Dan Terry - The Swinginest Dance Band. Dan Terry and His Orchestra 1952-1963 (2017)

When the experienced bandleader and trumpet player, Dan Terry (1924-2011), settled in Los Angeles in spring 1952, he organized a 16-piece band, hired some of the finest West Coast players and used one of the scene’s best new arrangers in Marty Paich. He won a successful residency at the Hollywood Club Oasis and a couple of singles for a small Pasadena label followed, but it proved difficult to keep the band together financially, and they disbanded.

Undaunted, Terry assembled a swing band in 1953, working with a more commercially slanted book than Paich’s original, largely written by Gene Roland. The band achieved a compact rather than a blasting sound on the up-tempos, and played slow dance tempos with imagination and variations in color. The richly-textured band’s emphasis was on a full ensemble sound. “It’s the swinginest band” said Terry. “Even the ballads swing. It has the excitement, I think, that characterized the great band period.”

In the following years, Dan Terry continued up to early Nineties —always with the same enthusiasm— heading ambitious big band projects. And, though not all made a lasting mark, his ability to attract the finest players was a tribute to the regard in which he was held. He remains one of the most underrated bandleaders of the post Big Band Era.