Charlie Barnet led one of those bands that came perilously close to the top tier of the big bands that once ruled music. Whether we measure “top tier” musically or by popularity among fans, Barnet’s band is one of the great stories of “almost”. But maybe this was what happened when a guy led a band because he wanted to and because it was fun. Most other bandleaders had to keep going even when it wasn’t fun, because that was all they could do. Charlie Barnet was the rare guy who got to the place where it was no longer fun and he stopped – because he could afford to.

Charles Daly Barnet was born October 26, 1913 in New York, and his parents divorced two years later. Fortunately for Charlie, his maternal grandfather was Vice President of the New York Central Railroad, in addition to being involved in banking and other businesses. His family would have preferred that young Charlie choose banking or law after being educated in boarding schools, but those were not his thing. Instead, he took up the saxophone and snuck out to see jazz performances every chance he got.

By age 16 he was playing professionally and by 18 he was getting his start as a leader. Like his contemporary Artie Shaw, Barnet didn’t so much lead a band as he led a series of them. And like Shaw, most of what he did before about 1938 didn’t get much traction. In a later interview, he confessed to turning down the song “In The Mood”, which helped catapult Glenn Miller to stardom. “I hated it. I still hate it” was his reason. But starting in 1939 things started to break his way.

In another similarity to Shaw, Charlie Barnet had no interest in being commercially successful if it meant playing music he didn’t want to play. His taste was for swinging instrumentals rather than the soft ballads for slow dancing. Barnet’s was sometimes called “the blackest white band in America”. This was partly because he hired more black players than was common at the time (Lena Horne was one of his first female singers) and partly because his band played in the more rhythmic styles favored among black musicians.

Barnet’s band may have been the only white band of that era to have multiple engagements at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater. And when Charlie’s band lost all of its music in a 1939 fire at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, it was Count Basie who offered Barnet his band’s arrangements so that Charlie could perform his next show. It seems that everybody in the jazz world loved Charlie Barnet.

In deciding on a few Barnet performances to share here, I was drawn to his later years. The following three records (from 1943 to 1949) represent three separate bands, and also show how Charlie Barnet was one of those leading the way into adapting bebop influences to a big band. Bebop was a huge force after WWII, and while some bands ignored it altogether and others borrowed bits and pieces, Charlie Barnet incorporated bop into his sound as much of anyone of his (by then) older generation.

“The Moose” is a 1943 recording, a period when the Barnet band was riding at his highest. I find this record interesting because it is sort of a “proto bebop” arrangement. Bebop featured fast solo playing, and 17-year-old piano man Dodo Marmarosa put on a clinic for what an extended fast piano solo should sound like. The bebop style would also be known for short, punchy musical phrases, and those are there too. Nobody would have called this bebop in 1943, but in hindsight, we can see that some of the seeds were beginning to sprout in this band.

You would never know it from this record, but Charlie Barnet was a very good reed player, who could switch from tenor to alto to soprano saxophone, and even clarinet, often within the same song. He was not, however, the kind of leader who had to be the center of attention all the time. If Charlie dug a piece of music, he was happy to play it whether it featured his instrumental skills or not.

The next selection is a clip from a 1948 Twentieth Century Fox Movietone Melodies film, entitled “Charlie Barnet and his Band”. The tune is “East Side, West Side” (also known as “The Sidewalks Of New York”). The song was an old fossil from the 1890’s that was brought right up to date with a full bebop treatment. The vocal is by the largely forgotten Bunny Briggs. Briggs had been a popular tap dancer who started singing with bebop bands in the 1940’s. His vocal is in the style popular with beboppers of the day, and his motions in time with the music look like those I might make when I listen to something like this when nobody is watching.

Those old enough to remember The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson might enjoy watching a 21-year-old Doc Severinsen giving his all to a hot trumpet solo. And we get to hear a bit of Barnet’s full-bodied tenor sax sound, as well as a snippet of his abilities with the uncommon (for the time) soprano sax. (If you can’t get enough of this band, you can watch the number that precedes this one in the film here.)

Barnet broke up his 1947-48 band not long after the above film was made. He was becoming disillusioned with the music business, which he was not finding as fun as he used to. But he gave it one last try, forming what would become his last full-time band in 1949. Stan Kenton’s band had gone dormant and Charlie picked up some of Kenton’s men. Also, he must have taken a liking to Doc Severinsen because Doc was back in this group.

This 1949 Capitol recording of “Charlie’s Other Aunt” was a thoroughly modern arrangement that captured the very last days of the big band as a normal choice in instrumental jazz. Unfortunately, the economics of the band business were dire by this time and slim bookings could not pay the high expenses. Tastes were changing and modern styles were not bringing out the dancers as they had a decade before. When faced with the choice of adapting to chase an audience or quitting, Barnet chose to walk away – at age 36.

Being one of not very many heirs to his family’s holdings allowed him to live out his days in a comfortable life with the last of his 11 wives (to whom he was married for 33 years) in Palm Springs, California. Barnet would occasionally put together a group for a special occasion, but after the 1960s he was completely done with it. He lived a life of ease, broken up with outings on his 40 foot yacht, until he finally succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in 1991 at the age of 77.

Charlie Barnet had been one of the wildest of wild musicians, living on a diet of women, liquor and jazz music. His restless ways showed up in his multiple bands and changing styles, and it was a more-or-less mature Barnet who made these records. Coming from money, he had the luxury of playing what he wanted to play and working when he wanted to work. These selections show that he had some pretty good musical instincts, and I am glad that he kept at his music for as long as he did.