The Ampersand and the Ligature

Jan and I just bought the Complete New Yorker. The collection of data DVDs contains all of the pages of the New Yorker from its beginnings in 1925 to the present, or at least March of 2005. This is why I bought a computer. When I was on the road with Stan Kenton I got hooked on the New Yorker, because it was a companionable magazine for long bus rides. The articles didn't have to be about things I was interested in. The quality of the writing was so good that my interest was irrelevant. I liked that it had ts quirks--no table of contents, writers identified at the end of the articles, no jumps yet no telling how long an article might be when you were underway. Now I can look up, throught the comprehensive index, all of the articles I read on all those bus rides and thereafter. My years as a cab driver in New York City, back on the road with the Glenn Miller band and the Modernaires, the period where I learned typography in Los Angeles on a Monotype machine and handsetting. My obsessive typesetting Jones was clearly a result of the New Yorker's cool gray Caslon and its quirky headline face. When I had learned enough to go out on my own, I performed redesigns on fishing magazines so they mimicked the New Yorker in adobe Caslon and Adobe Garmond.

That whole period of my life can be summarized by two typographical flourishes (not strictly flourishes, which are sylized digbats which swoosh): the ampersand and the ligature.

Ampersand & Company was what I named my typesetting company. I like jokes that only a select few get. Ligatures, the characters ff, fl, fi, ffi and ffl being the modern set, became my passion. Some of it rubbed off on my clients, some not. The advertising guys could care about typographical standards. It was 1987 when I opened the business and desktop publishing was still a gleam in the eye of Aldus, the company which was developing Pagemaker. Lucky for me I saw it coming, and along with it a wild period of bad taste as non-typographers decided they could do typographers' work. (Curious the parallels between type and music, where anybody with a loud PA and a set of blinking lights could set up as a DJ and get the weddings we musicians played.)

Anyway, by the time Ampersand came crashing down on me I was still reading the New Yorker, and I dusted off my saxophone and started playing again. I called Doc Rutherford at Orange Coast College and found a band I could play in. Music, family, New Yorker, in no particular order are he forces grounding me. Without them I think I would sputter and fail at everything.

Which brings us to the band. We've done some pretty successful gigs lately.

We have a booking in Dallas coming up on the 19th of November (2005) where we're using an updated version of a book I wrote for wedding of friends in 1980 or 1981. The gig is a jitterbug homecoming for Dallas Baptist University, and the setting is an airplane museum in north Dallas. The contract states that there will be no rock, soul, Motown or disco, just stuff from the forties.

Here's the preliminary set list I came up with:

1 1 108 String of Pearls
1 2 107 Cheek to Cheek
1 3 105 Begin the Beguine
1 4 24 Moten Swing
1 5 110 Let s Dance
1 6 139 Witchcraft
1 7 30 Sentimental Journey
1 8 23 All of Me
1 9 57 When Lights Are Low
1 10 4 Serenade In Blue
1 11 127 Bugle Call Rag

2 1 16 Don t Be That Way
2 2 32 Candy
2 3 33 I Got It Bad
2 4 148 Minnie the Moocher
2 5 111 Stompin at the Savoy
2 6 29 Jumpin at the Woodside
2 7 144 Nice & Easy
2 8 2 Mood Indigo
2 9 128 Jump Jive & Wail
2 10 27 April in Paris
2 11 8 Marie
2 12 141 Choo Choo Caboogie

3 1 7 Song of the Volga Boatman
3 2 28 Take the A Train
3 3 118 How Little We Know
3 4 112 Little Brown Jug
3 5 5 Song of India
3 6 21 I Get a Kick Out of You
3 7 20 Cherokee
3 8 20 Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
3 9 31 Stardust
3 10 147 Front Page Rag
3 11 130 Rockin in Rhythm
3 12 58 In The Mood

4 1 35 Caravan
4 2 9 Dancing in the Dark
4 3 10 Opus One
4 4 42 Blue & Sentimental
4 5 132 Sing Sing Sing
4 6 103 Moonlight Seranade
4 7 124 I ve Got You Under My Skin
4 8 138 Well, Git It
4 9 146 Mambo #5
4 10 125 You Make Me Feel So Young

OK, so some of the tunes were from the fifties. (As I am.) I also tucked Shiny Stockings into the first set.

So here's where I'm heading with this.

The instrumentation of this band is a small step from the Original Recipe Band. Just add three horn players and there you are. Eleven players instead of eight, but the good news is it can approximate a big band with those eleven instead of a "full" big band, which has 16, 17, or 18 players.

So we're going to use the old ampersand again and say that this is the Original Recipe Big Band. Maybe somewhere down the line a Texas oil billionaire will hire both bands, which will be a good night for all of us.

Rehearsals start next week. I've spent the last five weeks or so working on the book, adding guitar parts and sometimes doing rewrites.

We have some great players lined up for the gig on the 19th. Mark Kazanoff and Thad Scott are playing tenor, Chris Kapral on bari, Andre Zollinger is flying out from Vegas to play lead trumpet, John Van der Ghynst at the hot corner, Matt Walker on trombone, Marilyn Rucker on piano and vocals, Bruce Truitt on guitar and vocals, Mark Nelms on ACOUSTIC bass, my brother Jimmy on drums and vocals. Also we'll have my son Brendan there to cover on tunes Jimmy might want to come up front and sing. I am the luckiest bandleader ever to have this much talent in the family!

Meanwhile, I've just finished reading the jazz profile of Gerry Mulligan written by Nat Hentoff and appearing in a 1958 New Yorker. Could it get any better than this?