© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
It's no mystery what Stan tried to do. He did the same thing that all composers, all serious artists, have always done. He was trying to extend the form, that's all. He was—he was—the word innovator is right. Stan was an Innovator.
The following interview is drawn from Lillian Arganian’s Stan Kenton The Man and His Music [1989].
One can only wonder what the results may have been like if Allyn Ferguson’s “The Orchestra,” as described toward the end of this interview, had blended with Stan’s Neophonic Orchestra from the mid 1960s and continued to expand the Kenton band’s direction along the lines that Allyn delineates.
“Unfortunately, we live in a society in which popularity does not equate with excellence. You either learn to deal with it or you in some way destroy yourself. Stan had, I think, a remarkably large audience, for the kind of thing he was doing. Because of his charisma, because of a lot of things that were extra-musical. And he was successful — very successful, at what he tried to do.
L.A.: How did you first meet him?
FERGUSON: I met him years ago. I met him probably in 1941.
L.A.: Really! All the way back to 1941?
FERGUSON: Oh yeah, absolutely. The old Balboa band, I remember.
LA,: Did you hear them at Balboa?
FERGUSON: Oh, sure. The band made a big fuss on the West Coast. It was the biggest shock of my life when I heard it for the first time.
L.A.: Why a shock?
FERGUSON: Because it was something 1 could relate to. He was doing something very, to me, very important. I was only fourteen years old when I first heard that band. It was an emotional trauma to hear it. But that's true of every young aspiring artist in this society. You start out with, you know, really wild eyes. If you don't, there's no place to go.
L.A.: Oh, elaborate!
FERGUSON: The rhythmic element was different, the real stiff off-the-beat stuff. That was new, but it wasn't the most important thing. What he was doing was really experimenting, that's what was exciting. The band was acting as a unit. There were a bunch of guys together, doing something that they could believe in, and it wasn't what everybody else was doing. It was a West Coast band. I met Stan when the band was in San Jose. I was born there, and I was living up in Northern California in those days. I don't know, I just always knew the band and always knew Stan. At one point, a very good friend of mine, a trombone player, wanted to try out for the band. This must have been 1940, '41. And he asked me to come and play piano for him. Stan loved the way he played but for some reason I don't remember, my friend was never with the band. Stan was impressed with my piano playing. I sat down and we started talking. So that's how he remembered me. Years later I started doing things with him. He wanted to take lessons from me at one time.
L.A.: What did he want you to teach him?
FERGUSON: Some piano voicing, but mainly film writing, and a lot of things that he felt he lacked.
L.A.: Did he want to do film writing?
FERGUSON: Ya. He did a pilot for a couple of series at Warner Brothers. And he didn't have any training for that.
L.A.: He did want to study a few times at certain points in his life, I know.
FERGUSON: Stan never had very much musical education. And he was very much in awe of people who had degrees, for no reason at all. He respected the degree, rather than the person — not always, but the degree meant something to Stan. Those of us who came out of the academic world were not so sure that that was that important. But it did mean a lot to him. So, he always thought of me as something special because I had a Ph.D. from Stanford and I'd studied with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger and all those people. Stan was sort of in awe of not what I could do, particularly, but my background. And so, we were very good friends.
L.A.: Had you written for him prior to the Neophonic?
FERGUSON: Ya, I did charts for him. In the mid-fifties. Ballads and tunes and whatever he wanted. Nothing that he recorded that I can remember.
L.A.: Was this post-Innovations?
FERGUSON: About the same time.
L.A.: Did you write for the Mellophonium Orchestra? That would have been after Innovations. That's a possibility for you, with your classical background.
FERGUSON: Ya. I did some of that. I had a good time. The Neophonic Orchestra of course had French horns in it. And that was fun.
L.A.: How did the Neophonic work come into being?
FERGUSON: Stan knew that for my Chamber Jazz Sextet in the fifties I'd used forms like the caccia [Literally, “hunt” or “chase” in Italian. In 13th century Italian musical forms, a three-part canon. The English catch, a 17th-century type of round.]. When he called me to do the Neophonic thing he said "Will you write something that deals with one of the older forms?" He wanted that specifically. He wanted that fusion. I said, "I've been thinking about doing something with a fugue." And he said "Wonderful!" And so I did, I used a passacaglia and fugue. The passacaglia worked very well. And the fugue, the exposition section is almost a strict fugue.
L.A.: How did he feel about your work, once he premiered it? Did he talk to you about it?
FERGUSON: Stan loved it. He recorded only certain works from the concert.
L.A.: That's on the recording, I know.
FERGUSON: I remember he called me, and he said, "Yours is one of the few that I think we should record." The recording was made a year after it premiered. He talked Capitol into doing it.
L.A.: Thank goodness. We have something left of all that.
FERGUSON: Yeah, exactly.
L.A.: There's so much music that's been written that's disappeared. And it's got to be almost as good as what's on records.
FERGUSON: Oh, sure. That's part of the game.
L.A.: Did he quiz you on your "Passacaglia and Fugue"?
FERGUSON: Oh, yeah. He wanted to know all about it. When I said "Well, the exposition in the fugue is an absolutely strict formal exposition" well that didn't mean anything to him. He had never studied fugue-writing. And the passacaglia, he knew what I was talking about when I explained what it was, but he didn't know a passacaglia was a ground bass. None of that was a part of his equipment.
L.A.: What is the passacaglia form, exactly?
FERGUSON: Just a ground bass. It's a bass line, a bass pattern, upon which you build all different kinds of variations. And the pattern, the bass line, just repeats over and over again. The fourth movement of Brahms' Fourth Symphony is a passacaglia, for example. The passacaglia is a very interesting form. It was an obvious thing to do. It came from baroque music, even before, but it's been used by every composer ever since in one way or another.
L.A.: And he was fascinated by all this.
FERGUSON: He would seek people like myself out, that he thought could supply a lot of the technique that he didn't have, a lot of the understanding, the background that he didn't have.
L.A.: From the classical point of view.
FERGUSON: Exactly. That I guess was our attraction for each other. I looked at Stan as a prime mover and he looked at me as a person that probably could help him in areas that he was weak in. 'Cause he was realistic about his education. He always said he was gonna go back to school. Always. He used to threaten to take three years off and go to Stanford, you know. He used to tell me, "Oh, I'm going to Stanford." And he couldn't have taken three years away from that band if his life depended on it. That was his curse. That really is the thing that stopped him from doing anything else. When he wasn't doing it for even six months, he was a banana. I think to the day he died, the biggest heartbreak that he had was the fact that he didn't have any education to speak of. He really wanted that.
L. A.: You mean the whole music school bit? Composition, theory, history of music, and all this kind of thing?
FERGUSON: Sure, everything. Everything.
L.A.: He wanted a comprehensive background in music training.
FERGUSON: Absolutely. He really didn't know much about it. All that Stan knew about writing he had learned the hard way. He had a little bit of training, but pretty much he had learned by doing. He learned to write for his band by writing for his band. And then when other writers would come along, he used to be fascinated, and he'd say, "Why'd you do that?" Or "How come you took the saxophones and did that kind of thing?" And you'd say, you know, and he'd store it away. He was a good learner.
L.A.: Is your Stanford degree in music?
FERGUSON: Um-hm. Composition and theory.
L.A.: What attracted you to jazz?
FERGUSON: I was always interested in jazz. I was brought up with it. My father played with Paul Whiteman. My classical heritage was always a mixture. I studied trumpet with Red Nichols' father when I was four years old.
L.A.: My gosh.
FERGUSON: They were friends of the family. Red Nichols' father was an old,
hard bandmaster out of Ogden, Utah So I've always had those two elements of music in my background, classical and jazz. As all Americans should! All Americans should have that background. They should understand their music, they should understand their roots, they should understand their musical history.
L.A.: A lot of people think country western is our folk music.
FERGUSON: Well, country western really comes from Scotland and Ireland. It's all British Isles. Of course, it's been adapted and changed and everything, as jazz has, but it's a part of our folk music. I don't put it down. I think it's a very naive music, as is jazz most of the time. But that's what folk music is. All shades of it.
L.A.: Jazz was born here, actually, wasn't it?
FERGUSON: It was born here, but it has European harmonic roots. And African rhythmic roots probably. But it is a totally eclectic music. Some of it came from South America, some from Germany. It's all over the place.
L.A.: Stan always used to say that jazz only appealed to a minority audience. Why do you think this is so?
FERGUSON: Because jazz really started out to be utilitarian music. It started out as dance music. Then the musicians that got into jazz started to get serious about the music itself. And, as that happens, the music becomes more codified and it loses touch with its utilitarian purpose. When Stan came along and started changing tempos, for example, how the hell ya gonna dance to that? He lost all the dancers. So did Mozart, when he put a minuet in the third movement of a symphony. It was no longer a minuet. Nobody could dance to that. Bach did the same thing. A gigue in a Bach suite is originally a dance piece.
L.A.: I wonder what Copland would think of your doing music for jazz now.
FERGUSON: I was doing it then - he knew it then. I won a scholarship to Tanglewood with a concerto that I had written. It was a crossover piece — it had a lot of jazz rhythms in it. It wasn't harmonically derivative of that idiom. My education was in both idioms. I worked in jazz bands from the time I was 12. I also was a child prodigy on the piano, and I studied composition on the other side, and studied to be a "serious" writer, whatever that meant. The point is that I have always felt, and I still dearly believe, that the first great American composer is going to really understand his folk music, as Bartok did, and Stravinsky did. And our folk music is, after all, jazz.
L.A.: A lot of our American composers don't write that way at all.
FERGUSON: That's really where the problem comes. They don't understand jazz. They don't understand their own folk music. 'Cause there was a terrible snobbish bifurcation going on, which still exists, between so-called classical and popular, whatever that means — both those terms.
L.A.: Popular is everything else, right? (Laughs.)
FERGUSON: Yeah, I suppose, and classical should refer to a very short specific period in the history of Western music, roughly 1800 to 1840; that's what classical is. The whole thing is insane. Jazz was a poor relative. If you had culture, you didn't pay attention to it; it was dirty. I've thought about it in many ways, and researched it, and I think it has to do with the fact that we're a very young nation and a very insecure one and all of our culture came from Europe. It was transplanted. When I came up I was a serious musician, conductor, composer, in a society in which there is relatively no art. Those of us who are artists living in this society have an enormous problem trying to figure out how to deal with it. There've been great jazz musicians and some great people like Bernstein and Copland and so forth. But they didn't mix at all. What I'm saying is, that this person's gonna come along who is both. He is going to be steeped in his folk music. Now he's not gonna write jazz particularly. But he will have it so imbued within him — and at the same time will have a tremendous background in music and in the music of Western civilization, so that he understands the relationship to his history — that what he writes will come out totally different. It is going to be truly an American music. That will be the first great American composer. We are a young culture. It's maybe fifty years away.
L.A.: Did your thoughts about this lead to your desire to found The Orchestra out here?
FERGUSON: That was a dream I had going way back to 1964. And I used all kinds of forms in my Chamber Jazz Sextet while I was teaching at Stanford in 1956. There was a whole poetry and jazz movement on the West Coast that we started, with Kenneth Patchen, at the old Blackhawk jazz club in San Francisco. Kenneth was one of the great American poets. He's dead now, but he will yet be recognized as one of the great contemporary poets in America. We did an album back then which has recently been reissued. The kids listen to that today and they can't believe we did that in 1957. I mean it's far out by today's standards. We did jazz things and jazz-poetry, and it was all derivative of other forms of music. I was using forms like caccia and—caccia is Italian for chase, it's an old 13th century form; it's just a canon. An extended canon, one instrument started and the other followed. We did it in an attempt not to change jazz but to expand it. And to stop calling it "jazz." Which is, you know, really a terrible label. It doesn't mean anything.
Everybody means something different when they say "jazz." It's American music. The idea that I originally had with The Orchestra was to put together certain instrumentalists who could, given the right kind of compositions or composers, create a new music. Really, a new music. Or a new idiom, if you prefer. The time frame with Stan's Neophonic is interesting, because before Stan did that I talked with Max Herman and the musicians' union, and this was in 1963, I think, or '62, maybe. I did a piece, an album, which has just been reissued. It's a jazz version of Moussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition.
L.A.: You're kidding!
FERGUSON: No. It's on Discovery. It's a very faithful jazz version of the score, all in the same keys and everything. All I did was change it rhythmically a little bit and put some solos in and some improvisation. I'm proud of that. It's one of the best things I've ever done. I wrote it over a period of three years, while I was on the road conducting for Johnny Mathis, and I'd rehearse it with my band whenever I was in town. But I couldn't get a record company interested in it. "Pictures at a what?" Nobody could relate to it. Finally the guys in the orchestra said "Let's record it anyway, on our own." So we did. It was a wonderful band. Bud Shank, Paul Horn, who was the Promenader [the person walking around the exhibition; the main theme], Bill Perkins, Bill Hood, Jack Nimitz, Johnny Audino, Ollie Mitchell, Stu Williamson, Don Bagley, Johnny Crusano, Frank Capp....
L.A.: There are some good Kenton names in that list.
FERGUSON: It was out about three months, on Fred Astaire's label, Ava, and the company went broke. So nobody even heard it until about a year ago.
L.A.: If you were thinking along these lines when Stan called you for the
Neophonic, why did you agree to write for him instead of pursuing your own
idea?
FERGUSON: I hadn't formed anything at that time. I was thinking about what I wanted to do, but all I wanted to do was write. So when Stan called me I was delighted.
L.A.: Did he explain the concept of the Neophonic to you?
FERGUSON: Yeah. As a matter of fact, I recall the conversation. It was a mutual kind of thing, because he knew that's the kind of stuff I was doing and he said "Our ideas are similar."
L.A.: It's a wonder that you weren't even closer to him than you were, because you were two people going parallel toward the same kind of thing.
FERGUSON: You'd be amazed, in the business, people who do the same thing rarely see each other. I almost never see any other writers. I see lots of musicians. I would see Stan a lot. I used to hang out with the band. We were both good friends with Shorty (Rogers) and a lot of people from the band.
L.A.: But Stan knew you were interested in combining classics with jazz.
FERGUSON: Oh yeah. Yeah, we'd had some talks about it. When I wrote the "Passacaglia and Fugue" Stan was very impressed with the fact that I had combined a so-called classical form with a jazz feeling.
L.A.: That's what he loved.
FERGUSON: That's what he loved to think about. Stan couldn't relate to it from the side that I could, because he wouldn't have known a caccia if it had hit him in the face. It was all just spontaneous combustion with Stan.
L.A.: (Laughs.)
FERGUSON: It really was. In what I teach, now, I tell my students, this thing [pointing to the mind] is a computer, and it doesn't spit out anything that hasn't been put there some way. Stan had limited input, and a lot of output. He had a lot of energy. Very interesting kinds of energy. He was an incredible human being. A very dramatic person. You remembered everything Stan said. It was his magnetism. Pete (Rugolo) and Stan were ponderous writers. There was nothing delicate about anything that happened in that band. And if it swung lightly it bothered him. It was huge. ARCHITECTURE. Pete and Stan were architects. They really built great big things. Stan came up in an age when, if he had been educating himself, he wouldn't have had the band. So he did what he had to do. And he was a wonderful human being.
L.A.: His life really was his music, wasn't it.
FERGUSON: He really didn't have much of a personal life. I used to go over to his house on Alta Drive in Beverly Hills. He had, in the back, a big studio that he had built, I guess in a separate building, right on the back of the lot. And that's where he spent his time. His personal life was a disaster, from start to finish. It's tough to combine the two.
L.A.: Was your orchestra idea similar to Stan's Neophonic?
FERGUSON: Yeah, It's very close. Stan was really dealing with a band. That was the first thing. He was dealing with an expanded instrumental group that he understood. I mean five saxophones and five trombones and so forth, He could understand that. So he added horns. You know, that was sort of another thing that he could understand.
L.A.: Why didn't he have strings with the Neophonic? Would it have been too expensive?
FERGUSON: It would have been expensive, it is an expensive thing, and secondly I don't think Stan really felt strings. Stan loved the power of a bunch of horns blowing at him.
L.A.: Although he did have strings in the Innovations orchestras, and everybody loved that.
FERGUSON: Um-hm. Um-hum.
L.A.: The only problem with it being that he lost so much money on it.
FERGUSON: Oh I know. Stan, when Stan believed in something, he did it.
And the Neophonic itself lost money. And it was too bad, because it was a wonderful idea. The only thing that he really did wrong, he turned people loose. He turned the writers loose a little bit and didn't give them any direction. He didn't point them at all. And some of the guys just couldn't deal with that.
L.A.: Some of them loved it.
FERGUSON: Oh, yeah.
L.A.; From what I've heard. They said "Oh, wow, I can do anything 1 want."
FERGUSON: Well—ya, but you can't, That's the point. In art, you have to have a parameter. In painting, it's this size canvas, or whatever it is. And Stan didn't set the parameters. That was one of the problems the Neophonic had. But I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that the money was lost, that it was not supported. Those things are not very well supported in this society at all. That had nothing to do with Stan in particular.
L.A.: Stan had as his purposes, as I understand it, the following things: first, to encourage the composition and performance of contemporary music, and to help develop musicians capable of playing it; second, to serve as a clearinghouse for contemporary music, contemporary musicians, and information concerning contemporary music, and to serve in the dissemination of such music to universities, other cities and countries, and third, to sponsor and present the Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra — which he called "the first permanently established orchestra in the world devoted to contemporary music"— to extend its influence and performance, and to encourage the establishment of similar neophonic orchestras. He wanted to set them up all over. Wouldn't that have been wonderful?
FERGUSON: Absolutely.
L.A.: Stan's idea was really international in scope. He even formed what he called the International Academy of Contemporary Music to encompass all this. So this is probably on a broader scale than what you wanted to do. How does it compare with your aims?
FERGUSON: The idea of The Orchestra was to approach a true sort of new musical idiom through an aggregation of players. The idea initially was to put together a very unique combination of instrumentalists who would offer a whole new creative world with which to deal.
L.A.: Because they had the capability of playing anything?
FERGUSON: Exactly. Because they could deal with idioms. Various idioms that most orchestral players today can't deal with.
L.A.: In other words, it's along the lines of what Stan wanted to do, but not exactly the same thing. He wanted to develop musicians capable of playing this new music. That's slightly different from your idea. Rather than help develop them, you were hoping they already had it.
FERGUSON: That's right. My feeling is that the music will come from the players. And Stan more or less thought that the music was gonna come from the writers.
L.A.: He was really more into arrangers and writers.
FERGUSON: Ya, and he was into his band. (Laughs.) And he thought of it in terms of his band expanding. And I don't. I didn't at all. I thought of it in terms of a symphony orchestra, with all that that implies.
L.A.: A symphony orchestra playing indigenous American things combined with classical forms.
FERGUSON: Exactly right. Exactly right. For example, if you take a woodwind section, the same woodwind section that plays Rimsky-Korsakov in let's say a seven-voice chord or passage, if you can imagine those same woodwinds phrasing a thing rhythmically in a way that legitimate players don't do, that's just a very slight example. When you start to expand the technique of the orchestra you now have some creative ground to deal with that you didn't have before.
L.A.: Yes, I see.
FERGUSON: And that's what my idea was. Trumpet players that can play like Buddy Childers, and at the same time turn around and play a beautiful solo. So now the music that you can bring to this group is an entirely different kind of music. It's conceived differently, because you have people who can play in idioms that other symphonic players can't play. And you have opened up the whole creative process. What it is is the ability to walk both sides. If you put together ninety players like that, and you start to think about what this vehicle is, you now are capable of writing for this vehicle in an entirely different way, an entirely new way. You can write woodwind passages that don't have rhythmic roots in Europe. They have rhythmic roots here. So that through the personnel comes the music, as it's been throughout Western civilization. You could do things you couldn't do with any symphony, anywhere else in the world.
L.A.: Boy that's really—something new. That's strange. You're coming at it from here, let's say from this direction, and Stan was coming at it from here . . .
FERGUSON: Exactly.
L.A.: And you got this close . . .
FERGUSON: That's exactly what happened.
L.A.:.. . and then you split off; he died, and your orchestra thing . . .
FERGUSON: That's exactly what happened. My orchestra—uh—my orchestra—doesn't exist anymore. I may yet someday try to do what I'm telling you.
L.A.: You think you'll try to form another orchestra.
FERGUSON: I might. I don't know. The logistics of a ninety-piece orchestra are frightening. Stan's were bad enough at forty, or whatever.
L.A.: Why did you leave your partnership with Jack Elliott?
FERGUSON: I left because it was no longer a musical idea. It became a social idea.
L.A.: In what sense?
FERGUSON: Jack perceived that it was more important to make it a social thing so that it would be supported by a few people in Beverly Hills rather than an international idea, which is what I had. I think it's an international idea. It's the best idea I ever had. You have to broad-base it. I went to the local union in 1964 and said, "I think there ought to be a Hollywood orchestra that does this kind of thing." Jack and I had a commercial partnership; we shared an office and worked together, doing things like Charlie's Angels and The Rookies and the Emmys and the Grammys [television award shows]. At a certain point I kept talking about how I wanted to do this and he kept telling me I was crazy. When we first got together there was no thought of doing four concerts a year with foundation support. I don't want a foundation. I think that's totally wrong.
L.A.: How did you want to do it?
FERGUSON: Let's do one concert every once in a while. And let's do it when we can afford it, and let's do it when we've got the music to make it what we say it is.
L.A.: I heard the album of your first concert. I thought it was very good.
FERGUSON: The album was done when we were still together. It's a whole different thing than what's going on now. That concert was incredible. There was an “electricity” at that concert you couldn't believe. Everybody that was there would agree to that. Had we done this as a rehearsal orchestra, just as a musical idea, then I think it would really have lived, I think it would have been a very important thing. We'd have found some good music. It was really basically a problem of different philosophies about what we were doing. We didn't have to pay for rehearsals. That's another enormous argument that we had. When we put The Orchestra together we were entitled to rehearse for nothing.
L.A.: Through the musicians' union's rules?
FERGUSON: Sure. Absolutely. First three rehearsals we had were for nothing. What should have happened, what I wanted to happen with this thing was, the music should come in six months ahead of time. You want to send a score, send me one; okay, we'll look at it, we'll see what its merit is and so forth. And then we will have the time to rehearse it, to work it out, to learn it, to see what it's about; and then we can present it satisfactorily. Jack perceived it as a commercial situation. Now you set up a you-and-me situation, instead of us. I am going to pay you for rehearsing in my orchestra. Not: We're gonna build an orchestra together. Follow the difference? And that really I guess is the bottom, basic difference in philosophy as to what the problem was. My feeling about The Orchestra always was; we will get together, the players will all contribute, and so forth and so on. And it will be a learning experience for everybody.
L.A.: So then how did it actually come into being?
FERGUSON: I had done a couple of albums with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in England with a friend of mine, in which I experimented, writing an arrangement, for example, of "Here's That Rainy Day" as a symphonic tone poem. I felt that with some things under my arm I could interest somebody in this thing. First I met with some of the main string players in town to see if we couldn't put together a string section like this, in this town, that we could play some of these things with. And they said yes. Then I met with individual players to tell them my idea. We'd sit and talk and have dinner. Bud Shank, Bill Perkins, George Roberts, the brass players, all the way down the line. I got an idea for the instrumentation, how many people I wanted, and so forth. It was a logical outgrowth of what I had been thinking of for a long, long time, since I was at Stanford, which was 1956. So it was roughly twenty years before it came about. At our first three rehearsals we used two of the things from the Royal Philharmonic music and I did a special piece called "Statements for Orchestra," which was just a bunch of sections — bossa nova, pseudo-Dixieland, gospel — different movements that demonstrated what that orchestra could do that other symphony orchestras couldn't do, what it was capable of.
L.A.: I wonder what would have happened if Stan had lived longer and had perhaps got together with you and pursued this idea further.
FERGUSON: The last time I saw him was at Redlands. And we sat and we
were drinking coffee, talking about it. He had all these ideas; we gotta do this and we gotta do that. You say, "Oh yeah, we'll do it," and — and you don't. He really was interested in working with anybody who thought kind of the same way he did, and I certainly did, at that time. We always said that we would do something together. We never quite got around to it.
L.A.: The two of you! Oh, how interesting.
FERGUSON: What Stan did was important. Stan made a statement with his life, about jazz or whatever he was doing being more important than most people thought it was. And he was right. I think he had all the right instincts. He was totally a unique person. When Stan took the original, the Balboa band, on the road — now those guys were not extraordinary players, they were all a bunch of guys from Balboa that he got together, and they sat down — well what they did was create an idea. Together, And they performed the idea together. And it became something totally different.