[Dixielandjazz] Goldkette's "Stable"

[Don Ingle]

Marick's comment regarding Goldkette's many bands under his name was 
spot on. My dad was a member of the "stable" of players, sometimes 
working with the Victor band or with one of  many bands booked under the 
aegis of Jean Goldkette.
Dad joined the band in summer of 1926 and worked with many of these 
units. Often he worked with Freddie Begin, pianist who led severaal 
units and also was office manager for bands at the Goldkette office. I 
have a photos of his Vagabonds, with the kindly face of Steve Brown at 
one end and my curly-red-headed dad next to Fuzzy Farrar. Dad also 
worked with the Boblo Island band at the ballroom on that island just 
inside alcohol friendly Canada.  Spiegel Willcox played at times on that 
unit as did Walter "Pee Wee" Hunt. Jimmy Dorsey. Jimmy's brother Tommy 
led a Goldkette unit that played at the Detroit Athletic Club.
Dad made a road tour with the Victor  Band summer of '27 at which time a 
photo of dad and Bix was taken - a copy hangs framed on my knotty pine 
walls.
Dad was just 20 and married only a month when he joined the Goldkette 
stable in '26, and he and my mom were at Jimmy Dorsey's wedding to Jane 
in Detroit. Another unit band dad worked with was led by Chuck Wolcott, 
who later became a musical director for Walt Disney cartoons. Owen 
Bartlett also led a Goldkette band. The Orange Blossoms unit was led by 
Hank Biagini. The members of the band didn't like him, so they fired him 
and it became the Casa Loma band, led by violin player Mel Jensen but 
fronted by Glenn Gray Knobloch and the band went coop.
Incidently one of my first paid gigs was at age 14 and it was for a 
birthday party for a North Hollywood Jr. High classmate, Jimmy Dorsey's 
daughter Julie. (The circle keep sending rings back though time.)
  Someday when I find time to sit and write it, I will put together the 
many tales told by Red and the later times growing up as a band brat cum 
player and getting to meet and know many who were to become friends, 
mentors, and inspiration to a young squirt who just wanted to play a 
horn like the grown ups. The good Lord was kind enough to let me do that 
for 65 years. Having a dad who was in the thick of it all didn't hurt 
either. (Dad's best advice was, "play if you must, but go to shool and 
learn to do something else. So I went to college and managed to learn 
enough to make a living as a writer when the music business went 
electronic and over-amped and evolved into endless two chord vamps.)
But finding additional writing time is tough - editing a forestry 
magazine for 32 years, writing monthly columns for a state magazine with 
a quarter million circulation, and writing three newspaper columns 
weekly kind of eats the time up.
But maybe. . .
    . . . someday . . .

Good thread, Marick.

Don Ingle