Band Lore - The Early Days
The following was written by Bill Purves, MIT '65, and offers an early account of how the Festival Jazz Ensemble came into existence, "in the beginning...":
When I joined the band in 1961 it was called the Techtonians and it operated as an old-style '30s dance band. We had 17 or 18 pieces and played dance jobs at colleges from Brown to Smith to St. Anslem's as well as lots of fraternity dances and other stuff here in Boston. We had a regular annual gig at the Hampshire House and always played the Chinese Student Club ball. As you can imagine, the book for this stuff was straight standards all the way back to In the Mood and Tuxedo Junction. We got paid for these gigs, but couldn't take any money personally. We'd just go out for a big meal and drink a lot of beer after the jobs. The rest of the money went to the band and the other musical clubs. The Logarhythms operated the same way.The dance work didn't take much rehearsing, but we rehearsed every Sunday in Walker Memorial for our concert work. (Kresge was brand new then, and the roof leaked badly.) We did two annual concerts as you do now. Our charts in those days would be considered high school stuff now, but in those days there were no high school stage bands. Our first big band experience was at the Institute. The band's theme was the John LaPorta arrangement of Copley Square. I remember we did Killer Joe and Whisper Not.
In addition to our two concerts we did some other work. I remember opening for some pretty famous rock and roll act in the armory at Winter Carnival one year (the Four Seasons?). I remember it because we were all well into the beer, we did Four Brothers and the sax section messed up the final cadenza. The Techtonians also formed the nucleus of a pep band that played for basketball games. (No football in those days.) With few coeds around, we led the crowd through a very extensive repertoire of really raunchy songs. We also played in the pit for Tech Show, an annual affair written, directed and conducted by students. In 1964 the first Playboy club had just opened in Boston and the Tech Show was all about the Beaver Club and full of the corresponding double entendres. I remember it because the female lead was Cab Calloway's daughter from Wellesley.
Although today's band wouldn't find our book very challenging, we gave some good concerts. In the spring of 1962 we packed Kresge (1200 seats, isn't it?) for a `battle of the bands' with a similar band from Harvard. (Harvard won.) We worked with the footlights up in those days, spots for the soloists, a backdrop behind and it seems to me that Kresge had a curtain. They'd dim the house lights and we'd start with the curtain closed, the curtain going up on the band in full cry. Like a Count Basie movie from the 1930s. We even had the sexy solid-front music stands in maroon and silver. We always appeared in coat and tie.
In the spring of '62 we decided to change the name of the band to the MIT Concert Jazz Band (after Mulligan and Kenton). Klaus Liepmann, the Director of Music, was irate. The Techtonians had been going since the 1930s and he didn't want to change it. He and John Corley (even then!) felt the new name sounded too much like the Concert Band. So for a couple of years we went along with two names, the Techtonians was still official and on our bank account.
But all was forgiven a year later when Klaus called me in to his office and announced that he had decided to hire a professional leader for us. He knew Dave Brubeck and proposed that Brubeck would come up form Connecticut one weekend a month to rehearse us. I was enthusiastic, but the rest of the band suggested we'd be better to spend the money on someone local who could come every week. Someone suggested Herb Pomeroy, and Herb still tells the story of getting a strange call at Berklee one afternoon from a guy with an Austrian accent so thick he could barely understand him.
Herb's first move was to send me out to buy a set of matching mutes for the whole band. Until then everyone supplied his own, and when they put them in they went out of tune. Next, our piano player Mike Hughes dropped out and enrolled at Berklee. He went on to a successful career in the theatre in London. We were thrilled when Herb brought in charts from his own band with the solos marked `Lenny' (Niehaus), `Alan' (Dawson) or `Herb'.
In '65 we did a lot less dance work. In the spring we made our first trip to the Villanova festival (one of the few in existence at that time.) A couple of carloads of our fans came down from Boston and we made the finals. That year each band was supposed to do a Charlie Parker tune, so we closed with Half Nelson. Then North Texas State came on right after us and opened with the exact same chart at twice the tempo. We lost again. But Herb introduced us to his old boss Kenton.
When I left the band in '65 the name still wasn't settled. At the spring awards convocation I got a citation for service to music and it read `...as President of the Techtonians.'
Bill Purves '65
President of the Techtonians 1962-1965
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