially in the 20th century and in America, is in those roots.

There wouldn't be any whatever, you know, Jimi Hendrix or something if not for Eddie Durham.

And they have more -- For my money, they have more in common than people would think.

But that's just me.

♪♪ [ Instruments tuning ] ♪♪ -In music education, and frankly, in all art education, there's often a false dichotomy set up between what is modern and innovative and what is old and not useful anymore.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -And for the Juilliard students, it's one thing to encounter Eddie Durham in a jazz history class, listen to the records, understand the chronology of his life.

But to sit and play the music, it's a whole different story, because then you confront on your instrument the challenges, the orchestration, the swing, the rural part of it, the urban part of it, the innovative part of it that can really only be experienced by playing it.

-Art is a continuum.

Everything that you haven't heard before is new to you.

-I've been exposed to Eddie Durham's music since I was, like, 12, 13, about when I started playing the trumpet, but I had no idea who Eddie Durham was.

-There were songs of his that I had been playing by way of other bandleaders since high school.

-That whole Basie sound and that kind of swing and the riff-based stuff and the sections playing off each other -- that was a person that came up with that sound.

-Everything comes from somewhere.

You have to plug in some of the people that bridge the gap from my generation to Eddie Durham's generation.

-One of the reasons it's so important to honor Eddie Durham's legacy and play his music, especially for young people, is to really help them understand the journey that the great American music known as jazz has taken.

-♪ Love, oh, love, oh, loveless love ♪ Either high school or undergrad, I heard "Jumpin' at the Woodside" for the first time.

Oh, my goodness.

Like, I remember.

It was my favorite song for a long time.

-I love the role of the guitar in the big band because it's such a driving force, and it's all about forward motion and rhythm and just keeping the beat and keeping people dancing.

♪♪ -Human beings all have been sad and happy and wanted to celebrate and wanted to fall in love.

But the sounds that accompanied all these human rituals changed over time based on the technology and the environment.

-At first it was a little bit challenging because there aren't very many directions in the music and no recordings.

So just listening to the music and his style of playing really helped me to be able to establish the phrasing for the rest of the section.

[ Trumpet plays ] -You can start to get inspired by those ideas and the limitations cause you to, you know, find new creative ways to express yourself.

-♪ Boo be doo ba do boo be doo ba doh ♪ ♪♪ -I'm also a West African.

I'm from Cameroon.

And so we're very into things that are rhythmic.

-Powerful thing about music is it transcends language barriers.

It transcends cultural barriers.

-It just, like, moved me.

And being African, I was able to relate to those rhythms.

-You can really feel when you play it right.

Every part is necessary and every part really adds something to the ensemble.

-A lot of discovery happens just practicing and practicing the music, but in the moment, just enjoy, you know, something good.

♪♪ -Realize that the African-American tradition coming up in the '20s and '30s, you know, entertainment was really the most readily available option available.

You know, there were Black doctors and a few Black lawyers and all that in the teens, '20s, but they put a lot into entertainment.

All these musicians from that age always had some type of showman aspect to what they did, because they came up with -- with understanding that the show aspect and the musical aspect were hand in hand.

-The choreography of the big bands -- Eddie Durham, he was involved with a lot of that stuff, too.

-For the Jimmie Lunceford band, he said, "We got up together, we blew together, we moved the trombones together.

"We even breathe together," he said.

-It translated into a fact to add another show element, because you have these physical things that occupy space, especially the trombone that can -- that looks to be this big.

But once you do this, it's that big.

So all of these shiny brass instruments can occupy space and grab attention, and he was saying, "We can get a little bit more bang for the buck.

Let's give them a little something more to see, along with the great music that we're giving them."

-The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band was playing, Mama Lu Parks was with them, and she had the dance troupe.

And again, this is another thing.

When I see Mama Lu Parks and they perform, they're doing a Lindy Hop.

I'd never seen this before.

And he's throwing the girls around.

Now, this again, this is before hip hop really starts and breakdancing comes out.

♪♪ -What must it have been to be at the Savoy Ballroom with the floor swaying and really hundreds and even thousands of people on the floor dancing together?

You went there and, good gracious, it meant that you could have a good time.

And the blues were reminding you that "I've seen trouble all my days.

Okay, but meanwhile we're gonna -- We're gonna Lindy Hop and throw you over the top and have a good time."

♪♪ During World War II, when a lot of our musicians were drafted, the women began to get the gigs.

They would be playing in the ballrooms of the local town, and some of them got together and formed bands to go on the road as all-girl bands.

And that's where Eddie Durham is one of the heroes of this story.

-He toured with women for five years.

All women.

-He was working with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and working with other all-girl bands to help them get the gigs and help them have the arrangements that could show off their talents as musicians.

I like to do with my classes an exercise in which I say, "Who can tell me who's playing now?"

The jazz heads will sort of slouch back and say, "Oh, it can't be.

Let's see.

That's not -- that's not Ahmad Jamal.

That must be..." And then when they find out that it's Mary Lou Williams, it's still a little startling.

That one I do think is breaking down, though.

-I think it's a lot more common than people think to see a female jazz-trumpet player.

Definitely a lot of amazing, amazing artists out there and a lot of amazing female artists in the '20s and '30s.

[ Trumpet playing ] -When the full story is told, it'll spread out our sense of geography, and Eddie Durham working with those all-girl bands will be an important part of the new story.

[ Song ends ] -My mother was 30 years younger than my father.

And when he married my mother, he stayed home to have children and raise children.

-I know that Eddie at the time was often asked to join ghost Count Basie bands, but he turned them down.

He didn't want to travel.

He didn't want to.

He'd done all that.

-He was sort of like, retired, but I would call it semi-retired because he -- he did a bunch of stuff.

-You know, he stopped playing guitar because of the arthritis, but he was still playing guitar.

He was still writing, like, because I remember he was writing.

He was working on stuff.

-My mother saw my father in a way that a lot of people didn't see him.

He got taken advantage of a lot in the music business, so she really didn't want any of her kids being musicians, because you're gonna have to fight and scratch and claw to get anywhere and get the accolades and get what you deserve, you know, which is partly true.

Back in the day, you couldn't just get into ASCAP.

You had to be sponsored, so he would sponsor people and put their names on stuff that they didn't even write, so that they could have a career in writing.

I mean, who does that?

-Him not getting his monetary due is what I believe broke up the marriage.

-When I was 4 years old, my mother left.

-After the three of us, six years later, my sister was born, four years after that, my younger brother was born.

Now there were five of us and, you know, money was tight and she had to go back to work.

And I don't think that was the deal when she married him.

-At 6 years old, she came back and me and my sister, we go with her and we go live with her in England.

-And that's why he decided to go back on the road.

My mother moved to England and he wanted to go to England.

You know, because the divorce was not his idea at all.

And so he, I believe, was looking for a touring band.

Even though Doc was influential in getting my father in the band and all that, a lot of it had to do with him chasing my mother, really.

-Eddie often was on the phone at the airport, and we had to go and find him and get him so he could get on the plane.

-I would travel with him a lot with the band, with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band.

-At that time, he wasn't playing much guitar, so when he did join, he joined and played trombone.

♪♪ -Him being a guitarist and a trombonist, I realized that as I was listening to it, there was an arrangement by Jimmie Lunceford that I didn't know was his.

And I'd always liked it.

It's "Avalon."

You know, the trombone can be cumbersome.

It can be limiting.

That kind of stuck them in the sound of how everyone typically thinks the trombone sounds.

You know, brub-a-dub-bub-bup.

[ Trombone playing ] But there's a lot more that can be played on the trombone to those that overcome that technical hump.

♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ] [ Trombone playing ] Eddie was one of those, so he didn't write with the barrier of what the trombone can do.

Intricate rhythmic things in them.

And I always noticed, like, "Why would -- Why would he think to do that?

It's great."

He would think to do it because, one, he was a great trombone player, but also he played guitar, played an instrument that could naturally move faster and naturally be a little more fleet.

And so I think that gave him a sense of adventurousness that he translated into what he wrote for the trombone.

And a lot of those -- those '30s arrangements that have passes that feature.

And I think "Avalon" is one of the greatest examples of it.

♪♪ -He never bought a plunger.

The plunger for the trombone.

He always took the plunger off the bathroom thing.

Always, always, always drive my mother crazy.

We really were pretty ignorant, and I think he was pretty ignorant to his accomplishments.

Phil Schaap helped to bring a lot of that out, you know?

For instance, they were having a conversation and Phil was like, "Oh, well, did you write this?"

And my father said, "Yeah."

"Oh, did you write that?"

"No, I didn't -- I wasn't part of that."

"Oh, did you arrange 'In the Mood'?"

He said, "Yeah.

And you know, I also went on and arranged for blah, blah, blah."

And Phil said, "Wait a minute, did you just say that you arranged 'In the mood'?"

And he said -- he said, "Yeah, I worked, you know, I worked with Glenn Miller."

And prior to that, nobody knew who had arranged the song.

[ "In the Mood" playing ] -It came to Glenn Miller from Joe Garland, who wrote it.

And there are -- There are copies of it that are preserved.

It's rather -- rather plodding.

[ "In the Mood" playing ] Over time, it was sped up.

And then by the time Miller gets into the Army Airforce Band, it evolves even further.

If you look at "In the Mood" and you take a look at what Miller recorded alongside "In the Mood" in August of '39, there are other tunes -- "I Want to Be Happy" and "Wham" -- that are Eddie Durham and it says arranger Eddie Durham.

"In the Mood" never said arranger anybody.

It just -- it just said "In the Mood."

It's Durham, it has Durham's fingerprints all over it and literally Durham's handwriting on it.

Based upon Miller's notes and Miller's records, I think it's pretty clear Durham did the lion's work on modifying it for the Miller band.

-Phil Schaap spearheaded this effort to get him into the Hall of Fame.

-And we've changed the records to show Durham for "In the Mood."

-If he was really not aware of the significance of some of the things he did, there was no way we could be aware of it.

[ "In the Mood" playing ] -It's gone down as a Glenn Miller hit, and it certainly is.

It was his biggest instrumental hit and we all remember "In the Mood," Glenn Miller to this day.

But I think that it had a lot to do with the talent of somebody who helped Miller adapt it for his band, and that was Eddie Durham.

-I remember somebody's on stage setting up something.

He's, like, plugging the wires up.

I guess he's the house audio guy.

He must have plugged something into an amp and was all of this feedback.

[ Feedback squelches ] And my father said, "That noise right there that we all just heard."

He said, "In another few years, that's all gonna be in the music."

[ Feedback squelches ] How did my father even know that?

[ Big-band music playing ] -Big-band jazz had died after World War II, so there was not a demand for his musicianship.

And a lot of the legends from the '30s were dormant.

And overseas, they wanted jazz.

They wanted the orchestras, they wanted the big bands.

-It was prestigious to go to Europe, which we did almost every year in the late '70s and all through the '80s when Eddie was in the band.

We went to East Germany because, in 1980, Germany was divided between West and East.

Our appearance being the first American band to -- to play the Dresden Dixieland Festival.

And we played to thousands of people.

And he said right away, he said, "Doc, you've got to get hold of this band.

We're not playing enough blues."

So he knew that the Europeans wanted to hear American musicians play blues.

[ Jazz music playing ] -In Texas, there's a lot of good jazz musicians.

We convene once a year.

Some of the best players, professional players, jazz players in Texas.

-I thought you were dead.

[ Laughter ] -And we have one rehearsal, and then we do a big show the next night, which is all of Eddie's music, as well as some Count Basie music that Eddie played in.

-1, 2, 3, 4.

[ Jazz music playing ] ♪♪ -I founded the Hill Country Jazz Festival my first year teaching, and so I think the first year of the festival was in February of 1990.

In the first year, I think there was one jazz band in all of Austin, one public-school jazz band, and now most schools have it.

I'd like to think we had something to do with that.

-Alright.

We're starting to get in the swing of things now.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -Eddie Durham was born in the historic Dunbar neighborhood in San Marcos on August 19th of 1906, a fact that will be remembered today, October 15th, at the free annual Eddie Durham Jazz Fest organized by the Calaboose African American History Museum, to be held in Eddie Durham Park, 205 Martin Luther King Drive.

[ Applause ] -The property -- we think that it was where Eddie Durham actually lived, his family.

Schoolchildren and teachers got involved and city people, just people who went out and cleaned that property because it had been left for ages.

It had trash everywhere.

It was a mess.

And they cleaned everything up and turned it into this park that we have.

-Now, therefore, I, Jane Hughson, by virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor of the city of San Marcos, Texas, do hereby proclaim the 15th day of October as Eddie Durham Day.

[ Cheers and applause ] [ Jazz music playing ] ♪♪ -If you could make any kind of contribution, I think that, you know, anybody would feel good about that.

-I think you'd feel real good.

These are icons.

-What happens in history is that a few people's names become the only names that exist.

-Thank you very much.

How about this band?

[ Cheers and applause ] He's from San Marcos, Texas, where we are.

And this is one of the few places in the world that recognizes a hometown hero, which Eddie truly was.

And for me, I worked in Eddie's band and his last band in New York City, and it was a band that was really an all star in New York City band.

So it was an honor for me as a young man to work with some of my heroes that were in that band, and we were playing Eddie's music.

[ Song ends ] [ Cheers and applause ] -I'll be honest, when I first started playing, I brought my own modern-jazz piano chops to the gig.

It did not fit in.

It's not the style of 1940.

So over the years, I've been really interested to join the sound of a 1930s big band.

-To feel the excitement of the first time that music got heard.

What was the environment in which the thing they created got created?

♪♪ -The Eddie Durham Band on the Friday night concert is a professional band.

-We've been playing this hall for -- for a long time.

I've been here for 12 years leading this orchestra.

-I think, for me, one of the highlights of playing is the group is so strong, and it's really important to me that when you play music, you get to the style, the groove of what it is and that band gets to that.

♪♪ -It's a way of hearing the way people heard in 1930 and 1940.

♪♪ -They recognize that that's our American art form.

And so I think it's really important that they -- what we do here should be done all over the country with different artists.

♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ] -We did four tunes with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, and three of the four were Eddie Durham arrangements that had never been recorded.

But I thought it would be interesting to take music that they could feel some ownership to, that there was no recording to go back to, so they could invent it themselves and feel, like, as close as they could ever be to the fact that, like Eddie Durham had written a new arrangement and they were gonna play it for the first time, and they were gonna put their stamp on it.

[ "Careless Love" playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -♪ Love, oh, love ♪ ♪ Oh, loveless love ♪ ♪ Has set our hearts on goal-less goals ♪ ♪ From milkless milk ♪ ♪ And silkless silk ♪ ♪ We are growing used to soulless souls ♪ ♪ Such grafting times we never saw ♪ ♪ That's why we have a pure food law ♪ ♪ In everything ♪ ♪ Baby, baby, we find a flaw ♪ ♪ Even love, oh, love ♪ ♪ Oh, careless love ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, they're opening up for Cab Calloway.

And okay, we're gonna open up for Cab Calloway, huh?

Alright.

We're gonna smoke this stage, and then he's gonna have to get on behind us.

I don't know what was going on with y'all tonight, but he said, "Y'all was cooking tonight.

Like, "Y'all had it going tonight."

-I spent many years playing with Eddie Durham, and what I treasure was sitting on that bandstand, just three other instruments, with Eddie.

Hundreds and hundreds of hours and feeling the essence of how he created this wonderful thing in which there was a form and a structure to it, and yet it was spontaneous.

-He was playing in Goshen with a band there.

He also played at The West End.

-They only needed a place where scouts could find them because they weren't really findable either.

-I had just moved to New York.

I was 18 years old.

I was going to Manhattan School of Music, and around the corner from where I lived was a club called The West End, where this guy named Phil Schaap had done a wonderful thing in giving a lot of work and exposure to some of the great giants of the swing era, who really kind of invented a certain kind of jazz that really weren't working anywhere else.

-Some of us were lucky enough to be around New York in the -- in the late '70s, early '80s to be around these -- these masters and of these -- of a whole interesting cast of characters.

-And there was a band that Eddie Durham was in.

He wasn't leading a band at that point.

And I was so anxious to play that during their intermission, I actually took out my saxophone and just started playing in the aisle so they could hear that, like, I knew some of the songs.

Maybe I played "Topsy," something like that, and I got to sit in.

-It was my chore to tune that electric 12-string guitar.

And now, why he had that and not a more typical jazz guitar, I'll never know.

-He had a big American car, and there were times when he was coming just sort of in the nick of time, because I would stand by the door watching.

And then when Eddie pulled up, I would go out there and I would valet his car and he would run in and just -- just hit the bandstand running and just right on time.

-He never really dressed up.

Like, we kind of had to insist that he dress up in a suit.

But, you know, in the '70s, we had wild clothing anyway, so he had this plaid suit he loved, all plaid, and it was normal.

That was normal back then.

But you see the picture now and you're like, "Yeah, you know that's the '70s, right?"

-That night he played my guitar after the gig, you know, we're talking and hanging out and I'd mentioned that a buddy of mine and I had started this 4-horn swing band, and I'd just gotten through arranging his ♪ Ba boo doo-boo da da ♪ ♪ Da boo-doo-boo da da ♪ What's the name of that tune?

"Blue and Sentimental."

He said, "Oh, you know, I'd like to hear that."

He gave me his address and I went up to his place.

You know, he had this house set back off of the street, welcomed me in, played him that thing.

We just hung out.

Talked and played some things and... Yeah.

How many guys would do that for you today?

♪♪ -He is Eddie Durham, and the other night, over 200 friends and fans gathered at Saint Peter's Church.

The occasion -- a musical tribute on Durham's 80th birthday.

-I feel very happy about it because...

I love to see the musicians play this kind of music.

It's real sensible, you know, you can understand it.

-And I love to play his parts and he loves to hear me play them.

-I would like to be remembered as helping to stabilize some of the things that I saw was all scattered and mixed up, and that's how it was gotten together.

-There is a lesson in the blues at the base of the swing music that has to do with accepting the fact that life is going to end for everybody and that it's gonna involve struggles and strains and tragedies.

But at the same time, there's something awfully funny and awfully jolly about being alive that the blues also celebrates.

-Sometimes when I do really crazy, freaked-out stuff and I think about him, I go, "Whoa, slow down, pal.

You know, you don't have to do this.

You don't.

Let it go, you know?"

But that was his life.

He let it go.

-He definitely wasn't vain.

You know, like this.

[ Chuckling ] You know, this stuff like this.

None of this is my pops.

-He didn't get stressed out.

He didn't -- I never known him going to the doctor ever.

I never known my father ever to have a cold.

-He went on a cruise to play for a month, a Scandinavian cruise.

He came home and he was home maybe for a month.

And what we didn't know was that on the cruise, he was hospitalized the whole trip.

He never told us.

And the musicians wouldn't tell us because they figured he'd tell us, you know.

We never knew.

And Dr. Vollmer didn't go on that trip, so he didn't know.

One night we had this long discussion about the world and God and, I mean, stuff we never talked about before.

I was like, "What is going on with Dad?"

He took a hot bath and he had a heart attack when he got out of the tub, a fatal heart attack.

-One thing he always said was, "Always applaud a performer because they're getting up there and they're vulnerable."

So he always wanted to -- to encourage.

-Eddie has largely been left out of the way that the story of jazz is usually told.

We hear about Count Basie, we hear about Lester Young and Kansas City jazz.

But really the defining genius of that idiom was Eddie Durham.

-He was a very humble man.

He'd probably be a little embarrassed about it, but I think he'd be very proud.

-Musicians such as Eddie Durham, any time they heard some young kids playing music, the music that they loved to play, it's like you were in.

That was the price of admission.

-And all of the older cats that I met when I was first coming up, they were like that.

-Guys that created -- Not just could do it really well.

They created the swing era.

-Eddie was one of the warmest and most approachable.

-He was a very kind person that only wanted to create.

That's all he wanted to do.

-He's still, like, the most unknown genius of the 20th century in jazz.

-We used to sing a song in the church set.

"Little becomes much when you place it in the master's hand."

-What a major American story is the story of Eddie Durham, and one that everybody should know because there's so much to learn from it.

-The thickness of the American experience whenever he played his horn or wrote a tune.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Funding for this program has been made possible by Chiaroscuro Records, home of fine jazz recordings since 1970.

For more information, visit chiaroscurojazz.org.