Les Brown

For more than six decades Les Brown helmed an elite dance orchestra steeped in jazz influences, producing music that rarely broke fresh ground yet reliably charmed audiences. Born in Reinerton, Pennsylvania, to a baker’s household, he took up the saxophone at seven under the firm guidance of his trombonist father. Already proficient at sight-reading by ten, he regularly joined his father at neighborhood dances. After one year of high school he chose instead to enroll at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, concentrating on theory, harmony, and composition. A stint at the New York Military Academy preceded his arrival at Duke University, where he entered the Duke Blue Devils—the campus’s official dance band—in 1935. The group emulated the Casa Loma Orchestra, then among the nation’s most celebrated dance ensembles, especially with collegiate listeners.

His initial recordings occurred in 1936 with the Blue Devils for Decca, yet the following year the unit disbanded when remaining undergraduates returned to their studies. Brown relocated to New York and spent a year arranging for Jimmy Dorsey, Isham Jones, and Larry Clinton. Opportunity arrived in 1938 when an RCA executive secured a Hotel Edison engagement in Manhattan provided Brown could assemble a band. A loan from his father enabled him to form a twelve-piece group that soon performed at the hotel. Regular radio broadcasts quickly expanded their following beyond hotel guests, prompting RCA Victor to sign the ensemble to its Bluebird label.

As the 1930s ended, the band attracted strong dance crowds and broad radio listenership. Its discs—chiefly interpretations of standards and rival hits occasionally leavened by original Brown compositions—sold sufficiently to sustain industry interest. Late-thirties performances emphasized ensemble work and projected a full, resonant tone effective on stage, over the air, and on record. Brown demanded a refined, exacting execution that listeners embraced. Beginning in 1940 he expanded the palette by spotlighting soloists, a shift audiences welcomed further. He then recruited a seventeen-year-old vocalist, Doris Day, whose mature depth propelled the band’s popularity higher still. Day’s initial tenure lasted less than a year before she departed to marry. Her successor, Betty Bonney, was present when the band recorded “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” a tribute to the Yankee slugger’s hitting streak that became their first chart entry. Once tallies were complete, the orchestra ranked among the ten most popular acts nationwide.

A radio program titled Spotlight Band inadvertently shaped their later trajectory by featuring the group for military audiences, cementing their status among service members. During a 1942 broadcast an announcer spontaneously dubbed them “Les Brown & His Band of Renown,” a phrase that endured as their official name. Within the era’s musical landscape they occupied a distinctive position: although not strictly a jazz outfit, their incorporation of jazz elements and roster of accomplished soloists earned respect from jazz musicians and periodicals alike, even though Brown rarely featured himself as a soloist despite solid playing ability.

A decisive turning point occurred in 1943 when Brown persuaded a now-divorced Doris Day, then raising her son (future producer Terry Melcher), to rejoin the band. The reunion yielded the 1944 wartime staple “Sentimental Journey,” which emerged as a defining big-band anthem and remained Brown’s signature piece—and, to a lesser extent, Day’s—for the subsequent half-century, retaining that association well into the twenty-first century. Composer and arranger Ben Homer, also responsible for the band’s dance adaptations of classical works, penned the song. Throughout most of the 1940s Brown recorded for Columbia, the same label that housed Day’s solo output. Career momentum paused only after World War II when Brown elected to spend more time with his wife and family, forgoing tours; sidemen such as Abe Most and Ted Nash gradually moved on once he settled in Los Angeles.

In early 1947 an extended Hollywood Bowl engagement prompted him to reconstitute the band with freelance musicians of such caliber that quality remained undiminished. The booking also initiated his longest-running professional relationship: work with Bob Hope. Touring for years alongside the comedian’s USO shows enabled the orchestra to persist for decades. Several of Brown’s sidemen formed the Dave Pell Octet, which gained notice in the mid-1950s. In the late 1950s Brown became a founding member of the Recording Academy. Signed to Capitol during the same period, he enjoyed renewed hit singles and successful albums through the decade’s close; his standing allowed recruitment of elite players, among them reedman Billy Usselton. Those Capitol sides, like earlier Columbia recordings, retained an enduring audience. Association with Hope kept his name familiar to television viewers well into the 1980s. Brown continued occasional touring into his final years and performed within a year of his death on January 4, 2001, at age 88. His son, Les Brown, Jr.—primarily known as an actor—assumed leadership of the Band of Renown in the twenty-first century and has sustained its activity.