Terry Gibbs Dream Band
‘Volume 7 – The Lost Tapes’
Whaling City Sound

Just slightly more than two months ago, two highly significant events occurred in the life of one of jazz’s all-time great virtuosos of the vibraphone, Terry Gibbs. First, he released a new volume of previously unheard recordings by the “Dream Band,” the legendary jazz orchestra that he led for about four years ending in 1961. Second, he celebrated his 100th birthday.

Mr. Gibbs first became a major star in the jazz world in his mid-20s as a member of Woody Herman’s Second Herd, a remarkable orchestra that in many ways established a template for Mr. Gibbs’s own later groups in blending the best aspects of swing and modern jazz. You might say that both the Second Herd and the Dream Band played bebop in a way that was swinging and even danceable.  

Born as Julius Gubenko in 1924 at Brooklyn, Mr. Gibbs was, along with Al Cohn, Shorty Rogers, and Stan Getz, part of a generation of Jewish New Yorkers who achieved fame in West Coast-based jazz orchestras in the latter part of the big band era.  Bands like those of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton made a deliberate point of straddling the boundaries between swing and bop. By the 1950s, Mr. Gibbs was a huge star both as a studio player and the leader of his own ensembles.

As Mr. Gibbs tells the story in his notes to the new release, “Volume 7 – The Lost Tapes,” he formed this orchestra for an album, never intending for it to play outside of the recording studio. However, he realized that through a fluke in union regulations, it made more sense economically for the band to play a series of low-paying live gigs than to rehearse for the album.  

He called it the “Dream Band” because of the caliber of musicians he was able to attract; this current set features such headliners as trumpeter Conte Candoli, pianist Lou Levy, trombonist Carl Fontana, saxophonist Joe Maini, and drummer Mel Lewis, as well as superstar arrangers such as Bill Holman, Al Cohn, and Marty Paich. The Dream Band worked at Los Angeles clubs for several years, and recorded and released four albums for the Mercury label during that time.

Enter Wally Heider. An engineer and entrepreneur, Heider (1922-1989) operated several of the most successful studios in California. He was revered for his work with rock and pop groups in the late 1960s, but his personal passion was jazz and big bands, and he traveled up and down the West Coast documenting his favorite groups in all manner of live settings.  The Dream Band was a personal project of Heider’s even as it was for Mr. Gibbs, and, beginning in 1986, their live recordings of the band began to be released. Eventually six CDs came out, and, as Mr. Gibbs tells the story, they thought that was everything. That is, until Terry and his son, drummer and producer Gerry Gibbs, recently stumbled upon a previously unknown stash of additional material.

“Volume 7 – The Lost Tapes” is hardly a collection of leftovers: It contains some of the most amazing and exciting material that this incredible ensemble ever put down on tape. These performances make a particularly interesting point: It’s as if these musicians, who all came of age listening to big bands over the radio in the 1930s and then ended up joining those selfsame bands, wanted to revisit the music of their collective youth in a very fresh and original way in 1959.  

The vast majority of the charts here are swing era classics by the likes of Benny Goodman (“Let’s Dance,” “Flying Home,” “Don’t Be That Way”), Artie Shaw (“Back Bay Shuffle,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise”), Duke Ellington (“Cottontail,” “Prelude to a Kiss”), Tommy Dorsey (I”m Getting Sentimental Over You,” “Opus One”), and others. Throughout, these swing era flagwavers are re-animated with an entirely new sense of purpose and a bebop sensibility.  

What’s also fascinating is that though there’s no shortage of solos and soloists, each track is kept to a reasonable recording length.  

Mr. Gibbs himself makes some kind of a personal statement on almost every track, and the others rotate through. We hear the outstanding bassist Walter “Buddy” Clark on a Gibbs original titled “It Might As Well Be Swing,” while “Cottontail” features, among others, Bill Holman on tenor sax — a fitting tribute to the great musician who died earlier this year a few weeks before his 97th birthday.  A swinging treatment of Debussy’s “Reverie,” partly inspired by bandleader-arranger Larry Clinton, boasts a sparkling solo by Charlie Kennedy, a fine alto saxophonist best known for his work in Louis Prima’s World War II-era big band.

The album ends with a phenomenal reading of “Flying Home,” inspired by all the swing era stars who put their imprimatur on this classic riff: Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian, Lionel Hampton, Illinois Jacquet, and Ella Fitzgerald. Taped live at the Seville Club in Hollywood in March 1959, the Dream Band veritably explodes in ecstatic energy as we hear from Levy, the leader, and then a two-trumpet encounter between Conte Candoli and Stu Williamson.

The new volume adds to the Dream Band’s already considerable legacy. What makes it even sweeter is that Terry Gibbs is hardly on the sidelines; even in the last few years he was still working local gigs. Just last year, he released a newly recorded album, “The Terry Gibbs Songbook,” co-starring Gerry Gibbs on drums, the marvelous tenorist Scott Hamilton, and Danny Bacher, the excellent and exuberant saxophonist and singer who tragically left us last week at the age of 47.  

Let’s hope Terry Gibbs gets another hundred years of making the Dream Band a reality.