Bill Holman: Journey in Swing Time

By John McDonough I Oct. 8, 2024

Holman’s writing or playing was documented in an astounding 552 jazz sessions over the course of more than 70 years.
(Photo: Lesley Bohm)

Chronology aligned the timeline of Bill Holman’s music education with a remarkable precision, positioning him to intersect with a destiny that in 1998 led critic Gary Giddins to pronounce him perhaps “the premier living jazz orchestrator.” When he died on May 6 in Olive, California, two weeks and a day short of his 97th birthday, his career had clocked nearly a century of big band history from ballroom jitterbugs to classroom academics.

Born in 1927, he reached early adolescence as the first swing bands hit him like a missile at an impressionable age. His ear was inspired by the sweeping flights of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, leading him to take up the clarinet when he was 12. The writings of Jimmy Mundy, Eddie Durham, Jerry Gray and Fletcher Henderson grounded him in the fundamentals of the jazz ensemble.

By high school the more nuanced vocabulary of Eddie Sauter, Sy Oliver and Strayhorn-Ellington was expanding the literary horizons of swing. They were his immediate generational predecessors as World War II briefly stalled his trajectory as a musician, composer and arranger.

By the time Holman exited the Navy in 1946, big bands were nearing life support, no longer the arbiters of popular music. As their commercial supremacy dimmed, however, their artistic options flourished. They found new frontiers of expression and more implicit ways to swing. No longer expected to generate hit records, producers let them have their way, and a young generation of composer-arrangers (Bill Russo, Shorty Rogers, George Russell, Johnny Mandel, Bob Brookmeyer, Ernie Wikins) were liberated to follow their muse and experiment with new thinking.

This was the state of the big band when Holman abandoned a budding engineering career to study music under the G.I. Bill with Wesley LaViolette, whose other pupils included Shorty Rogers, Neal Hefti, Andre Previn, Jimmy Giuffre, even Stan Kenton and Nelson Riddle. In December 1948 he made his first records on tenor with the Ike Carpenter band. It was the beginning of what would become one of the most prolific footprints in jazz history. Holman’s career would continue for more than 70 years, during which his writing or playing would be documented in an astounding 552 jazz sessions — more than any contemporary arranger of the post-war generation, including Quincy Jones (273), Hefti (424) and Rogers (509). His vast library lives on in jazz education.

Holman’s most direct early influences were Russ Garcia, with whom he studied, and Gene Roland, who brought him into Kenton’s imperial orbit early in 1952. It’s hard today to imagine how hot Kenton was then. Literally all of the great legacy big bands were either gone or struggling. But in 1954 Kenton’s stature swept him into the Down Beat Hall of Fame (third after Louis Armstrong and Glenn Miller).

Initially Holman sat in the Kenton reed section, but his arranging skills surfaced quickly. “When I joined Stan, I could write,” he told DownBeat’s Don Gold in 1957. “But I didn’t have a conception of my own. Fortunately, Stan was patient. The first six months I didn’t write anything, but I got to associate with some of the inspiring people in the band. When I started to write, Stan accepted everything I turned in.”

That was because the Kenton band in the early ’50s was a progressive think-tank of restless intellectuals. Many of the smartest young writers of Holman’s generation had converged around Kenton, who was hungry for challenging new ideas. The variety and depth of the collective repertoire were as rich as they were controversial, often within the Kenton ranks. Kenton was indulgent. “After I quit,” Holman later recalled in DB, “I tore the band down verbally to [Stan]. He went right out and recorded an album of my music. I thought that was extraordinary.” Holman became a pillar of the Kenton creative brain trust with its “positive antagonism.” In 1991 Mosaic Records collected the definitive portrait of that period in Stan Kenton: The Complete Capitol Recordings Of The Holman And Russo Charts.

Holman thought of forming a band in the late ’50s. But the security of Kenton was too valuable to trade for a solo life. It remained his principal platform through the decade, as he divided his time between playing, writing, and studying.

Born and raised in Southern California, Holman was at home among the rising modern stars of the West Coast jazz scene, most of whom were card carrying Kentonites or fellow travelers. He recorded only six albums as leader between 1954 and 1960, all accompanied by Kenton alums and the cream Los Angeles studio men. There wouldn’t be another for 27 years.

Beyond Holman’s documented jazz discography, Hollywood offered many lucrative but uncredited opportunities. He played on the soundtrack sessions of The Sweet Smell of Success. And when his 1952 “Invention For Guitar And Trumpet” somehow found its way into Blackboard Jungle three years later, no one was more surprised than Holman. “It was one of the worst pieces I ever wrote,” he later told DownBeat, “but I’ve made more money on it than anything else of mine.” In 1992 he arranged the soundtrack score for Glengarry Glen Ross. L.A. was an atmosphere in which commerce and art enjoyed an accommodating détente. It allowed the creative jazz impulse to explore far and wide, but in the comfort of a good life.

Holman was not an avant-gardist. His was loyal to his jazz roots. “I’ve always tried to write things that sound like jazz,” he explained to DownBeat. “No Bach revisited. … I always write as if I’m playing. When I write I often play passages on my horn in order to preserve the improvised mood. Usually, I find a fragment and build on that. I come up with the fragment by thinking in jazz terms. I’ve never used a melody that is classical sounding. … It’s the correct plane for jazz.”

Perhaps that’s the reason so many different bandleaders — Woody Herman, Harry James, Terry Gibbs, Benny Goodman, Buddy Rich — felt safe in Holman’s hands; why leaders as diverse as Kenton and Count Basie each could build whole albums around his writing: Kenton Showcase: The Music Of Bill Holman (Capitol, 1954) and I Told You So: Count Basie (Pablo, 1976). Holman scored “Norwegian Wood,” “Ready Mix” and “Midnight Cowboy Medley” for Rich. Vocalists sought out Holman: Sarah, Ella, Peggy Lee, Patti Page, Natalie Cole and Tony Bennett. In his later years he worked and recorded with many of the finest European ensembles. DB