Happy Feet: A Tribute to Paul Whiteman (feat. Joe Venuti)

Almost 40 years after his death in the mid-'60s, bandleader Paul Whiteman remains one of the most controversial figures in jazz history. A pioneer of what he called "symphonic jazz," Whiteman made no apologies about his goal: to create an elegant version of jazz that could be easily accepted by white audiences and appreciated by those with refined musical tastes. Those who value jazz largely for its visceral power and its celebration of African-American traditions and accomplishment have tended to cast Whiteman as a pretender and a diluter of the music, if not a cultural villain. But as this wonderful album (originally issued on LP in 1976) demonstrates, Whiteman's music deserves far greater respect than it has gotten from the jazz establishment; the arrangers with whom he worked were not only skilled at traditional orchestration, but had radical ideas about how orchestral strings could be used in a jazz context (on "Coquette" and "Happy Feet" they behave more like horns) and could come up with hocketing effects and surprising flourishes that would have made Spike Jones proud. Gunther Schuller leads an exceptional ensemble of students from the New England Conservatory on this program, with a guest appearance by the great jazz violinist Joe Venuti, and although singer John West could have been more skillfully recorded on his two tracks, the album is a complete pleasure. Perhaps its reissue will help a few of Whiteman's more vociferous critics to moderate their views.