A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of March
Tightly Stretched in the Sun
On March 28th in 1890, Paul Whiteman was born in Denver, Colorado. Originally a violinist, he became an American bandleader, later known as the King of Jazz for popularizing a musical style during the 1920s and 1930s that contributed to the introduction of jazz to mainstream audiences.
During 1917 and 1918, Whiteman conducted a forty-piece United States Navy band and, after the war, formed the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. In 1920, he moved his popular dance band to New York City where they made recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The popularity of these recordings led to national fame. Whiteman became the most popular band director of that decade. While most bands consisted of six to ten men, his band was more imposing with as many as thirty-five musicians. By 1922, Whiteman was overseeing twenty-eight ensembles on the East Coast and earning over a million dollars a year.
While most musicians and fans considered improvisation essential to the jazz style, Paul Whiteman thought that jazz could be improved by orchestrating the best of it with formal written arrangements. His recordings were popular both commercially and critically; his style was often the first form of jazz most heard during the era. Over the course of his career, Whiteman wrote over three-thousand arrangements.
Whiteman hired the best jazz musicians for his bands; these included such notables as Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Steve Brown, Wilbur Hall, Jack Teagarden and Bunny Berigan. He encouraged talented and upcoming African-American musicians and planned to hire many of them; however, his management persuaded him not to do so due to America’s segregation at that time. In 1925, Whiteman hired the team of Bing Crosby and Al Rinker to perform intermittently with his band to break up the selections.
Paul Whiteman provided music for six Broadway shows and produced more than six-hundred phonograph recordings. in 1942, he joined Capitol Records and produced such records as “I Found a New Baby” and “Trav’lin Light” which featured Billie Holiday. Whiteman appeared in the 1945 George Gershwin bio-film “Rhapsody in Blue”, the 1947 Dorsey Brothers bio-film “The Fabulous Dorseys” and as himself in the 1940 “Strike Up the Band”, among others.
After a long and prolific career as a band leader, Whiteman disbanded his orchestra in the early 1940s. He worked as a music director for the ABC Radio Network and hosted several television shows for ABC. The Paul Whiteman’s TV Teen Club from Philadelphia and Grady and Hurst’s 950 Club proved to be the inspiration for WFIL-TV’s afternoon dance show called American Bandstand.