"A One Night Stand with the Big Bands"
(As originally broadcast on WTIC, Hartford, CT)


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Program 24 - April, 1973 - Jean Goldkette Orchestra



The Jean Goldkette Orchestra

 

This week's "One Night Stand" features the Jean Goldkette Orchestra and interviews with Joe Venuti, Spiegel Wilcox, and Bill Chalice. The Jean Goldkette Orchestra featured some of the best White Jazz musicians of the 1920s. According to almost all that saw them when they played live they were a force to be reckoned with. The 1926/27 version of the orchestra featured Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. Jean Goldkette emigrated from France to the United States in 1911. He was a classical piano player. Jean Goldkette 's importance to jazz is as a bandleader in the 1920s. Goldkette actually had over 20 bands under his name by the mid-'20s, but it was his main unit (which recorded for Victor during 1924-29) that is the only one remembered today.  The orchestra was among the best of the period, even defeating Fletcher Henderson at a Battle of the Bands contest in New York. In 1927 Paul Whiteman hired away most of Goldkette's top jazz players (including Bix and Tram ) and the band's later recordings are of lesser interest although Hoagy Carmichael is heard on two vocals. Goldkette, who also helped organize McKinney's Cotton Pickers and the Orange Blossoms (the latter became the Casa Loma Orchestra ), dropped out of the jazz business by the early '30s, working as a booking agent and a classical piano soloist.

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Program 24 - April, 1973 - Jean Goldkette Orchestra

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