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Buddy Childers

Marion "Buddy" Childers, jazz trumpeter and bandleader was born St Louis, Missouri. Playing lead trumpet for a big band is like being a carthorse. It's one of the most demanding jobs in music requiring not only great musical skill and timing, but also stamina beyond man's normal allotment. Buddy Childers was, for half a century, one of the best. He played the role in the most demanding band in the world, that of the progressive leader Stan Kenton.

Another trumpeter with Kenton, Jack Sheldon, famously recalled that Stan stood in front of the band wanting louder, louder. "It didn't matter whether you played the music as written because it was so loud that nobody could tell whether you were actually playing or not." It was not unknown for Kenton's lead trumpeters to pass out on the stand from over-extending themselves. It happened to Al Porcino, the iron man of the horn, and also to Childers, as he recalled:

"It was at the beginning of the job during the band's theme "Artistry in Rhythm". I was playing a high D, which isn't that high as trumpet parts go, but I had to hold it for four incredibly slow bars and the next thing I knew I was on the floor on my back with my horn still at my mouth and Stan was leaning over the sax section peering at me".

The Kenton band book was so demanding that Childers and Porcino were among several of his trumpet players who wore abdominal supports. The need for these was an indication that the musicians weren't blowing correctly.

Buddy Childers first joined the Kenton band in 1942 when he was 16. It was rare for one so young to join a "name" band. Self-taught, he had taken up the trumpet when he was 12 and had joined the musicians' union in his home city of St Louis, Missouri and become a working professional at 14. Soon after joining the Kenton band he became its lead trumpet player.

"Guys in the trumpet section were always laying out while waiting to play a high note on the end of a song. One night three guys laid out and I was the only one playing the part. Stan got livid. He had told us not to do that, but they'd done it anyway. Stan turned purple with rage."

"You, you and you," he said, "you're fired!" He turned to me and said "You, you're my new first trumpet player." He thought better of that later, but it was too late and he kept his word". The Kenton band worked for a year backing Bob Hope's radio show.

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7
Album Review

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: Roots

Read "Roots" reviewed by Jack Bowers


Roots is a most appropriate title for this series of concerts by the Stan Kenton Orchestra recorded in 1944-45 on behalf of the Armed Forces Radio Service. While the sessions do include a handful of staples from the Kenton book ("Eager Beaver," “Reed Rapture," “Tampico," the well-known “Artistry in Rhythm" theme), it's clear that Kenton and the orchestra hadn't yet developed the singular persona that enabled it to safeguard its place among the front ranks of contemporary big bands until ...

4
Album Review

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: In a Lighter Vein

Read "In a Lighter Vein" reviewed by Jack Bowers


Stan Kenton was a man of many moods, as was his intrepid and popular orchestra, which endured until his passing in August 1979 and whose renown is kept alive even today by the Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra. Kenton dons his carefree hat on In a Lighter Vein, an assortment of straight-ahead themes from the orchestra's jazz library, preserved in five concert performances from 1953-55 beneath the umbrella of NBC radio's All Star Parade of Bands. Original compositions ...

4
Album Review

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: Concert Kenton

Read "Concert Kenton" reviewed by Jack Bowers


There's no question that Stan Kenton led one of the more successful and popular orchestras of the storied Big Band Era, winning various yearly polls while drawing large crowds to his jazz concerts and dance performances from coast to coast. But Kenton always wanted something more: to enlighten as well as entertain. Music, he felt, should be cerebral as well as visceral. And so he formed the Neophonic Orchestra to play the sort of forward-looking jazz he felt many listeners ...

13
Profile

Buddy Childers

Read "Buddy Childers" reviewed by Robert Spencer


The Big Band sound of legend, the Big Band sound of Duke and Basie and the Thundering Herd, the Big Wide Enormous Fat Sound, is alive and well. The Big Band sound is alive and well and living in the horn of Buddy Childers. Mr. Marion Childers turned 75 on February 12, and from the sound of his recent releases, he's playing as strong a trumpet now as he was in 1942, when Stan Kenton hired him at ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Roots

Submarine Records
2024

buy

Concert Kenton

Sounds of Yesteryear
2020

buy

In a Lighter Vein

Sounds of Yesteryear
2020

buy

Artistry in Jazz

Candid Records
2008

buy

Buddy Childers Quartet

Bizarre Planet Entertainment
1956

buy

Something Else

Bethlehem Records
1956

buy

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