Duly announced by posters and all that sort of thing, we find that Stan Brown and his band have been signed by Dunster House for their dance a week from tomorrow. This is something I'm glad to sec. because Stan besides having a very good band, has a Harvard band; and it's about time we got ourselves a little really decent jazz. Every big Midwestern school has at least one good band, and even Yale has creditable imitations of one. So with drum majorettes and stuff, it would seem as if the old place is taking life at an increasingly fast clip.

Stan's band played a swing concert last year at Sanders Theater. Between ourselves, it wasn't too good. In fact, it was even less. But shortly thereafter, the outfit was completely reorganized and enlarged. So vast was the change that when Benny Goodman auditioned the band "sat-in" and played with them for fifteen minutes, breaking the clarinet player's reed in the process. And shortly thereafter, Fitch Band Wagon evinced considerable interest in having them on their program sometime during the year.

So when they start at Dunster on the 11th, you'll really hear some good jazz. "Uncle" Bill Whitcraft on piano, Johnny Harlow (trumpet), Hal Jacobs on clarinet, George Olson on drums, and Mike Siegel on tenor sax manage to turn out some solos that are good enough for anybody's wing. Stan does the sweet vocals, and odes a good imitation of the Jack Leonard style of singing. Fem vocalist Dorothy Sinatra, sister of Harry James'vocalist, does even better.

Best point about the band though is the easy style with which it swings, its excellent special arrangements, and best of all, the fine dance tempos that it plays. This is nothing short of rank plugging. As a matter of fact, the proceedings paragraphs should have "advt." written after them. But it's about time that something good at Harvard got a little publicity.

Really interesting record came out this week on Victor: Tommy Dorsy's "Stomp It Off." For the last year, this column has been panning Tommy pretty regularly for turning out nothing but obnoxious sweet music. Lately, however, Tommy's popularity rating has been taking a beating. Evidently he has finally worken up to the fact that one of the biggest factors in his decline has been that the fans felt that all his pieces sounded the same--that they could tell what a new Tommy Dorsey arrangement was going to sound like long before they heard it.

A month ago Tommy began to enlarge his arranging staff, adding Sy Oliver and one other, making four full-time men working for him, the largest staff in the country. But the catch is that Sy Oliver formerly played trumpet for Jimmy Luncefor, and is an arranger in the best Kanas City powerhouse style. More than this, Oliver specializes in a very different Casa Loma type of technical arrangement that demands a well-kuit band.

Thus we have Tommy Dorsey who never made a colored swing style record, who lately has been doing either very feeble Dixieland or even more feeble sweet music trying to do one of the famous Lunceford arrangements.

Get Jimmy's Decca record and the Victor of Tommy if you want to see something interesting.

Instead of the alternate power and bounce-lightly that Lunsford uses, you have a white band playing a colored-style arrangement without anything behind it. The record strikes one as being slightly bewildered, as though the boys in Tommy's band just couldn't make the shift fast enough.

Don't get me wrong, the record is good. The arrangement is played in a far cleaner manner than the 1934 Lunceford band could do (although the same wouldn't be true today), but it settles once and for all the argument as to whether all a band needs to play good swing is a bunch of musicians that can read and play section well, and a good arranger. The answer is gently but firmly, no.

Tommy is on the right track. If he hangs onto Oliver and gets some men back into his band that know the meaning of swing and limits his own playing to lead solos, he'll start going up once more.