The Original

Wolverines Classic Jazz Orchestra

KQRS-FM St. Paul, MN

1974

This was our first ever radio broadcast. We’d been establishing good reputation around town—got some good press from Will Jones of the Mpls. Star-Tribune re: our regular Sunday night gig at the Longhorn Saloon, downtown Minneapolis (we did 35 Sundays in a row).

We were a cohesive unit rehearsing every Saturday at the Pillsbury House (an old mansion converted to artist environments where several of us were caretakers of the building in exchange for free rent.

And we had some especially talented players: Mark Bryn, Piano; Joe Demko, Steve Benson, Guitars; Johnny Olson, Violin; Becky Reimer, Vocals. This added special dimension to the project.

Back then, we had plenty of time for research (there were 4 of us at one time, transcribing original recordings from reel-to-reel tape recorders) and study (all players had tapes of the original recordings and studied the original styles). And I’d bumped into a couple of fanatical record collectors who hipped me to all sorts of great period music I’d never heard before—I would bring my cassette recorder, then transfer to reel-to-reel.

The Repertoire:

My premise was always: "unusual, out of the ordinary, yet very creative." We did some numbers that were quite daring: e.g., the "Whiteman Stomp". That’s really a concert piece, but we got away with it in most places. Even more daring was the "Copland Piano Concerto-Excerpts". We performed it at this KQRS gig, but also at a notorious West Band bar called the Cabooze:

14 of us crammed onto the elevated triangular stage in one corner (we had to lift an upright piano up there, plus all of the stands and instruments). We played ‘normal’ (for us, anyway) repertoire throughout, but towards the end of the evening, everyone was pretty much looped and charged-up, so I asked Mark the Piano Man:

"Can you do ‘Copland?’ "

"Here? Now?"

"Yeah, let’s do it for an Encore!"

This piece had 2 tempo changes, so 3 tempi = everyone was dancing up a storm to our stuff, but every tune was in one straight tempo; great for dancers. What would these charged-up dancing fools down below us react to tempo changes? OMG, they loved it! There would be a short pause in the dancing, then they’d pick up on the new tempos and hoot and holler! When we hit the ending, there was a huge Roar!

To my mind, this was a triumph: we pitched a Classical curve ball to the ‘masses’ and they ate it up. It’s sort of like Louis Moreau Gottschalk carting his Grand Piano by horse and carriage to cornfields and playing Classical stuff for ‘plain folk’.