Goodman, Miller and Some Voodoo

The most uneven Hollywood Bowl jazz season of recent memory opened Wednesday night with a program that defined, in miniature, both the upside and the downside of this year’s scheduling.

Start with the opening act, Ken Peplowski’s Tribute to Benny Goodman Big Band. Peplowski is a fine clarinetist, thoroughly adept in styles reaching from swing to bebop--a meaningful presence in any jazz setting. But what really made his performance so special was that anonymous tribute band, which was, in fact, a virtual Southland all-star assemblage. It included--among others--saxophonists Gary Foster, Lanny Morgan and Pete Christlieb, trombonist Andy Martin, trumpeters Frank Szabo and Warren Luening, bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Frankie Capp. That’s a world-class group, by any definition, yet none was mentioned in the program.

Despite the anonymity, they played a set that was far and away the musical highlight of the evening. Goodman specials such as “Don’t Be That Way,” “Down South Camp Meetin’ ” and “Sing, Sing, Sing” were rendered with an authority and vitality surpassing the original recordings. Peplowski’s high-speed romp through a small group version of “Avalon” rivaled even Goodman’s better efforts.

The soloing from Morgan, Martin, Luening and Christlieb was equally impressive--ironically bringing the full flavor of bebop to the music of Goodman, a bandleader who resisted the genre for most of his career. The spirited jitterbugging of four pairs of dancers added an appealing touch to a program, underscoring an era in which jazz and popular music were a happy musical couple.

The Glenn Miller Orchestra’s appearance paid tribute to the same era, while minimizing the jazz links. Nearly 60 years after Miller died in a wartime plane accident, his music continues to find audiences. And classic swing items such as “Tuxedo Junction,” “In the Mood” and “American Patrol” generated predictably spirited responses from the surprisingly large crowd of more than 13,000. Although a few non-Miller items were included--”A Tisket, A Tasket” and, curiously, a big band version of Lennon & McCartney’s “Here, There and Everywhere”--this was essentially a nostalgia program, important primarily as a reminder of the continuing allure of big band music.

Nominally headlining the bill, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played with the sort of busy vitality that makes the band so attractive to its fans. Despite an identification with the swing revival movement, however, its performance had a lot more to do with the ‘40s small-band jive of Louis Jordan and the ‘50s jump music of Louis Prima. Full of manic rhythm and energy, perfectly matched to the gymnastics of the dancers, the Voodoo Daddy players were at the opposite end of the creative musical spectrum from the captivating work of Peplowski and the Goodman tribute band.