Regarding Bunny Berigan. It never ceases to amaze me how disease can over-shadow the brilliant legacy of a person’s life. How much ‘expert’ blather was there about Stephen Hawking’s motor neurone disease as an excuse to avoid explaining and understanding his discoveries in physics? It’s belittling and disrespectful.

Louis Armstrong’s favourite trumpet player was Bunny Berigan. We’ll be hearing radio broadcasts by Bunny Berigan on this week’s The Phantom Dancer.

Even today, seventy years after his death, he is still considered to have been one of the top trumpet players in jazz.

But what I find additionally interesting is how his legacy has been marred by the alcoholism that affected the inventiveness of his playing in the latter part of his short thirty-three years and which ultimately killed him through cirrhosis of the liver.

On this week’s Phantom Dancer you’ll also hear a set of live vintage radio by Dave Brubeck, Jack Teagarden and women singers with their own radio shows – Lee Wiley, Peggy Lee, Dinah Show and Mildred Bailey.

THE PHANTOM DANCER
is two hours of non-stop swing and jazz mixed from live 1920s – 1960s radio and TV by Greg Poppleton, Australia’s only authentic 1920s-1930s singer https://www.gregpoppleton.com.

Broadcast 12:04pm Tuesdays 107.3 2SER Sydney then over 22 radio stations and online.

HEAR The Phantom Dancer live-streamed and afterwards online on the Radio 2SER website. http://www.2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

HOW DISEASE EFFECTS LEGACY

When jazz musicians talk about Bunny Berigan, his alcoholism always comes up.

‘What might have been had he not drank?’, is usually the most positive musing. But to me, from a music perspective, his illness should have no bearing on his legacy. Surely it’s his trumpet playing and technique that’s important, the music played, the songs composed, the landmark recordings made. Louis Armstrong praised Bunny Berigan’s trumpet sound and jazz ideas both before and after Berigan’s death.

I have known jazz musicians, world-touring, who’ve died after long illnesses. They kept their illnesses private, performing to the very end. Even though everyone knew they were terminally ill, the particulars of their illnesses were never discussed. These musicians had the luxury and the determination to never be defined by their disease. Nowadays, when people talk about them, they talk about their music, the good times and their positive legacy. How they died, their disease, and their substance abuse (in one case) are irrelevancies.

However, other jazz musicians I have known, have had deaths after long, debilitating illnesses during which time it was impossible to perform. Others have died suddenly – a heart attack, an overdose, a bleed. Always, these musicians are discussed in terms of their deaths, their creative life work overshadowed by the fabula of their failing health or their fatal surprise.

I guess it’s easier to talk about sickness and death than music. The musical process is a specialist field. Feeling poorly and falling off the perch is something on which everyone has an expert opinion.

BUNNY BERIGAN…
…was the stage name of Roland Bernard Berigan.

He composed, sang, and most famously was a brilliant trumpet player. Of his compositions, we’ll hear a live recording of one, ‘Chicken and Waffles’, from a live 1936 radio broadcast on this week’s Phantom Dancer.

He was best known for his virtuoso jazz trumpeting. His 1937 classic recording of a song from a flop music, ‘I Can’t Get Started’ (which we’ll also hear in two live 1930s versions on this week’s Phantom Dancer) was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1975. ‘I Can’t Get Started’ was Berigan’s radio theme when he launched his own band in 1937.

Bunny Berigan had learnt violin and trumpet and was playing in local bands by his mid-teens. In 1930 he joined the Hal Kemp Orchestra and soon came to notice. He became a sought-after studio musician in New York as well as playing in the orchestras of Freddy Rich, Freddy Martin, Ben Selvin, Paul Whiteman and Benny Goodman. In fact, Goodman’s manager only got ‘that ace drummer man’ Gene Krupa to join the band by telling him Berigan was already on board.

After leaving Goodman, Berigan began to record regularly under his own name and to back singers such as Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, and Billie Holiday. We’ll hear him this week with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in early 1937. His solo on ‘Marie’ became one of his signature performances. We’ll hear a 1940 radio version. And, of course, a critic describing Berigan’s trumpet on the 1940 show had to bring up his alcoholism.

After leaving Goodman, Berigan began to record regularly under his own name and to back singers such as Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, and Billie Holiday. We’ll hear him this week with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in early 1937. His solo on ‘Marie’ became one of his signature performances. We’ll hear a 1940 radio version. And, of course, a critic describing Berigan’s trumpet on the 1940 show had to bring up his alcoholism.

MUSICAL ADVICE FROM BERIGAN
And instrumentalists PLEASE TAKE NOTE. There’s nothing more irritating to a singer than an instrumentalist taking too much air during the singer’s solo, or cramping the singer’s freedom of expression by trying to steer the improvisation…

Your Phantom Dancer Bunny Berrigan singing and playing trumpet on ‘Until Today’ with Freddy Rich’s Orchestra in 1936 . Enjoy!