Orchids, or some such Winchellian device are certainly due trumpet man Bunny Berigan this week at the Marionette Room of the Hotel Brunswick. The guy was still suffering from an attack of arthritis which had hospitalized him for some time in New York when he played opening night.

Story goes that he could barely stand up or play due to the severity of the pain. Yet he was a colossal success that night and has been since, so much so that the Brunswick is going to hold him over.

It's about time Bunny got a break. He's had management trouble, financial trouble, personnel trouble, and plain hard luck for so long that it looked as though he wasn't going to make the grade. I hope that this job is a step back towards the breaks and the playing Bunny had and did in his halcyon days on the Swing Club program.

A high official in the RCA Victor setup and a boyhood friend, insists that Artie Shaw will be back in Hollywood within three weeks to record for Victor, to make a picture, and to marry Miss Betty Grable. He also says that Shaw has "seen the light" while on his Mexican vacation and has "changed" his mind about the jitterbug situation!

Didn't get time last week to really say one-tenth of what should and could be said about Duke Ellington and his band. He was out at Briggs and Briggs last week for one of these record signing sessions, and besides amazing the various bystanders with some excellent piano, he pulled the following honey. (He had been previously declaiming against the present trend towards commercialism in jazz, and had said that all the big bands were playing "commercial." He was asked if this were true, why was it that his band had been able to go along for so many years playing untarnished jazz.

"The present day tune at the height of its acceptance is perfection for the day. It may not be lasting, but at any given moment, the number one tune is what most people consider perfection. All of the bands today spend their time giving different renditions of the wanings and waxings of the claimants to perfection. Since we feel that we can't achieve this perfection and achieve anything lasting, we strive to achieve its opposite--"imperfection" and play strictly original things that must be judged on their own merits. Imperfection is the only relief to perfection, and that is how we have remained popular and yet managed to play what we feel is great jazz."

Phil. A men, dig that one!

But the Duke is no mere spellbinder. He has assembled a band that has great swing soloists--topnotchers all--but more important, when they play ensemble work, it is music of a kind that is played nowhere else in this country. Many critics believe it to be a cross between contemporary classical works and the pure swing idiom.

Indicative of this feeling is it that Gramaphone Shop of New York listed Ellington in its catalogue--and no other jazz band! Listen to records of his such as "Little Posey" (for brass ensemble work), "Plucked Again" (for fine piano changes), "Azure" (for brilliant impressionism), "Pyramid" (for an unusual experiment in music) and no further explanation will be needed.

By the way Duke's band has broken all records at the Southland during his present stay--a sign that he is finally stepping from the pedestal he has always occupied in the musical world to the attention of the dance public as a whole.

For those of you that are interested, Jack Teagarden's band comes into Southland next Monday for two weeks, then Teddy Powell's band, and on February 19, the Kansas City cyclone, Count Basie returns for a couple.

Teagarden's band has been completely reorganized in the last few weeks, so we don't have too much information on it. Main reason for the reorganization was that the payroll was the heaviest to date for a new band and was just too much to carry. "Big Gate" had to let Charlie Spivak (trumpet) go, also Ernie Cascares (alto sax), and Red Bone (trombone).

It was bad in the sense that they were good men and will be hard to replace, but it was good in a way because all the men came from well-organized and (mostly) Dixieland bands--which meant so far, Jack hadn't been able to develop any distinctive style of his own.

Don't forget, however, that regardless of what's behind him, be it tin-can or washboard, Jack is considered by most musicians to be one of the greatest and most sincere musicians around. In fact, this reviewer, amongst others, feels that Jack is virtually to the white musicians what Louis Armstrong is to the colored. And the real compliment to his playing genius is that everybody that has ever worked with him perks up his ears when Jack plays--which for pro musicians is something.

Notes between the notes: After years of mayhem committed on a hapless public, Guy Lombardo has finally relented and convinced brother Carmen that someone else should take care of the Lombardo lyrics. Nominee is a bird by the name of Mert Curtis, who used to sing for Russ Morgan. . . . Victor claims that it is going to swipe Duke Ellington, Horace Heldt, Kay Kayser, and a couple of other bands away from Columbia records in February. All we can say is that this record racket, which totalled 70,000,000 sales last year, is really getting vicious.

. . . Onyx Club has closed and it looks like for good. . . . Sonny Dunham of Casa Loma fame, starting another band again. . . . Not content with raising general hell with the Metropolitan Opera and its "great gold curtain," blind pianist Alee Templeton has just developed a fifteen tone scale. The only instrument he can find which it will work on is an old zither, so unfortunately his invention is a bit limited.