[Dixielandjazz] Peter Duchin Still Playing The Businessman's Bounce in 2/4

[Stephen G Barbone]

Caveat: Long Article, but this is where "Society" Music is going.  
Duchin still keeps the American Songbook and Jazz alive like the bands  
of Meyer Davis and Lester Lanin, but it isn't like the old days.

Guitarist and Bassist  in my band cut their teeth with the Lanin  
Bands,  and not only learned 2/4 Dixieland with Lanin but also about   
2500 songs. We do a little society work these days, but do not play R  
& R, only the Broadway Show Tunes. And when we're in 2/4, are  
delighted when a  Society matron comes up and says; "You boys still  
have the beat." <grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


December 6, 2009 - NY Times - by Eric Konigsberg
His Music Still Makes Society Whirl


THERE are certain people for whom a party doesn’t rate if the Peter  
Duchin Orchestra isn’t playing. Over the years Mr. Duchin, as both  
pianist and bandleader, has provided the musical entertainment at an  
estimated 6,000 celebrations. The list itself could function as a  
potted history of late-era American society, as it includes everything  
from Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966 to a joint bar and  
bat mitzvah reception for Ivan Boesky’s children on the Queen  
Elizabeth 2 to the wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.

Mr. Duchin is often called a society bandleader, a term that refers to  
his clientele but also signifies a musical approach that incorporates  
big bands, swing and Broadway songs (and nowadays, old-fashioned rock  
’n’ roll). He was considered a throwback even when he first began  
playing professionally in the 1960s. There have been peaks and valleys  
since. “In the late ’70s through the ’80s, when everybody was into  
show tunes, was probably when I was best known,” he said. By and large  
he has been plying an increasingly endangered trade.

To wit, although his band played the inaugural balls and White House  
dinners of every president from John F. Kennedy through Bill Clinton,  
he didn’t perform for George W. Bush and hasn’t been asked by  
President Obama. “I just see fewer parties where people want a  
traditional dance band,” he said over lunch at the Century  
Association, his Midtown club.

“I’ve come to feel that part of my job is to keep alive the American  
songbook,” he continued, speaking of the jazz and musical-theater  
standards that were the dominant pop form for nearly half a century,  
and naming Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Richard Rodgers and Harold  
Arlen. The other essential part of his job, of course, is filling  
dance floors, and this is high season for the events for which he’s  
most in demand. “Everyone remembers the parties where they danced all  
night,” Mr. Duchin said. “I want to be exciting enough to get them to  
do that, but not intrusive.”

The singer and pianist Michael Feinstein, a friend who has put in his  
share of nights playing parties, said, “The music Peter plays is music  
to entertain and make people feel wonderful at parties and events that  
would — and will — suffer tremendously without it.”

Mr. Duchin cut his engagement schedule by half when he turned 70 two  
years ago, so that he now plays around 60 gigs a year, but he’s still  
a visible presence on the fall and holiday benefit circuits. Last  
month he played the Living Landmarks fund-raiser for the New York  
Landmarks Conservancy and the Charity Ball for debutantes at the Union  
League Club in Philadelphia. This month he is booked at the Blue and  
Gray Colonels Ball in Montgomery, Ala., in addition to the  
Metropolitan Opera’s annual New Year’s Eve gala.

Mr. Duchin is such a fixture in these circles there’s an understanding  
that in any given ballroom he belongs more to the elite than do most  
guests, or even hosts. At this year’s Landmarks Conservancy event,  
which was honoring Robert Morgenthau and Tommy Tune among others, Mr.  
Duchin pointed out that not only was his band providing the music for  
the 13th time, but that he had also been selected as a “living  
landmark” back in 1996.

“It means you’re so old a pigeon can land on you,” he said while  
seated at the piano during cocktail hour. He was chatting while he and  
his band played “The Wanderer,” the Dion staple, between conversations  
with Gay Talese and Mary McFadden, though he might as well have been  
in his own living room. Mr. Duchin is that rare party entertainer so  
at home at a deluxe gala that he holds forth with guests while  
performing.

He had just spent 20 minutes rehearsing a number with Liz Smith, the  
gossip columnist and the event’s honorary chairwoman. She was singing  
“It’s High Time” from the musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Later,  
at the bar, Mr. Duchin was asked what he made of Ms. Smith’s singing  
voice.

“Liz is a writer,” he said.

Mr. Duchin’s father, Eddy Duchin, was also a bandleader and was famous  
for a string of Top 10 records in the 1930s. His mother, Marjorie  
Oelrichs Duchin, was described by newspapers at the time of her  
marriage as a “New York and Newport socialite,” though by marrying  
Eddy Duchin, a Jew and an entertainer, she was forced to relinquish  
her spot in the Social Register. When she died a few days after giving  
birth to Peter, his father was apparently so pained, and certain that  
his frail newborn son was also dying, that he decided to go on an  
extensive tour with his orchestra. Peter ended up being raised amid  
extraordinary wealth and privilege by his godparents, W. Averell and  
Marie Harriman. Mr. Harriman, in addition to having served on  
PresidentHarry S. Truman’s cabinet, and governor of New York, was also  
one of the richest men in the country.

Mr. Duchin likes to chalk up his success to a combination of  
birthright and social profile, invoking not only his background but  
also that he bolstered his fame by playing small roles, mostly as  
bandleaders, in a number of movies (including “Six Degrees of  
Separation” and ”Working Girl”) and writing mystery novels with a  
ghostwriter. His second wife, from whom he recently separated, was the  
actress Brooke Hayward.

“He’s capitalized on the social thing, but he goes a lot further than  
social — I would certainly hope so,” the actress and singer Elaine  
Stritch said recently during a rehearsal break at the Café Carlyle.  
“That crowd knows he speaks their language better than they do, and  
he’ll play against it too, which is fun.”

There are genuine chops beneath the charmed and charming persona, Mr.  
Feinstein said. He called Mr. Duchin “an immensely talented musician,  
as evidenced by the records he made for Decca in the ’60s,” which even  
included songs Mr. Duchin had written himself. “His piano dexterity is  
mighty.”

Mark Adamo, the opera composer and a friend of Mr. Duchin, said: “He  
not only grew up with this music, he may well be in some of those  
lyrics. Porter’s lyrics were never better than when he was talking  
about the international glamour set. He could have been inspired by  
something that happened when he was in Eddy Duchin’s living room.”

Mr. Duchin laments about how much the landscape has changed since his  
heyday, in part because he’s lonely. “When I came along, there were a  
dozen clubs in town to play, places like El Morocco and the Maisonette  
in the St. Regis, where people would go to dance,” Mr. Duchin said.  
“There were others doing what I did, musicians with full bands who  
played for dances, but they were all at least 20 years older”: Duke  
Ellington, Count Basie and Meyer Davis; another was Lester Lanin,  
though he didn’t write music or play an instrument himself. The few he  
calls peers today — Bob Hardwick and Mike Carney — aren’t nearly as  
well known.

Mr. Duchin is thick-chested and ruddy-faced, with a mane of sandy hair  
just on the long side of businesslike. Though his uniform most nights  
is a tuxedo — he keeps 15 of them in working order — one evening near  
the end of the summer found him in a fishing jacket and Belgian  
casuals as he prepared to play a town concert in Port Jefferson, N.Y.  
Behind the stage he addressed the members of his band, a core group of  
seven younger musicians. Each of them knows about 3,000 songs.

Depending on the scale of a gig, the band can consist of as few as  
five (not including Mr. Duchin) and as many as 45. He charges from  
$10,000 to $25,000 for an evening, based on factors like the size of  
his band and whether or not the occasion is benefiting a charity he’s  
involved with.

Over the years he has had to adjust his strategy to fit the evolving  
demands of New York nightlife. “At weddings in particular, you need to  
be able to do theRolling Stones, Michael Jackson, the Beach Boys, or  
else we’d only be hired by 90-year-olds,” he said. “And you have to  
really set up a crowd. I’ll play something with a 12/8 tempo,  
something like Etta James’s ‘At Last.’ ” From that low boil, he said,  
he might go straight into something up-tempo, like “Oh What a Night,”  
by Frankie Valli.

“Everybody will get up when they hear the opening bars,” he said.  
“They get up, they stay up.”

Before his concert in Port Jefferson Mr. Duchin instructed his  
musicians to play “something other than rock ’n’ roll, because they  
really look forward to this, and they will dance.” The town, after  
all, had hired him a couple of times before to play this event, and a  
lot of older rug cutters turned out.

Mr. Duchin was drinking scotch from a heavy cut-glass tumbler (his  
secretary, Betty Walsh, always carries one for him and one for Roberta  
Fabiano, his guitarist and singer), dipped cold cuts from a caterer’s  
tray into a plastic cup of mustard and had a look at a set-list  
printout. It was split into several categories — “Big Band,” “Dad,”  
“Sinatra” — and, at the end, a handful of “sets/songs to be added when  
we talk it over.” These included “Slow Big Band,” “Ellie Greenwich”  
and “Society — if needed.”

“ ‘Society’ means Cole Porter, Irving Berlin — Peter’s thing — but  
this isn’t a society crowd,” said Barry Lazarowitz, the band’s drummer  
and musical director. “They’re more Sinatra, Bobby Darin.”

“Dad” was shorthand for a series of Eddy Duchin standards that began  
with “Embraceable You” and ended with “Stormy Weather.” He also played  
his father’s theme song, Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat.

It was a capacity crowd of a few hundred, and perhaps two dozen  
couples got out of their chairs to dance the fox trot or a slow Lindy.  
People ate it up when Mr. Duchin paused between numbers to tell  
stories from his past. Who, after all, could beat the one about the  
time Mr. Duchin drove into New York with a number of Yale classmates  
to watch as a film crew shot “The Eddy Duchin Story,” in which Tyrone  
Power and Kim Novak had been cast as his parents? (His father died  
when Mr. Duchin was 13.)

“I walked up to Kim Novak from behind, put my arms around her, gave  
her a kiss on the ear and said, ‘Hi, Mom,’ ” Mr. Duchin recalled. In  
the extended version of the story, recounted in his 1996 memoir “Ghost  
of a Chance” (written with Charles Michener), Mr. Duchin spends a  
night on the town with Ms. Novak and stumbles back to his room in the  
Harrimans’ apartment at 6 a.m., having gotten “as close to Oedipal  
ecstasy as I’ll ever know.”

As an adult, Mr. Duchin said, it was meaningful for him to learn about  
his father’s legacy before taking up the musical life himself. “It was  
probably a way of trying to establish that I had roots in the first  
place,” he said. His father’s great innovation, he added, was to loose  
the piano from the confines of the percussion section and make it the  
belle of the band. But he generally plays down the similarities  
between his musical aesthetic and his father’s, beyond their affinity  
for certain kinds of songs and his habit of crossing his hands over  
one another while playing, a flourish meant as a tribute to his  
father’s style. “Dad, as I always understood it, was more  
straightforward, with fancy embellishments,” he said. “I’m more jazz.  
I like to let my musicians improvise a bit.”

Mr. Duchin likes modern music and is proud that his band was the first  
to perform rock ’n’ roll at the White House, when he was hired for the  
weddings of Lyndon Johnson’s daughters. He said patrons at the  
Maisonette, where he had his first steady job, gave him a hard time  
for playing “long-hair music.”

It sometimes frustrates him to play for so many adults who will only  
dance to rock ’n’ roll, particularly because these are people with the  
fox trot in their blood.

“A lot of adults aren’t very graceful when they try to dance like  
kids,” he said. The bandleader Meyer Davis told him: “Society people  
are wonderful, but they have no rhythm.”

Mr. Davis “taught me how to play music for them, which is putting it  
in 2/4 time, so it’s basically like a march,” he said. “It makes  
everybody look like they’re a good dancer. We called it ‘the  
businessman’s bounce.’ ”