Terry Gibbs: Dream Band, Vol. 7: The Lost Tapes, 1959

Someone once asked Terry Gibbs how it was possible that if you took his side men, or some subset of them, and put them together in another band, they never quite sounded as good. Gibbs replied, modestly, that it was all in the arrangers. He got the best arrangers, like Bill Holman, Marty Paich and Med Flory. Others did not. And so the story went.

It would have been tempting to ask if, perhaps, Gibbs had not underestimated another element in the formula: Terry Gibbs himself. If the first thing someone hears on listening to Gibb's 1959 Dream Band recordings is not Gibbs frenetically urging the band to, well, swing harder, then what does a listener hear? In March 1959, Gibbs took his remarkable collection of session and West Coast players into the Seville Club in Hollywood and counted off, with insistent urgings of "watch your feet, watch your feet!" on "Don't Be that Way." If a listener was expecting Edgar Sampson and Benny Goodman ca. 1937, no way. As Bob Florence said, the band projected sheer "lift you off your chair" with its power. It is an honest if subjective evaluation that this kind of exciting hell-for-leather part-your-hair sort of big band has largely disappeared. Today's players may be technically superior, but Gibbs or Woody Herman's pedal-to-the-metal leadership is simply not there. It is painfully obvious.

The original series of Dream Band recordings were engineered and recorded live at both the Seville Club and the Sundown Club in Hollywood by Wally Heider, with a jaw-dropping collection of musicians who must have showed or subbed as alternative commitments permitted. A strictly informal count says there were originally six volumes, but not everyone is blessed enough to have them all.

So from whence issued The Lost Tapes after being in hiding for more than 60 years? To hear Terry tell it (and he is alive and well on the Internet as a centenarian, no less) his son, drummer Gerry Gibbs, digitized every recording of his in 2024 and Terry came across a file labelled "1959 Jazz Party" which mystified him.

As Terry recalls, he immediately recognized the Dream Band, but it took a little longer to place them at the Seville Club. Actually it turns out that some of the recordings were made at the Sundown Club as well. What are they? A listener suspects alternative takes, maybe from a different show or a different night. But they are most emphatically not duplicates as some comparative listening instantly demonstrates. The arrangements are the same, of course, but the solos, especially of the side men, are quite different. Whether one set is clearly better or preferable to another is, of course, a matter of taste. Listening to Terry tell the band "go home" on an out chorus is as much of a kick as it was the first time around. Seeing what Joe Maini or Bob Enevoldsen can come up with on another take of "Opus One," or whether Lou Levy is going to play a chorus at all is just another reminder of what a superb group this was. Of course, "Opus One" is a famous shapeshifter with one recorded version, One More Time (Contemporary, 2002) featuring a battle between Charlie Kennedy and Joe Maini. That must have been a "spontaneous" outburst, one writer has suggested. Certainly...

Happy 100th Birthday (October 13, 1924), Terry. This is quite a gift to give to your fans!

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