How Jazz Went from Hep to Highbrow in One Met Opera House Show

 

Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Oscar Pettiford, bass;  and Billie Holiday, thrush in the Esquire Jazz All Star concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Eighty years ago on January 18, 1944, thirty or so years after Jazz burst from the streets of New Orleans and into the speakeasies and hearts of Americans, the music finally crashed through a glass ceiling into respectability as an art form with an all-star concert broadcast from the hallowed stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

On hand playing on their own and in collaboration were Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Roy Eldridge, Jack Teagarden, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo, and a couple of girl singers—Billie  Holiday and Mildred Bailey.

                                        The poster promoting the concert.

The concert had its origins in the desire for the magazine to carve out a new niche among publications.  Esquire had been founded in the depth of the Depression in 1933 as a men’s magazine competing in a genre that had been dominated by smoker magazines along the lines of the venerable Police Gazette that mixed sports, scandal, sensationalism, titillating but safely risqué humor, and pictures of pretty girls clad a scantily as the Post Office would allow.   The new magazine was produced on slick paper with modern design elements like industry giants Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post.  It aimed for a more urban and upscale readership than its competitors.

In its first few years the magazine struggled to find and identity and audience.  But by the early 1940’s it had hit on a successful format built around the alluring Vargas and Petty Girl illustrations and contributions of fiction and reportage by literary heavy weights like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alberto Moravia, Andre Gide and Julian Huxley.  The magazine was becoming a hot commodity.

In the midst of World War II as war production cut back on the consumer products which were the back-bone of its advertising, the publisher and editors noted that per copy sales were still strong, especially among GI’s.  Looking forward to when those men would be coming home and when the cornucopia of consumer goods for them would come gushing to market, they wanted ways to secure continued loyalty of the reader base.

One way was to appeal to the cultural interests of the men.  What were they interested in?  The answer was on the radio every night.  Jazz and more jazz.  The Big Band Era was at its height, but smaller combos playing traditional jazz were still popular.  Why not initiate a Reader’s Poll to pick favorite performers on all of the instruments, singers, and band leaders?

                            Esquire touted its jazz at the Met program on its cover.
 

The first poll was launched with great fanfare in 1943 and the results, published in the December issue of the magazine, attracted wide attention.  And some scandal.  There had been previous jazz popularity polls.  But they had been based on feedback from record stores, which were dominated by the young, overwhelmingly white bobbysoxer fans of the Big Bands.  The results had inevitably skewed to white musicians. 

But the Esquire poll sampled the more sophisticated audience of the magazines targeted demographic.  Many newspaper critics were shocked when the results were heavily skewed to Black artists. 

On the other hand, many of the most hard core jazz fans clustered in the bohemian ghettoes of the big cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, found many of the honorees already passé and accused the magazine of ignoring new, cutting edge sound emerging from the small stages of smoky nightclubs.

Controversy, however, generated interest.  Publisher David Smart came up with the idea of an all-star concert featuring poll winners.  He moved with astonishing speed to set the event up.  By designating the show a benefit for the Navy League, a platform for War Bond sales, and securing the early interest of Armed Forces Radio, he wrapped the event in suitable patriotism which unlocked the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House, previously a guardian of high European culture.

New York's highbrow temple--the original Metropolitan Opera House.

Ticket sales were predictably brisk.  The New York Times reported that $650,000 was raised by ticket sales and 3,600 bonds were sold. 1944 Esquire All-American Jazz Concert at the Metropolitan Opera House was broadcast on NBC Blue network and around the world on Armed Forces Radio (distributed on discs) as part of the popular One Night Stand.

The legendary show centered on Armstrong and his early New Orleans style opening up to later mainstream jazz and the Big Band leaders playing together in tighter, smaller combos.  Missing almost entirely were the early strains of what would become the dominant post-war expression of jazz, bebop, only hinted at by a few licks by Coleman Hawkins.

That first show would be followed by two more in ’45 and ’46.  But it was the first one that took on legendary proportions.

 

That first show would be followed by two more in ’45 and ’46.  But it was the first one that took on legendary proportions.

Licensing issues in the United States prevented domestic release of recordings.  But when the European copyright on the Armed Forces Radio transcription disc recordings expired, the whole concert was issued on a double LP album in the Czechoslovakia in 1998.  Despite the less than stellar recording quality, the set is available in this country as an import, and many consider it an essential recording for anyone interested in the history and evolution of jazz.

 

 

Where the Biggest Stars Lit Up the Airways—The Lux Radio Theater

Two photos were somewhat clumsily put together for this panoramic view of a 1948 performance of the Lux Radio Theater in front of a large audience.  Jane Wyman and then husband Ronald Regan at the center microphone.

The final curtain went down on a dazzling era when the last broadcast of the Lux Radio Theater signed off on June 7, 1955.  The final program was an adaptation of MGM’s 1949 melodrama Edward My Son with Walter Pidgeon in the part played by Spencer Tracy on the big screen.  For more than twenty years the show had brought the biggest stars first of Broadway and then of Hollywood into American living rooms.  At the peak of its popularity that star power attracted audiences on a par with the hyper-popular radio comedians like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy, and Bob Hope.

The program originated on the NBC Blue Network from the studios of WJZ in New York City on October 14, 1934.  Conceived as a prestige production and frankly aimed at women with cultural interests and aspirations, it was aired on Sunday afternoons.  Lever Brothers’ top tier product Lux Soap was the sole sponsor and would remain so throughout the long run.  

The idea was to air one hour adaptations of well-known stage plays staring the top actors from Broadway and supported by a stable of reliable radio performers.  Each show would begin with a casual discussion between a fictional Douglass Garrick—the name a play on the famous 18th Century English actor/producer David Garrick and the stars of that week’s episode introducing and setting up the production.  His equally fictitious assistant Peggy Winthrop conversationally managed to deliver monologues extoling the virtues of the sponsor’s soap.

The first program was Seventh Heaven, a hit 1927 romantic melodrama set among the Paris lower classes during World War I.  Miriam Hopkins and John Boles starred.  The story was also familiar to movie audiences—the silent version starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell reaped the first ever Academy Awards for Gaynor and director Frank Borzage.

The program was a success, but Lever Brothers decided that the audience would be even bigger if the show moved to the West Coast and switched emphasis to film adaptations and the movie stars who were house hold names even in small towns far from the lights of Broadway.

The program jumped to CBS and began airing from Los Angeles on June 1, 1936.  The Garrick character was jettisoned and instead legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, with his carefully cultivated, clipped speech, was brought on as host.  It was the beginning of shows take off to top rung popularity.

Flamboyant Cecil B, DeMille in his jodhpurs and riding boots looked every inch the director when he took over Lux Radio Theater hosting duties in Hollywood,

The first production set the tone.  The Legionnaire and the Lady, starred Marlene Dietrich in the role she first played in the 1930 film Morocco and Clark Gable, played the part originated by Gary Cooper.  The next week both of the stars of 1934 The Thin Man, William Powell and Myrna Loy were on hand to recreate their most famous parts.

At first some of the studios were reluctant to release their titles for adaptation.  But they soon discovered that the big radio audiences translated to cash at the box office when the stars were able to plug their current films.  Several films also got a boost in re-release.  

Lever Brothers was prepared to lay it big money to lure even the biggest stars to its microphone.  $5,000 was the standard fee for big stars and major supporting players were also generously compensated.  In Depression Era that was a lot of money for two days work—a table reading and full rehearsal one day and the live broadcast the next—even for the biggest stars.  Hardly anyone ever turned them down.

James Stewart, Joan Blondel, and William Keightley in a radio version of Destry Rides Again.

Whenever possible the show cast the original actors from the films in the radio version.  But if someone was unavailable, other stars were pulled in, giving audiences a kind of alternative version of their favorite films.  Joan Crawford, for instance, took Katherine Hepburn’s part in Mary of Scotland and real reporter Walter Winchell and reliable character actor James Gleason starred in a version of The Front Page.   And sometimes actors got to stretch, playing parts outside of their usual genres or type casting like Robert Montgomery with his New York accent in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Some shows broke the mold like This Is the Army, Irving Berlin’s musical with no stars but an all GI cast or Walt Disney presenting Snow White with the cast uncredited.  Several films, including Seventh Heaven were done more than once over the shows long run with entirely different casts.

A short list of just some of the stars who appeared on the show included, Lauren Bacall, Wallace Beery, Jack Benny, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Bing Crosby, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Carole Lombard, Rita Hayworth, Bob Hope, Betty Hutton, Fredric March, Robert Mitchum, Paul Muni, Tyrone Power, Mickey Rooney, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, John Wayne, and Orson Welles.

The Lux Radio Playhouse in the heart of Hollywood attracted big crowds every week for live readings of favorite movies.

The show was broadcast in front of a live audience at the Lux Radio Playhouse at 1615 North Vine Street in Hollywood, a theater building owned by Howard Hughes.

DeMille’s long tenure as host came to an acrimonious end, a result of class politics and the post-World War II Red Scare.  DeMille was one of Hollywood’s most outspoken conservatives and an anti-communist who not only cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee but led the charge to get leftists out of the industry and especially out of the unions.  In order to appear on the radio DeMille had to be a member in good standing of the American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA).  The union was part of a campaign to convince the California Assembly to pass closed shop legislation which DeMille voraciously opposed.  The union assessed each member for a one-time payment of $1 to support the campaign.  DeMille refused to pay and was suspended by the union.  By contract with CBS he could not continue on the air.  DeMille later claimed that whole thing was a Communist sham to get him off the air.

Robert Taylor, Jean Harlow, Claude Rains and C. Henry Gordon in a Lux Radio Theater 1937 production of Madame Sans-Gene which aired shortly before Harlow's death.

The show continued with other hosts, but was soon facing other challenges, chiefly the rise of television which was disrupting both the radio and movie businesses.  With ratings falling, the show left CBS and returned to NBC in the fall of 1954, going off the air at the end of its second season there.

Meanwhile Lever Brothers launched Lux Video Theater as a half hour program on CBS-TV in 1950 broadcasting from New York.  In ’53 it, too, relocated to California and the next year expanded to an hour and jumped to NBC.  That show competed with other Golden Age of Television anthology shows like Playhouse 90, and the U.S. Steel Hour until it went off the air in 1957.

Today many episodes of the Lux Radio Theater have been packaged on CDs and are available by download to I-Pods and computers.

Hep to Highbrow—The Night Jazz Went Legit

Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Oscar Pettiford, bass;  and Billie Holiday, thrush in the Esquire Jazz All Star concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

On January 18, 1944, thirty or so years after Jazz burst from the streets of New Orleans and into the speakeasies and hearts of Americans, the music finally crashed through a glass ceiling into respectability as an art form with an all-star concert broadcast from the hallowed stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

On hand playing on their own and in collaboration were Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Roy Eldridge, Jack Teagarden, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo, and a couple of girl singers—Billie  Holiday and Mildred Bailey.

The poster promoting the concert.

The concert had its origins in the desire of a magazine to carve out a new niche among publications.  Esquire had been founded in the depth of the Depression in 1933 as a men’s magazine competing in a genre that had been dominated by smoker magazines along the lines of the venerable Police Gazette that mixed sports, scandal, sensationalism, titillating but safely risqué humor, and pictures of pretty girls clad a scantily as the Post Office would allow.   The new magazine was produced on slick paper with modern design elements like industry giants LIFE, LOOK, and The Saturday Evening Post.  It aimed for a more urban and upscale readership than its competitors.

In its first few years the magazine struggled to find and identity and audience.  But by the early 1940’s it had hit on a successful format built around the alluring Vargas and Petty Girl illustrations and contributions of fiction and reportage by literary heavy weights like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alberto Moravia, Andre Gide and Julian Huxley.  The magazine was becoming a hot commodity.

In the midst of World War II as war production cut back on the consumer products which were the back-bone of its advertising, the publisher and editors noted that per copy sales were still strong, especially among GI’s.  Looking forward to when those men would be coming home and when the cornucopia of consumer goods for them would come gushing to market, they looked for ways to secure continued loyalty of the reader base.

One way was to appeal to the cultural interests of the men.  What were they interested in?  The answer was on the radio every night.  Jazz and more jazz.  The Big Band Era was at its height, but smaller combos playing traditional jazz were still popular.  Why not initiate a Reader’s Poll to pick favorite performers on all of the instruments, singers, and band leaders?

Esquire touted its jazz at the Met program on its cover.

The first poll was launched with great fanfare in 1943 and the results, published in the December issue of the magazine, attracted wide attention.  And some scandal.  There had been previous jazz popularity polls.  But they had been based on feedback from record stores, which were dominated by the young, overwhelmingly white bobbysoxer fans of the Big Bands.  The results had inevitable skewed to white musicians. 

But the Esquire poll sampled the more sophisticated audience of the magazines targeted demographic.  Many newspaper critics were shocked when the results were heavily skewed to Black artists. 

On the other hand many of the most hard core jazz fans clustered in the bohemian ghettoes of the big cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, found many of the honorees already passé and accused the magazine of ignoring new, cutting edge sound emerging from the small stages of smoky nightclubs.

Controversy, however, generated interest.  Publisher David Smart came up with the idea of an all-star concert featuring poll winners.  He moved with astonishing speed to set the event up.  By designating the show a benefit for the Navy League, a platform for War Bond sales, and securing the early interest of Armed Forces Radio, he wrapped the event in suitable patriotism which unlocked the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House, previously a guardian of high European culture.

New York's highbrow temple--the original Metropolitan Opera House.

Ticket sales were predictably brisk.  The New York Times reported that $650,000 was raised by ticket sales and 3,600 bonds were sold. 1944 Esquire All-American Jazz Concert at the Metropolitan Opera House was broadcast on NBC Blue network and around the world on Armed Forces Radio (distributed on discs) as part of the popular One Night Stand.

The legendary show centered on Armstrong and his early New Orleans style opening up to later mainstream jazz and the Big Band leaders playing together in tighter, smaller combos.  Missing almost entirely were the early strains of what would become the dominant post-war expression of jazz, bebop, only hinted at by a few licks by Coleman Hawkins.

That first show would be followed by two more in ’45 and ’46.  But it was the first one that took on legendary proportions.

Licensing issues in the United States prevented domestic release of recordings.  But when the European copyright on the Armed Forces Radio transcription disc recordings expired, the whole concert was issued on double LP album in the Czechoslovakia in 1998.  Despite the less than stellar recording quality, the set is available in this country as an import and many consider it an essential recording for anyone interested in the history and evolution of jazz.