Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra (Warner Bros., The Vitaphone Corporation, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Between Blood on the Moon and the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ agenda, Unfaithfully Yours, TCM showed on September 4 an intriguing band short called Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra. The band had originally been formed in 1927 as Henry Biagini’s Orange Blossoms, but like Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians, they got their name from a hotel in Canada where they got one of their first long-term gigs. In the early 1930’s they were briefly considered the hottest white band in the U.S., but after the successes of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey (jointly and severally), they lost that title and began to move more towards “sweet” melody-driven arrangements. This film was made in 1942 and shows the band on the cusp between swing and sweet. It opens with an instrumental called “Hep and Happy” (imdb.com doesn’t list composers for this one or their later instrumental, “Broom Street”), then contains a ballad called “Purple Moonlight” by Arthur Kent (music) and Eddie DeLange (lyrics). Though the (unidentified) male singer who’s featured on this sounds a bit too adenoidal for my taste – throughout the band’s career Gray followed the older practice of drafting his musicians to sing whenever a vocal was needed instead of hiring a person just to sing (no male singer emerged as a solo star from a big band between 1927, when Paul Whiteman introduced Bing Crosby; and 1940, when Tommy Dorsey introduced Frank Sinatra and Earl “Fatha” Hines introduced Billy Eckstine) – it’s a quite lovely ballad. Then came “Broom Street,” with good if not overwhelming solos by clarinetist Clarence Hutchenrider and a trumpeter and trombonist, and the short closes with “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”

That song struck me as irredeemably racist when I first heard it in the 1960’s before I learned that it was actually written by a Black man, Shelton Brooks (but then he wasn’t the first Black artist who realized he could make a living by reinforcing white people’s ridiculous notions of what Black people were like; at the turn of the last century Black minstrel artists Bert Williams and George Walker billed themselves as “The Two Real Coons”!). The Casa Loma band do an O.K. job on “Darktown Strutters’ Ball”; once again the vocal is handled by one of the instrumentalists instead of a separate singer, but the song goes well enough even though there’s very much a “yes, but” attitude towards Casa Loma as a swing band. Critic George T. Simon put a lot of the blame on their drummer, Tony Briglia – who impressed him a lot until he had the chance to hear Gene Krupa with Goodman and Buddy Rich with Shaw and Tommy Dorsey. More recent critics have faulted Casa Loma’s elaborate written arrangements that left too little room for the soloists to improvise. Still, this is a quite entertaining band short, produced by Gordon Hollingshead for Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone Corporation (after they abandoned Vitaphone as a sound-on-disc process for sound films and shifted to sound-on-film like everybody else, Warners kept Vitaphone alive as a trade name for their band shorts) and directed quite creatively by the young Jean Negulesco. I especially liked the way he staged the dancers, Dean Collins and Jewel McGowan, who were shown jitterbugging to the Casa Loma band’s music, and I’m still not sure whether they were multiple dancers or just the same ones infinitely reflected in mirrors through a Droste effect.