The Athenaeum

Sam Lanin Presents...

We Big Band aficionados while shooting the bull in person or online many times amuse ourselves by tracing the roots & influences of our favorites orchestras back through the early 1940s, back even further into the era of the Great Depression, citing every source from Bennie Moten of Kansas City fame to Gershwin musicals to New Orleans dance & roadhouse jazz as possible bloodlines for the amalgamated sounds of the 40s dance band era. But just a little further back in time is one of the biggest (mostly forgotten) influences of all.  What were Glenn Miller, Jimmy & Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman et al. doing musically during the 1920s? 

When these future Big Band heavyweights weren’t auditioning to be sidemen in regional bands in order to get some performance experience, hustling pit gigs for musicals & vaudeville (plus the occasional church social or debutante dance), trying to land any steady job playing their instruments to help Ma & Pa support numerous siblings, or dreaming of joining a really successful well known orchestra like Paul Whiteman's (a permanent job that might actually pay the rent) they were...

...working as session musicians for record producer/arranger Sam Lanin.  From Bruce Elder at allmusic.com: 

Not everyone who had a profound effect on the world of music was necessarily a musician, or had to be a particularly good one -- sometimes it was just a matter of recognizing the latter quality in others and enabling them to do what they did best. Sam Lanin was a musician, but it was not in that capacity that he made his greatest contribution to music -- oh, he played drums here and there in some recording sessions, but that was as far he got generating music himself in a way that lasted beyond a particular performance. He was a band director, an organizer of performing and recording groups, who was as active in that field as anyone in music during the 1920s -- his timing was especially significant because the '20s were, for the majority of Americans (except in the farm belt) a time of unimpeded (and, as it turned out, in major part illusory) prosperity, when entertainment was booming... [Lanin’s] reputation beyond the 1920s and early '30s was carried forward by the names of the musicians who passed through his employ. Among the most celebrated of Lanin alumni, in addition to Phil Napoleon, Miff Mole, Red Nichols, and Jules Levy, Jr., were Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Manny Klein, Jimmy McPartland, Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Lang, Bunny Berigan, and Nick Lucas.

Glenn Miller & Benny Goodman also played in the recording studio for Lanin during the late 1920s & very early 30s. Lanin had a sure instinct for raw talent, giving these young musicians solo spots on some of his best-selling records: Me And My Shadow- 1927, Gonna Get A Girl-1927, Side By Side- 1927, South Bound-1928, Glorianna-1928, Do Something-1929, Lovable And Sweet-1928, Turn On The Heat- 1929, Hello, Beautiful!-1931. 

Here's a sampling from youtube of the Sam Lanin dance band sound so popular on parlor Victrolas:

Dark Night

Am I Wasting My Time On You

Flag That Train

Tonight's My Night With Baby

I Want Somebody To Cheer Me Up

Hello Beautiful! (some 20s/30s nudes in this one, considered both daring & artistic at the time, I'm sure)

For more great music from Sam Lanin try these re-mastered samples from the CD below put out by Rivermont Records of Lynchburg VA.

- Maureen Lang

"The Least Worse Place" A Review

   "The Least Worse Place" by Karen Greenberg is a study of the first hundred days that the Guantanamo detention facility was in operation.

Karen is Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University.  She has been deeply involved in a long series of closely focused conferences on torture, civil military relations and the legal and moral aspects of counter-terrorism. 

In this book she describes the initial efforts by career military and civilian officials to create a prison camp that met international standards for such a facility and the process by which the Bush Administration quickly undermined these efforts and created an engine of perpetual confinement and tortured confessions. 

The process of transformation of this facility went forward quickly once Donald Rumsfeld and his collaborators realized that the officers initially in charge intended to obey US and international law with regard to the treatment of captured personnel.  That was unacceptable in the Bush/Cheney Administration and so, new, more pliable men were found for the job of running Guantanamo.  There are always such people in any organization and they always come forward, eager to disgrace themselves and their cloth.  This is the story of the beginnings of that disgrace.

Greenberg hints at the roots of the psychology af such men and the personnel systems that bring them to the fore.  She describes careers built of endless striving for self advancement, of lives of sycophancy at higher and higher levels of government culminating in eagerness to do or say anything that will earn favor with "the man."

Disturbingly, she points to the sad role played by part time soldiers at Guantanamo.  Reserve officers are supposed to bring the values of Main Street America to the Army.  They are supposed to be more attuned to humane values than professional soldiers.  At Guantanamo, reservists rather than the Regulars were often the principal instruments for the willing transmission of illegal and cruel policies demanded by Washington.

The psychology of that phenomenon is fertile ground for another book.  I hope Greenberg writes it.

Pat Lang