How High the Noon

Parable of Misplaced Loyalty
with thanks to Carl Foreman (1952)

Awakened on March 26, 1962, by a phone call from his panicked record producer, bandleader Stan Kenton felt an unaccustomed twinge of doubt, which he nearly failed to recognize because doubt was such an infrequent visitor.  After much coaxing, singing cowboy Tex (“Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'”) Ritter, had agreed to Kenton’s latest project, traditional songs of ranch and range backed by Kenton’s Mellophonium Orchestra, featuring its namesake brass instrument, which looked like a French horn with a hard-on.

But Ritter’s jitters about associating with progressive jazz, combined with his busy schedule, meant the recording session would have to take place that very noon!  Half a workday to arrange orchestral backgrounds for a dozen C&W staples such as “Empty Saddles” and “The Last Round-Up.”  Stan would have to round up help on absurdly short notice.

First call went to his current sidekick, a veteran big band arranger.  When he heard what Stan wanted, the man suddenly pleaded amebic dysentery and said he’d be confined to his bathroom for the remainder of the day, unable to write a note of music.  The phone in Stan’s hand went dead.

Kenton was disappointed but not surprised.  His motivation for doing a country album was to dispel such prejudice among jazzmen.  To Kenton, all forms of music were valid.  If he could sufficiently “Kentonize” country & western, it would open the minds of disbelieving fans and musicians from both sides of the musical fence.

Now that his first choice had weaseled out, Stan would have to recruit from his little black book of L.A. arrangers.  The list was short because, over the years, few men had been able to produce the Kenton sound.  Getting 10 or 15 brass instruments to both swing and instill awe was easier said than done.  Plus, there was no time.  Stan’s clock displayed 7:13 a.m.

And sure enough, when Kenton explained what he had in mind, Keene signed on.  “I’ll do cowboy charts for you, Stan.  No sweat.”  Kenton’s breath expelled involuntarily with relief.  “But you’ll have to do something for me.”

“Double the usual fee,” pledged Stan, aware it would come out of his own pocket.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Keene.

“Then what?”

“Conductor credit.”

Kenton was flabbergasted.  “Harve, nobody but me conducts the Stan Kenton Orchestra.”

“I don’t have to actually conduct,” Keene backpedaled.  “Just credit me on the album.  It’ll help me break into the studios.”

Kenton was suffused with revulsion.  “Harvey, you can’t blackmail your way up the ladder.”

“Then no deal.”  The extortionist stood his ground.

Livid, Kenton slammed the phone to its cradle.  After calming himself, his next call went to another ex-Kentonite.  This time the arranger’s wife said her hubby was out of town, but Stan could hear the guy in the background, cravenly coaching her.  Word spread fast in this business.  Showing class, Kenton thanked the woman and hung up.

No sooner had he put down the receiver than it rang with an incoming call.  A top arranger was on the line, bristling with indignation.

“Stan, it’s Herb Talbot.  You can count on me, Stan.  Hell, you’re the Moses of modern jazz!  How many other writers you got lined up?”

“None, yet.”

“For Pete’s sake, man, get a move on!  I’ll meet you at your office in half an hour.”

Touched and encouraged, Kenton hung up after him.  But good as he was, Herb Talbot wouldn’t be enough.

A burst of laughter erupted as Kenton, unseen, entered the hall.  “I’m telling you,” a man insisted with apparent satisfaction, “Kenton’s washed up, and this proves it!”  As the merriment subsided, Kenton strode up and slugged the man, sending him sprawling onto the sawdust-covered floor.

Wiping blood from his lips, the socked looked up accusingly.  “You had no call to do that,” he griped.  “I’m a trumpet player.”

The bandleader immediately regretted his violence.  “You’re right.”  He tried to help the fellow to his feet, but the trumpeter resentfully brushed aside Stan’s proffered arm, preferring to be hoisted by friends instead.

Now that he had their attention, Kenton addressed the assemblage.  “I guess you know why I’m here.  I need arrangers for an album of cowboy songs I’m doing with Tex Ritter.  Today at noon.”  He paused.  There was no response.

Finally someone spoke up.  “Stan, we all respect what you’ve done for progressive jazz, but country & western is skid row for arrangers.”  This elicited murmurs of accord.  “Most of us are young,” the speaker went on.  “Why should we risk it?”

“Look,” Kenton argued, “many of you started in this business playing in my band.  I came through for you then.  Now it’s your turn.”

The room fell silent.  Someone near the rehearsal piano observed quietly, “We’re arrangers, Stan, not martyrs.  You want us to ruin our reputations.”

Kenton realized there was no help for him here.  Shooting the onlookers a last, withering look, he stomped out to the parking lot, where he slid into his low-slung car.  Firing up its engine, Stan slammed into gear and glanced at the clock on his dashboard. It read 8:22.

His last hope was Bob Graettinger, composer of such classic Kentonia as “Thermopolae” and City of Glass.  True, Graettinger had died of lung cancer five years earlier, but to Kenton that was a minor inconvenience.

As he arrived at her bungalow, well-known Hollywood medium Madame Bulschitsky naturally claimed Kenton was expected.  What kind of psychic would be surprised to see someone?

Ushered into her darkened parlor, Kenton could soon make out Great Graettinger’s Ghost, hazily materializing in a corner, surrounded by papers, pens and books on music theory.

At first the Ghost seemed pleased to have been summoned by his longtime champion.  But when Stan explained the assignment, the Ghost hurriedly began packing the indecipherable hieroglyphs that passed for his scores.

“Bob, what is it?” asked Kenton.

Rolling up his portrait of Gustav Mahler, the Ghost declared, “Stanley, you ever hear of Socrates?”  Graettinger had a weakness for Greeks.

“Look,” snapped Kenton, “I have no time for games.  What’s your point?”

“Backing a cowboy singer, my friend, is hemlock to the hip.”

“Robert, I gave my word.”

“People make mistakes, Stanley—even you.  Better to admit being wrong than to stand by a lousy decision.  Loyalty for its own sake is fool’s virtue.”

Out of options, Kenton tried a Hail Mary.  In exchange for Ghostly help with the cowboy songs, Kenton promised to record, as the centerpiece of his upcoming concept album Artistry in Séance, Graettinger’s long-lost Tumult for Two Hundred Tubas.

Momentarily tempted, the Ghost paused in his packing.  “With real tubas?”

“Sousaphones are an abomination,” Kenton assured him.

Ruefully, the Ghost shook his head.  “Stan, you ought to know you can’t bribe an apparition.”

The image began to fade.  Madame Bulschitsky was losing her connection.

It would now be a race against the clock.  Stan overpaid the medium for her mediation and, with reckless abandon, drove to his office, where he found Herb Talbot pacing the floor.  Kenton greeted him with relieved recollection.  “I forgot about you, Herb.  I’m mighty glad you’re here.”

“What kept you, Stan?  The clock is ticking!  When will the other guys get here?”

“Other guys?”  Kenton faced him squarely.  “There are no others, Herb.  I couldn’t get anybody.”

“I don’t believe it!  This town ain’t that low.”  Talbot stared at him, as realization gradually sunk in.  “So it’s just you and me?”

“You want out, Herb?”

“I didn’t figure on anything like this, Stan.”

“Nor did I,” Kenton smiled without mirth.

“I mean, hell, I volunteered.  You didn’t have to call me.  But there’s a limit how much you can ask.  Why, this is career suicide!”  Talbot hurried to the door.  His hand on the knob, he stopped, ashamed.  “I guess you think I’m letting you down.”

Kenton said nothing.

“Look, Stan, you’re the greatest idea man in progressive jazz.  But this one didn’t pan out.  Call if off!”

“There isn’t time.”

Hurrying out, the arranger vowed over his shoulder, “You get some other guys to share the blame, and I’ll go through with it!”

There’d be no time for copyists, so he dispensed with orchestral sketches.  Instead, song by song, he laid out a page for each player, and wrote the parts individually.  This was a perilous way to work, but it did save time.  Likewise his decision to downsize.  Since this was the Mellophonium Orchestra, naturally he’d keep those.  And Kenton without five trombones was unthinkable.  In a wrenching but crucial choice, he threw out trumpets and saxophones, meaning he’d have ten fewer parts to score.  Listening to the orchestra in his mind, he swiftly transcribed what he heard.

In the hushed reception area, against her better judgment, Stan’s secretary peeked at her watch.  It said 9:19 a.m.  The recording session was set for noon.  Impossible!

And then, to make matters worse, Ann Richards stormed in, wearing a gold cashmere sweater above tight black pedal pushers and below an outraged expression.  The secretary didn’t dare stop the ex-Mrs. K.

Barging into the inner sanctum, she confronted a startled Kenton, hunched over his work.  “Is it true?”

“If you mean, am I doing a record with Tex Ritter, yes, it’s true.”

“Are you insane?  You’ll destroy everything I’ve worked for!”

“Ann, I don’t have time for this.”

“Is this payback for the divorce?  Now that I’m on my own, and embarked on a very hip career, you’re out to scuttle me.  Is that it?”  As Ann angrily stalked around the room, Kenton waited helplessly.  “First I posed nude for Playboy, which incidentally not only got me some attention, it helped you win their readers’ poll as best bandleader.”

“For the fourth year running,” said Stan matter-of-factly.

“Do you honestly think you’d have won again without my little skin show?”  She contemplated planting one of her stiletto heels in his famously furrowed brow.  “Then my LP came out with a cover photo from Playboy’s shoot.  The combo included Barney Kessel and Jack Sheldon.  How hip is that?”

“It’s a fine album, Ann.  You can be proud of that record.”

“Stanley, I’m begging you—drop this crazy idea, please!  They can get another band.  Isn’t Woody Herman in town?”

“Have you known me to back down from a challenge?”

“What, Kenton with his hero complex?” mocked Ann, who’d spent years in therapy at Stan’s behest.  “Better to go down in a Wagnerian blaze of glory!  Twilight of the freaking Gods!”

“Ann, this is my project.  I’m going through with it.”

Ann stepped close, locked onto her ex-husband’s eyes, and lowered her voice, speaking not without feeling.  “Stanley, we were married five years.  We have two wonderful children.  They’ve got their whole lives ahead of them.  Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Kenton brushed her aside.  “I have a week’s work to do in the next two hours.  Please leave.”  With his hand at her elbow, he guided her toward the door.

Ann knew well the sound of her ex-husband’s mind slamming shut.  She left the way she came in.

Grimly determined, Kenton resumed his task.  Except for rustling paper and scratching pen, the office became as quiet as a funeral parlor before mourners arrive.

When finally he finished, Stan swept charts into his arms and rushed out, tossing a folded folio sheet to his secretary as he passed.  Glimpsing its heading, her eyes filled with tears.  “LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT,” he’d written between the staves in his always steady script.  “TO BE FOLLOWED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEMISE.”

Outside, Kenton squinted against the glare of the midday sun.  He sensed, even without looking skyward, that the inexorable orb was approaching its glaring zenith.  Kenton threw his charts in the passenger seat and himself behind the steering wheel.  It was 11:48.

The result made even diehards wonder why he bothered, although his mission statement was clear.  The liner notes declare that Stan Kenton! Tex Ritter! “brings together the genius of Stan Kenton, master innovator and perennial leader in the field of contemporary music, and the deep, rich voice of the man whose singing seems to typify the spirit of bygone days on the rugged Western frontier—the inimitable Tex Ritter.”

The first thing we notice, however, is that the bygone days in question seem to be not the 1880s but the 1930s.  Three of the 12 songs were written by Billy Hill, a conservatory-trained violinist who bowed in with the Boston Symphony while still a teenager:

• “The Last Round-Up” was a #1 hit in 1933 for Jazz Age leftover George Olsen and His Orchestra;

• “Wagon Wheels” clopped through the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934; and

• “Empty Saddles” encumbered the film Rhythm on the Range (1936), starring everybody’s favorite ridin’ & ropin’ crooner, Bing Crosby.

Of similar vintage are “Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddle” (1935), “Cimarron” (1938), and “September Song” from Kurt Weill’s Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday (1938).

The remaining material is even farther fetched from the Old West, unless Hollywood, California typifies the rugged frontier:

• “Cool Water” (1941) is by Bob Nolan, Canadian-born leader of the Sons of the Pioneers, who lived most of his adult life in Studio City, just down the road from where Republic Pictures cranked out low-budget oaters for Saturday matinees.

• “Do Not Forsake Me,” the title song from High Noon (1952), and “Green Leaves of Summer” from The Alamo (1960), were penned by Ukrainian-born/St. Petersburg Conservatory-trained composer Dimitri Tiomkin.

• Even “Red River Valley” by this time owed its honored place in Americana less to a traditional 19th-century origin than to having flowed unforgettably through John Ford’s film masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Only “Home on the Range,” an 1870s folk song spread by cowboys and settlers from the Great Plains, reeks more of the Old West than the New Hollywood.  Alas, Tex Ritter’s corny emoting is as unconvincing as the lad who murdered his parents and then pleaded for the court to show mercy on an orphan.  This treacly abuse of Kansas’s official state song is enough to make even Jayhawkers gag.