RESEARCH, SCHOLARSHIP AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE SPRING 2005

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Walking on the Wild Side

by Kevin Rayburn

Buddy Rich’s drumming was explosive, his band’s playing electrifying, and his temper volcanic.

Rich was one of the few people in the music business who dared to argue with—and tick off—Frank Sinatra.

Even though Rich’s caustic verbal wit embittered many colleagues, the late music legend has a staunch defender in John La Barbera.

La Barbera, associate professor of music at U of L, began a two-decade association with Rich’s band in the late 1960s, first as a trumpet player and then as an arranger. La Barbera’s compositions and arrangements have been performed and recorded by Rich and other jazz luminaries including Woody Herman, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Phil Woods.

“You hear a lot about Rich, and there’s even a notorious tape of him blowing up that’s out there on the Internet,” La Barbera says. “But, in his defense, he was a perfectionist; he wouldn’t tolerate laziness. A lot of times the guys in the band deserved it.”

Part of Rich’s perfectionism was persistence. One example is the story La Barbera tells about his boss’s need for an arrangement.

In 1970, Rich asked La Barbera to craft a short arrangement for his band of the score of a 1962 Jane Fonda film, Walk on the Wild Side. The film score was one of hundreds written by Elmer Bernstein, whose movie credits included classics such as The Ten Commandments, To Kill a Mockingbird and True Grit.

Things didn’t go well.

“Buddy wanted the arrangement for an LP he was going to record in London,” La Barbera recalls. “I struggled with it and did it quickly, and Buddy and everyone else knew it wasn’t good—and they were right.”

The aborted arrangement was shelved for more than a decade. Years later, the ever-persistent Rich had not forgotten.

“‘When are you going to get me that arrangement?’” La Barbera remembers Rich asking.

In the mid-1980s, La Barbera found the LP soundtrack to Walk on the Wild Side at a neighbor’s yard sale for 50 cents. “I’d never heard the whole score before,” he says. That and Rich’s prompting inspired him to tackle the jazz band arrangement anew.

“A year before Rich died in 1987 I took the arrangement to New York where Buddy was recovering from heart bypass surgery,” La Barbera recalls. “It was a winner. He and the band played it in live performance but regrettably never got the chance to record it before his death.”

Although the Walk on the Wild Side Suite arrangement was performed by Diva—an all-woman jazz band co-founded by La Barbera in New York in 1994—he never recorded it himself until 2002.

The Road to the Grammys

It’s December 2004 and La Barbera is sitting in his office in U of L’s School of Music amid books, music sheets and gold and platinum record awards on the wall next to his desk.

He’s on the telephone, getting out the good news to friends and the press.

“Our CD has just been nominated for a Grammy,” he tells them.

The CD is On the Wild Side, the first recording to bear La Barbera’s name as bandleader. It was nominated along with four other CDs for the music industry’s top award in the “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album” category. (The eventual winner was the Maria Schneider Orchestra’s CD, Concert In The Garden.)

The centerpiece of the recording is the arrangement that began its odyssey 34 years before: the Walk on the Wild Side Suite.

The CD’s nine tracks of swinging big-band jazz, all arranged by La Barbera, include standards such as Miles Davis’ So What and The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby as well as La Barbara-penned compositions such as the Brazilian-flavored Cachaca Gotcha and his most popular work, Tiger of San Pedro.

“My Tiger of San Pedro arrangement for college bands has never been out of print since I wrote the piece in the 1970s,” La Barbera notes. “There are more than 40 band arrangements of it circulating out there.” The tune was the title track of a best-selling, Grammy-nominated 1975 Columbia LP by trombonist Bill Watrous.

La Barbera says he’s kept “on top of the pulse of the music business” during his 14 years as a U of L faculty member, but his creative side always pestered him.

“It’s rewarding to teach courses in jazz, the music industry and computer techniques in composition, but teaching doesn’t allow you the time you really need to write or record,” he says.

When it came time to satisfy his creative needs, La Barbera says the university backed him. His recording project was aided at its inception by an intramural research grant from U of L’s Office of the Senior Vice President for Research. “The administration here at the music school and Vice President Nancy Martin’s office have been supportive of me all the way,” he adds.

Once he started composing and arranging, mostly on computer, La Barbera said the notes poured out easily. “I would just disappear into the studio in my house and, luckily, some of these pieces just wrote themselves.”

Also nagging at him was the need to record his Walk on the Wild Side Suite arrangement.

“I always wanted to record it, but when we got to L.A. to do it, I didn’t even know the individual names of the four short parts of the suite because the old LP has conflicting titles listed for the cuts,” he says. That led to correspondences with Elmer Bernstein himself, whom La Barbera had never met.

The CD was recorded during three sessions in January 2002. The John La Barbera Big Band was composed of crack session musicians and soloists including Bud Shank on alto saxophone and La Barbera’s brothers Pat, on tenor sax, and Joe, on drums.

After mixing and mastering the CD that spring, La Barbera shopped it around for about a year. He entertained three contract offers before offering it to the Jazz Compass label. La Barbera says the label’s good distribution in strong jazz markets such as Japan and Europe were key factors in his decision to sign.

The results have been earning rave reviews and sales in the thousands of units, he says. “That’s a lot of sales for a big band jazz CD,” he notes.

Critic Scott Yanow in the All About Jazz, 2004 guide calls the CD “spectacular.” The Jazz Times concurred, calling it “memorable, energetic.” But the major endorsement came from the jazz industry bible, Downbeat magazine, which praised the release for its “strenuous reworkings of post-Stan Kenton vernacular,” further noting the CD’s “relentless power,” “intelligent counterpoint” and “breathless pace.”

La Barbera is no stranger to commercial recording success. His Laserlight CD production of In a Christmas Mood, recorded with members of various incarnations of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, has sold nearly 2 million copies since its release in 1986. It has earned gold (500,000 copies sold) and platinum (1 million units sold) awards from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Still, La Barbera says his latest CD represents his best work.

“These guys in this session were working at such a high level of musicianship,” he says. “This was probably my most enjoyable musical experience ever.”

La Barbera says he hopes to repeat the experience again in summer 2005, when he is slated to record another CD of his own material and standards.

“In doing On the Wild Side I met one of my heroes, the legendary Horace Silver, a pianist I was listening to when I was 7 years old back in the 1950s. I never thought I’d ever be in the company of such giants.” Silver’s song, Mayreh, is the first cut on the CD.

When the CD was done, La Barbera says he sent a copy to Bernstein, who was able to hear it before his death in 2004.

“He was knocked out by the CD and the performance of his suite, and he endorsed our efforts. It was quite an honor.”

La Barbera says that even Buddy Rich might have approved.

“Maybe Buddy’s smiling at me—from wherever he may be.”

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