JazzProfiles: Terry Gibbs Dream Band

This CD just arrived from Terri Hinte’s public relations firm and I thought I’d share the media release “as is” so I could post the announcement in time to celebrate Terry’s 100th birthday on October 13, 2024.

With more recorded music by the Dream Band, it would seem that Terry is giving us the gift on his special day instead of receiving one in return.

I’m sure he realizes that he has the gift of our appreciation in return.

Happy Birthday Terry and best wishes for many more.

“TERRY GIBBS DREAM BAND, VOL. 7: THE LOST TAPES. 1959,”

LATEST INSTALLMENT IN GIBBS’S ARCHIVAL “DREAM BAND” SERIES,

TO BE RELEASED OCTOBER 11 (CD) & NOVEMBER 8 (DIGITAL)

ON WHALING CITY SOUND,

AS GIBBS TURNS 100

LEGENDARY VIBRAPHONIST AND BANDLEADER UNEARTHS INCANDESCENT BIG BAND PERFORMANCES OF WORK BY ALL-STAR ARRANGERS, LIVE IN HOLLYWOOD IN MARCH AND NOVEMBER 1959.

“The gift of Terry Gibbs’s vast tape archive keeps on giving with the October 11 release of Terry Gibbs Dream Band, Vol. 7: The Lost Tapes, 1959 on Whaling City Sound (digital release November 8). The newly discovered tapes find the vibraphonist and first-generation bebopper (still alive and kicking as his 100th birthday approaches on October 13) leading his legendary 16-piece Dream Band at two Hollywood nightclubs in March and November 1959. The 18 tracks feature superb performances by some of the finest arrangers in jazz history, delivered in stunning high fidelity.

Gibbs and his son, drummer/bandleader/co-curator Gerry Gibbs, thought they had exhausted the surviving documentation of Terry’s swing-boppin’ big band with the 2002 release of Vol. 6: One More Time. (Vols. 1-5 came out in fairly quick succession between 1986 and 1991.) Then, earlier this year, the elder Gibbs was going through the archival files on his son’s computer when he stumbled across one labeled “1959 Jazz Party.”

“I said, ‘Hey, what the hell is that?'” he recalls. “So I played it and it was the Dream Band.” Gibbs had booked the ensemble in the winter of 1959 at the Seville Club in Hollywood as a way of rehearsing them for a recording session without breaking union rules; when they packed the place, they were asked to stay on. After several weeks they moved to the Sundown, a club on the Sunset Strip, where they remained for about a year.

During that time, Gibbs built up a book with charts from an unbelievable list of arrangers, whose talents are on display here: Bob Brookmeyer (“Don’t Be That Way”), Al Cohn (“Cottontail”), Marty Paich (“Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”), and the band’s tenor players, Med Flory (“Flying Home”) and Bill Holman (“Begin the Beguine”). “I talked with my arrangers,” explains Gibbs in Vol. 7’s liner notes, “and I wanted to have arrangements that presented the band as an ensemble band.”

That full-band focus doesn’t stop the soloists—-among the best of the day—from giving crackling, hard-swinging performances. Trumpeter Conte Candoli sounds off brilliant on both the driving “Bright Eyes” and the ballad “Moonglow”; trailblazing trombonist Carl Fontana brings his brawny sound to “Let’s Dance”; and drummer Mel Lewis, soon to be big band royalty in his own right, defies the title of “No Heat” with his simmering fills and brief solo. And then there’s Gibbs himself, whose dusky signature tone on the vibes nevertheless illuminate “The Song Is You,” in the Dark,” and “Prelude to a Kiss.”

“It was a labor of love,” says Gibbs of the Dream Band’s superlative work. “I made $11! The band got $15, but they didn’t mind! They were playing for the love of it!” On Dream Band, Vol. 7, that love for the music shines through.

Terry Gibbs was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 13, 1924, as Julius Gubenko. A member of a musical family (his father was a violin teacher and orchestra leader), he found his way to the mallets by playing his older brother Sol’s xylophone. He took lessons with drummer-percussionist Fred Albright at 9, won a radio talent show at 12, and hit the road with singer Judy Kayne’s band at 16.

While serving in the Army during World War II (stationed Stateside), Gibbs — who had taken the name to sound punchier on concert marquees and programs — heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie playing the new sounds of bebop, and it changed his life forever. Before long he was playing the music himself, making records with Allen Eager, Tadd Dameron, and Stan Getz in addition to touring and recording in the big bands of Bill De Arango, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman (of whose “Four Brothers” band Gibbs was a vital member).

In the intervening decades, the list of names on Gibbs’s resume reads like a roll call for the Jazz Hall of Fame, from Benny Goodman to Ray Charles to Alice Coltrane. He has led quartets, quintets, sextets, and big bands, including the house bands for Mel Torme, Steve Allen, and Jerry Lewis; played on recording sessions for John Lennon and Leonard Cohen; and written an award-winning biography in 2003 ‘s Good Vibes: A Life in Jazz before he retired from performance at the age of 92. Gibbs continues to live an active life, however, appearing weekly on Facebook with his TG Q&A Show.”

And this announcement from Whaling City Sound accompanied Terri’s press release:

TERRY GIBBS DREAM BAND

Biography

“There was joy in Jazzville the day Terry Gibbs’s Dream Band was released in 1986. Long before the onslaught of newly “discovered” albums, it captured a remarkable ensemble, live and swinging at Hollywood’s Seville club in March of 1959.

Led by hot-wired bebop veteran Gibbs at the vibes, the hard-hitting 16-piece group—which DownBeat would call “the best in the world”—defied the obituaries being written for the big band. Featuring such familiar names as Conte Candoli, Pete Jolly, and Mel Lewis along with lesser known talents—”all real jazz players, not studio pros,” says Gibbs—the Dream Band played arrangements by the killer’s row of Bill Holman, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, Sy Johnson, Marty Paich, and Manny Albam.

How is it that this music, recorded by the legendary Wally Heider, went unreleased for nearly 30 years? “I was offered lots of money for the tapes by attorneys who were starting a new record company,” says Gibbs, who at 99 (!) retains a sharp memory of those glory days. “But I didn’t want to sell. I played the tapes mainly for friends like Shorty Rogers and Buddy Rich.” It was at Rich’s urging that he finally agreed “to let the world hear that band.”

If Dream Band were the only album to capture this one-of-a-kind unit, Gibbs would be thrilled. Hearing the songs played on the radio, he said, made him “feel like a winner.” But like a gift that keeps on giving, Dream Band has spawned not one, not two, but six sequels, drawing from the Seville performances as well as sets later that year at the Sundown club in Hollywood and sets at the Summit in 1961.

To say the road to the new, surprise-filled Volume 7 had its obstacles would be like saying Los Angeles is sunny. Volumes 2 through 5—The Sundown Sessions, Flying Home, Main Stem, and The Big Cat—came out like clockwork on the Contemporary label between 1987 and 1991. But after the 1994 Northridge earthquake rumbled through Gibbs’s L.A. home, destroying or redistributing everything in it, it looked like the series would end. Not until seven years later did he find, hidden on the top shelf of a closet, 11 boxes of reel-to-reel tapes marked “Big Band Sundown, Seville 1959.” Voila; Volume 6: One More Time.

Now, after a gap of 21 years, here is Volume 7, which Gibbs and his son Gerry Gibbs, the drummer and bandleader, stumbled across on the computer on which Gerry had digitally stored all surviving tapes. “There was a file labeled ‘Party 1959,'” says Terry. “I said, ‘Hey, what the hell is that?’ So I played it and it was the Dream Band from the Seville and Sundown.”

Gibbs’s initial reaction was a bit mixed. “I asked myself what do I need this for,” he says with a laugh. “I’m going to be 100! I’m all done. I’ve had a great career. I have enough money to last. I didn’t need all the work of putting together another album, programming it. But it was a labor of love. I never had so much fun losing money than I did with that band. I made $11! The band got $15, but they didn’t mind! They were playing for the love of it!”

(In order to be able to rehearse his big band for the studio sessions later that year that produced the Terry Gibbs Orchestra’s Launching a New Band, released on Mercury, Gibbs had it perform at the Seville in place of the quartet on a Tuesday night—for the same money the combo would get. Union rules prohibited unpaid rehearsals for recordings but permitted a band to rehearse for a nightclub job.)

“Once in a lifetime, things just click for you,” says Gibbs. The Sunday before the Seville gig, he appeared on The Steve Allen Show, where the host, a jazz artist himself, gave him a big plug. As a result, the place was packed, with celebrities like Dinah Shore, Fred MacMurray, Johnny Mercer, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Prima in attendance.

Most of the songs on Volume 7 are standard fare, including such classics as “Dancing in the Dark,” as in a Morning Sunrise,” and “After You’ve Gone.” But the performances are anything but standard, delivered with the blend of tight economy and in-your-face power that made the band unique.

“The ensemble was always the most important thing,” Gibbs says. “It was never about solos, but that sound of everyone playing together, rising and falling as one. I wasn’t interested in hearing a saxophone play ten choruses. I wanted to hear the band play the arrangement. What made that band so great was that they played together. Back then, the songs had to be under four minutes to get on the radio, so you didn’t have time to fuss around.”

With the recent passing of Bill Holman, who arranged eight of the songs, Volume 7 serves as a tribute to that certified genius, who also plays tenor throughout. “There was no one like Bill,” Gibbs says. “He had a hand in just about every important band. While I’m not going to say he was the best, maybe he was. He certainly was the most unique. He was doing all kinds of things, some very experimental.”

Holman’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” trades in its usual romanticism for bracing back-and-forth volleys by Gibbs’s sizzling vibraphone and the unison horns. Other memorable arrangements on Volume 7 include Paich’s rapturous setting of the Tommy Dorsey hit, “Opus One” (which originally featured Buddy DeFranco, with whom Gibbs would co-lead a quintet into his eighties), and Flory’s razor-sharp treatment of “Flying Home.”

The latest and possibly final Dream Band collection also celebrates the innovative genius of Wally Heider, who died in 1989. “I told him I wanted all the horns to be on the same level,” says Gibbs. “And I wanted the drums up front because without that excitement from the drums, I don’t have the exciting band that I want. Wally captured it all beautifully. He makes it sound like you’re sitting right in front of the band.”