Buddy Childers

Lead trumpeter with Stan Kenton

Marion "Buddy" Childers, jazz trumpeter and bandleader: born St Louis, Missouri 12 February 1926; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Los Angeles 24 May 2007.

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. He told me how it happened:

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.

I actually left and rejoined the band eight times altogether. The first time was when I was called into the army in June 1944. I'd always had back problems. All it took was a couple of days of marching around and standing and I literally fell down and couldn't function. They put me in hospital and kept me in there for three months and then one day they told me I was out. Within a couple of months I was back with Kenton.

Childers worked with Kenton off and on from 1942 to 1954. In between he joined the bands led by Benny Carter, André Previn, Les Brown and Vido Musso. In 1951 he joined Tommy Dorsey, where he partnered the remarkable virtuoso Charlie Shavers in the trumpet section. Dorsey was a monster to work for, indifferent to the suffering of his musicians. On a long tour of Brazil Childers almost came to blows with him but stood up to the bandleader and afterwards they became good friends.

Leaving Dorsey he played for Georgie Auld and then rejoined the Charlie Barnet Band - he had been with Barnet in 1950. He worked as a freelance in Los Angeles and then spent seven years in Las Vegas from 1959 to 1966. He then returned to Los Angeles where he worked as a studio musician until the 1980s, working and recording under all the well-known leaders in the city. In the late Seventies he joined the big band led by the pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi and her saxophone-playing husband Lew Tabackin, recording and touring Europe with them. From 1983 he worked as music director for Frank Sinatra Jr's backing band.

He proved what an emotional man he was at a Stan Kenton Convention at Egham, Surrey in 1996, when he broke down and cried whilst explaining to us the enormous difficulties the trumpet section had had to overcome when he led it through a complex passage in Kenton's "Concerto to End All Concertos".

He returned to London in April 1997 to play at the Pizza Express and a couple of months after that he proved his eloquence and total recall when I interviewed him at the Jersey Jazz Festival; the resultant article ran to more than 10,000 words.

Childers also had a successful career as a photographer. He led his own big band at various times in Los Angeles and proved himself a worthy soloist on many occasions over the years. He battled with cancer for almost a decade but as recently as a year ago he was playing from his wheelchair at jam sessions in LA.

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Maynard Ferguson
TPO/MF Tribute Page

Maynard Ferguson: Trumpeter, flugelhornist, valve trombonist, bandleader, b. Verdun (part of Montreal) 4 May 1928.

Maynard passed away late last night in California from kidney failure.

After recently completing a new live recording and closing out his amazing performing career with a historic run at Birdland last month in NYC, Maynard Ferguson passed away peacefully in California Wednesday evening.

As a child he studied piano and violin, and played the latter instrument in a Fox-Movietone short. Taking up the trumpet at nine, he was a member in his teens of dance bands led by Stan Wood (saxophonist), Roland David, and Johnny Holmes (his older brother Percy, a baritone saxophonist, also played for Holmes) and studied 1943-8 at the CMM with Bernard Baker. Ferguson was heard frequently on CBC radio and on one occasion played a “Serenade for Trumpet in Jazz” written for him by Morris Davis. While leading his own band in the Montreal area and in Toronto during the mid-1940s Ferguson came to the attention of US bandleaders. As Paul Bley recalled (Montreal Gazette, 28 Oct 1978), “Maynard would always open the show, and he played three octaves higher on trumpet than anyone else ... you ought to have seen the jaws drop on the visiting musicians.”

Ferguson went to the USA in 1948 and worked in turn in the big bands of Boyd Raeburn, Jimmy Dorsey, and Charlie Barnet until 1950. It was during his term 1950-3 with Stan Kenton that he first received great public acclaim, winning the DownBeat readers' polls for trumpet in 1950, 1951, and 1952. He made his first records under his own name in 1950, for Capitol, leading the Kenton band of the day.

After playing 1953-6 in Hollywood studio orchestras under contract to Paramount and recording with small groups (his own and others), he formed the Birdland Dreamland Band to perform at the New York jazz club Birdland. This was the first of several 'small' big bands (12 or 13 musicians) with which Ferguson toured until 1965, appearing at festivals and in clubs and concerts. He then turned briefly to a still smaller ensemble, although he performed and recorded at Expo 67 with a big band and a sextet, both comprising Montreal musicians.

Ferguson spent a year in India studying meditation and lecturing on music, then moved in 1968 to England. It was with a 17-piece English band, which combined the orchestral conventions of jazz and the rhythmic vigour of rock, that he regained and even surpassed his former popularity. The band made its North American debut in 1971, and its recording of “MacArthur Park” was popular early in the decade. With New York as his home base after 1973, Ferguson gradually replaced the English musicians with young US players, reducing the band again to 13. His recording of “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme from the film Rocky, was a major hit single (by the standard for pop intrumentals) 1977-8; it was followed by a second lesser hit in 1978, the theme from the movie Battlestar Galactica. His album Conquistador exceeded 500,000 in US sales.

In the mid-1980s, by which time Ferguson had moved to Ojai, Cal, he reduced his band still further and in 1987 introduced High Voltage, a fusion septet. By 1990, however, he was leading a more traditionallly-based nonet, the Big Bop Nouveau Band. Ferguson's extensive touring itinerary, which still found him on the road 8 months of every 12 in the early 1990s, has included many Canadian appearances. He performed on such CBC TV shows as 'Parade' and 'In the Mood' and, with his band, has played at the Stratford Festival (1958), in many concert halls (Massey Hall, PDA, etc), at Canadian Stage Band Festival (MusicFest Canada), regularly during the early 1980s at Ontario Place, and in 1982 and 1990 at the FIJM. He also played solo trumpet in the opening ceremonies of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Several Canadians have been members of his bands - eg, the singer Anne Marie Moss, the tenor saxophonist Georgie Auld, and the trombonists Rob McConnell and Phil Gray. Kenny Wheeler composed and arranged for Ferguson's English band.

While Ferguson's dramatic virtuosity in the extreme upper registers of the trumpet (extending with ease to double-high 'C') and the bravado and invariably au courant style of his band have taken his popularity beyond the jazz world, they also have brought him a certain amount of critical disdain. Typically, the FIJM aside, the Ferguson band was rarely heard at the Canadian jazz festivals that flourished in the 1980s. His tendency towards exhibitionism - his grandstanding high notes and his use for many years of an aria from I Pagliacci as an encore - has led to his dismissal in some quarters as a mere showman. However, much of his work in the small-group context reveals a mature improviser whose high-note facility becomes a well-integrated aspect of an expressive and lyrical style. A natural leader, Ferguson has shown the ability to form and mould an ensemble of young musicians, and to infuse it with his own considerable energy and enthusiasm.

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