I live in a place where we experience all four seasons of the year. My personal favorite is Autumn – at least since I quit being a full-time student and autumn meant the start of a new school year. Each of the other seasons has its high points, and I can understand the attraction others may feel towards them. Winter brings us indoors to cocoon near a warm hearth. Spring brings us outdoors in a colorful burst of renewed life, and summer is the time for recreation and vacations.

We spend less time thinking about those uncertain periods when one season transitions into another. By the end of November, fall is spent but winter is yet to begin. The start of March can be both winter and spring, or it can be neither. And who can tell when, precisely, spring ends and summer begins? We are in another of those transitions right now. The leaves are still green and attached to their trees and the daytime temperatures can be quite warm. Yet cooler days (and much cooler nights) are upon us to let us know that autumn is knocking on the door.

There are plenty of songs that we can associate with seasons. There are far fewer musical associations with those transitions between seasons. Today, however, I bring you two of them which are tangled together in a way that makes it almost impossible to consider either of them on its own.

Woody Herman was a clarinet-playing bandleader during the peak of the big-band era in the 1930’s and 1940’s. That era knew two titans of that niche – Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Both Shaw and Goodman were extremely competitive and agreed about few things, but one of them was that Woody Herman was not in their league as a player of the clarinet. They may have been right, and Herman’s popularity outside of the top tier of hit bands was confirmation of that fact. But where both Shaw and Goodman lost influence after WWII, Herman’s trajectory went in the opposite direction, and he became one of the most influential bands of the time.

The Herman band of 1945-46 has become known as “The First Herd”, and was a hard-charging, bop-influenced band full of top musicians. The band also boasted a top-flight young writer and arranger by the name of Ralph Burns.

The Herman Band was booked for a concert at Carnegie Hall in mid 1946, and one of the pieces to be performed was a piece written by modern classical composer Igor Stravinsky. The band needed some additional material for the concert, and Burns came up with a three-part piece that ran about nine minutes and was called “Summer Sequence”. The band recorded it in September of 1946. It is not an unpleasant listen, but it is also not well remembered. Then, within a few months Herman pulled the plug on the band for reasons most likely due to his wife’s worsening alcoholism.

Herman came back the following year with a new band (the Second Herd) that had significant changes in personnel. Late in 1947, Herman asked Burns to work up a fourth part of Summer Sequence that would feature his band’s new sound. What became known as “Summer Sequence, Part IV” was recorded December 27, 1947, and is the one that really had some legs.

The record begins with a theme developed in Part I of the earlier work. But where Parts I-III are OK pieces of music, Part IV is one of the most lyrical works of its era. Of any era, really. The piece is mostly a showcase for the trombone of Ollie Wilson and the tenor saxophone of a twenty-year-old Stan Getz, with Herman playing an alto sax between the two. That Getz solo (starting at about the 2:00 mark) is one of the loveliest I can recall.

To me, this recording does a marvelous job of capturing that seasonal transition from summer to autumn when we know that summer activities are coming to an end. It is not hard to imagine a still warm day at a nearly deserted beach when listening to Part IV, or maybe a cool evening on the porch when you have to debate yourself on the need for a sweater.

The following year, Burns took hold of the final phrases of “Summer Sequence Part IV” and built a new piece from them – it was called “Early Autumn” and was recorded December 30, 1948 – not long after Herman moved from Columbia Records to the Capitol label. This is another performance that is truly evocative of the season from which it gets its name.

As in the earlier record, Herman trades his usual clarinet for an alto saxophone, and Stan Getz provides another of the performances from which he made a decades-long career. One change from Part IV of Summer Sequence is the addition of Terry Gibbs’ vibraphone to the list of soloists.

I have a hard time trying to decide which of these two pieces does a better job of turning a brief part of the calendar into music – or which one I enjoy more. The happy conclusion is that such a decision is unnecessary. Each of them does a fine job of capturing a time of year that is a little of one thing yet a little of another. Both of these recordings have been favorites of mine for a long time, and it is at this time of the year when I am happy to remember them again.

(The entire 4 parts of “Summer Sequence” (Parts I-III from 1946 combined with Part IV from 1947) can be heard here).