When I interviewed Van in 2012, he was already in his late 90s but his memory was as sharp as a tack. I reached Van through arranger Johnny Mandel, and Van was forthcoming on his role in the Chick Webb band and spoke openly about how he and Fitzgerald came to pen the song that made them both famous.
In tribute to Van, a wonderful, rock-solid guy, here's my entire two-part interview with him, combined...
JazzWax: Where did you grow up?
VAn Alexander: I was born in New York, on 129th St. and Convent Ave., at the St. Agnes Apartments. These weresix-story buildings that took up an entire block [they still stand today]. I was born in 1915, at home. I don’t remember too much about my early childhood except that I had loving parents and a loving brother, David Van Vliet, whom we lost a few months ago at age 100. David designed the present-day flag of the United Nations when he went to work there as a graphic designer after World War II.
JW: Van Vliet?
VA: [Laughs] I was born Alexander Van Vliet Feldman and was known until 1939 as Al Feldman. Van Vliet was my mother’s name and Feldman was my father’s name. I was named for my grandfather on my mother’s side—Alexander Van Vliet. My mother’s side was Dutch.
JW: How did you become Van Alexander?
VA: In 1939, after Chick [Webb] died, Eli Oberstein, thehead of RCA Victor Records and my mentor, wanted me to lead a band. He asked me to change my name so it would be more dramatic. Mr. Oberstein asked me my middle name. I told him. He said I should use it as my first name and Alexander as my last. So I did.
JW: What did your parents do?
VA: My father was a pharmacist. He owned a Rexall drug store on 131st St. and Amsterdam Ave. in Manhattan, just down Convent Ave. from what was then Knickerbocker Hospital. Apartments stand there now. My father did well. Soon after I was born my parents bought land in the West Bronx and built a home.
JW: Sounds pretty nice.
VA: Almost. What started out sounding idyllic became very difficult for my father. The subway trip to his drug store was too hectic. So he sold the house and moved us to an apartment on 150th St. and Broadway. The building was across the East River from Yankee Stadium. Years later, in 1939, I was at the Stadium the day an ailing Lou Gehrig gave his “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech before retiring. I was sitting in the bleachers with Butch Stone, a reed player who joined Les Brown’s band in 1941.
JW: Were you always interested in music?
VA: Yes. My mother was a classical pianist, and when I turned 6 years old, she gave me piano lessons. I wasn’tkeen on playing scales and arpeggios and practicing. But eventually, I saw the value in it. When I attended George Washington High School, on Audubon Avenue and 192nd St., I played in the marching band. But since I couldn’t walk around with a piano, I played drums and cymbals. Soon I was promoted to drum major. I also met my future wife, Beth, at George Washington. I met her at The Point, an ice-cream parlor just down from the high school where all the kids hung out. We were married for 72 years. She recently passed.
JW: How did you become interested in jazz?
VA: I used to listen to records in the early ‘30s and remotes of bands playing live. I was always fascinated by the mechanics of the music, how it was made. In high school I started to experiment by writing arrangements for six orseven pieces. My band was known as Al Feldman and His Orchestra. I also took music classes at Columbia University and studied music orchestration and theory with Otto Cesana, who later became a mood music orchestrator. It was mostly classical instruction, and I studied with him for a year and a half. But I was more interested in swing. All of us were as teenagers. We loved to dance. We were early jitterbugs, dancing the shag and the lindy.
JW: Where did you go to dance?
VA: The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem on 141st St. and Lenox Ave. That’s where all the great bands played in the 1930s. I was fascinated by the arrangements that the great black bands of that era were playing. I always wanted to look at the sheet music they were playing. After going to the Savoy as much as we did, I struck up a nodding acquaintance with bandleader and drummer Chick Webb. He was there more than anyone else. He’d always say to me, “Oh, you’re here again?”
JW: How did you eventually speak with him at length?
VA: One night in February 1936, I got up the nerve and said to him, “I have a couple of arrangements that might fit your orchestra.” He said, “Sure, bring them next Friday.”
JW: You had arrangements for the band?
VA: No, of course not. I was bluffing [laughs]. But because I had committed myself, I had to write them. I went home with fear and trepidation. Over the next four or five days I knocked out two charts: Keeping Out of Mischief Now and a Dixieland classic That’s a-Plenty.
JW: What happened?
VA: Friday came, and I went up to the Savoy at 8:30 p.m. with my arrangements. But it turned out that the band’s rehearsals were held when the band finished the job. At 1 a.m., the musicians took a muscatel wine break. At about 2 a.m., the band finally got down to its rehearsal.
JW: How did your arrangements sound?
VA: I had to wait longer. Before me came two otherarrangers—Edgar Sampson, who had arranged Stompin’ at the Savoy and Don’t Be That Way [both in 1934]. And guitarist Charlie Dixon, who also had arranged a few songs. By the time the band got around to my charts, it was 4:30 a.m. By then, my mother had called the police.
JW: Why?
VA: She had no idea what had happened to me.
JW: What did Webb think of your arrangements?
VA: Chick liked what I did with the songs. He paid me $10 for each one, and I went home on Cloud 90. I had sold my first arrangement, and I was 19 years old.
JW: Did Webb hire you?
VA: Pretty much. I began writing steadily for Chick, and Moe Gale, his manager and co-owner of the Savoy, put me on a salary of $75 a week for three arrangements, including copying all the parts. From then on, I wrote steadily for Chick. Ella Fitzgerald had joined the band in 1935, and one of the first songs I arranged for her was Cryin’ My Heart Out for You in 1936.
JazzWax: How did A-Tisket A-Tasket come about?
VAn Alexander: In February 1938, Chick and the band went into the Flamingo Room, which was on the second floor of Lavaggi’s Restaurant, in North Reading, Mass., 20 minutes outside of Boston. The band was broadcasting on the radio up there three or four days a week. Each week, I’d go up to Boston by train with three new arrangements. This went on for about six weeks.
JW: So you were pretty busy.
VA: Very. One day Ella Fitzgerald said to me, “Gee, I have a great idea for a song. What if you did something with the nursery rhyme A-Tisket A-Tasket? I took in what Ella had said and went back to New York. But Chick kept giving me assignments and advances to get more work done. I was up to my neck finishing songs that he wanted to place with publishers so they could get them on the air.
JW: Did Fitzgerald ask you about the song again?
VA: It was definitely top of mind. The following week when I came up to Boston, Ella cornered me: “Al, did you think about the song?” I told her that I hadn’t had the time yet but that I would turn to it soon. When I came back to Boston the following week, she asked me again. When I told her that I hadn’t done it yet, Ella said, “Listen, Al, if you’re not interested, tell me and I’ll ask [arranger] Edgar Sampson to do it.”
JW: What did you say?
VA: I told her, “Hold the phone, Ella. Give me one more week.” I went home to New York and burned the midnight oil. You have to understand, A-Tisket A-Tasket had been in the public domain since the late 1800s, so anyone could pick it up. There also wasn’t much of a song to begin with.
JW: What did you do with it?
VA: I put the children’s tune into a 32-bar song, adding a release and bridge. I also wrote novelty lyrics, including the exchanges between Ella and the band. You know, the stuff where they ask, “Was it red? Was it blue?” and Ella’s responding, “No, no, no, no.”
JW: What did Fitzgerald think?
VA: We rehearsed the song when I came up, and Ella loved it. And she gave it her own flavor. Originally, I had written lyrics in the middle part that were pretty straight—that she was “walkin’ on down the avenue.” Ella changed it to “truckin’ down the avenue”—to make the song more hip. She also changed something else, and we shared credit on the lyrics. A few weeks later, Chick Webb’s band and Ella recorded it—on May 2, 1938, my 23d birthday.
JW: Did you sense that it was going to be big?
VA: No way. No one knew what we had at the time. It was just another novelty song, and picking a hit is next to impossible. It just happens. We recorded it for Decca at World Transcription’s studio. Dave Kapp was in charge. The song came out in early summer, and by the end of the summer the song was No. 1 on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. It remained at No. 1 for nine weeks.
JW: Did Webb love it?
VA: Oh did he ever. The song jump-started my career and Ella’s and Chick’s. Up until that point, Chick and Ella were certainly well-known, but not on a national level and not as crossover artists.
JW: Was the song radical at the time?
VA: It was in terms of its jump and naturalness. You have to remember that when Chick recorded A-Tisket A-Tasket, it was long before stereo and echo chambers. Today the recording may sound dated, but back then it wasn’t. It was alive and fresh. And that band had a certain spark and energy, and both came through on that song. Sadly, Chick didn’t live much longer. He died in June 1939 when he was just 34 years old.
JW: What were your impressions of Ella back then?
VA: She was a sweet, shy little girl, and she was that way all her life to the end. Strangely, she never fully really realized how great she was. But she was a thoughtful person. She also had terrible jitters about performing and recording, and she was always perspiring. But once she got out there in front of a mike, she was fine. Until that happened, she was a mess.
JW: How do you think she stacks up in relation to other vocalists of the period?
VA: Writers always compared her to Billie [Holiday] and Sarah [Vaughan], who I thought were vocal stylists. As great as they were, I don’t think they had the warmth, diction, intonation or projection that Ella did.
JW: Did you know Fitzgerald when she relocated to California?
VA: Oh sure. In the ‘50s I had a chance to write arrangements for her nightclub act. But Norman Granz, her manager at the time, didn’t dig me too much and didn’t ask me to do one of her songbook albums. I could have gone to Ella, but I was so busy at the time with film and television work. I guess you know that Granz wasn’t the sweetest man in the world.
JW: What was Webb like?
VA: Chick was a pussycat. Not a strict bandleader. Some of those guys were monsters to their musicians. Chick wasn’t. He was sort of mild-mannered. The guys in the band were very protective of him because of his stature and ill health. He was a superb drummer. One of the great innovators. [Photo above, Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald]
JW: Especially at the Savoy?
VA: Absolutely. I remember a Battle of the Bands at the Savoy in 1937 between Chick and Benny Goodman. People started to line up at 4 in the afternoon. By the time the ballroom opened at 8, the line was around the block. The Savoy was up on the second floor, and when the place was filled with 3,000 people jumping up and down, as it was that night, you could feel the floor bending.
JW: How did the battle turn out?
VA: That night was so exciting. Benny opened up with King Porter Stomp and played for 15 minutes. Then Chick opened with his arrangement of King Porter Stomp. Of course, Chick had the reinforcement of Ella. When Ella sang, the place belonged to her and Chick.
JW: Who won?
VA: At the end, the consensus was that Chick had won. Even Gene Krupa said so. No one could have beaten Chick that night. Buddy Rich also said Chick had won. [Photo of Ella Fitzgerald by Carl Van Vechten, 1940]
JW: How much longer did you write for the band?
VA: Until he died the following year. During that time, most of the songs I arranged for Chick were pop tunes for Ella and many of them novelty numbers. I wasn’t doing too many band instrumentals at that point.
JW: Did you take a lot of heat for the novelty tunes?
VA: That’s what Chick wanted. He was as smart as a fox. He knew Ella was going to sell records for him. Chick and Ella loved each other, and Ella loved what Chick did for her. Chick’s wife took Ella in hand and taught her how to dress and put on makeup.
JW: What did you do after Webb?
VA: Eli Oberstein, the head of RCA Victor Records, approached me. He wanted to start a stable of bandleaders who arranged. So he signed me, Larry Clinton and Les Brown. My contract was for $100 a week. It was a great opportunity for me to start and lead my own band, which I did from 1939 to 1944.
JW: How did you like it?
VA: Being a bandleader was exciting. It got me into show business and I got to meet a lot of people and accompany a lot of singers. I never really competed with the top bands of the day. I played piano, and I was never very prolific at it. I played an arranger's piano—chords and things. I didn’t play clarinet or trombone, the big instruments then. So it was hard to compete. Consequently I never made it super big.
JW: But you had a great run.
VA: Absolutely. We played all the great theaters. Rising on the stage out of the pit at the Paramount Theater was a thrill. I wanted to use Alexander’s Ragtime Band as my theme, but when I did, I received a telegram from Irving Berlin telling me to cease and desist. He said he didn’t want anyone else to be associated with that song [laughs].
JW: How did your band end?
VA: During World War II, the draft pulled a lot of guys out. I was classified 1-A, but three days before I was to report, the enlistment was rescinded. At the time I was the father of two little girls so I got a defense job instead and worked the band at night.
JW: How were the work opportunities?
VA: In New York they were great. But toward the end of the war, the Capitol Theater in New York scrapped its stageband policy and began showing just movies. Then the theater reactivated its band policy, and the first act it booked was singer Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother. My manager was Joe Glaser, Louis Armstrong’s manager. He cooked up a deal so it would be Bob Crosby with the Van Alexander Orchestra. We went into the Capitol and had five wonderful weeks.
JW: How was Crosby?
VA: Great. Bob and I hit it off. He said to me, “Ever think of moving to California?” I told him, “Many times.” He said, “When I get back to California I want to put a band together. If you want to come out and be my contractor and arranger, let’s see if we can work something out.” I spoke to my wife Beth. We both saw the handwriting on the wall in New York. The band scene was deteriorating and so was the work. So we moved out there in 1945.
JW: What did you do?
VA: Worked with Bob Crosby and then with Les Brown for many years into the ‘50s. I also began arranging for television, which was in its infancy. I got in early and worked on Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which was on the air for about 10 years. I also had a few friends out there who knew me from New York, so I was pretty well plugged in.
JW: You also worked with Mickey Rooney.
VA: Yes, I wrote and arranged original music for his first TV series. That was my first taste of scoring for television. I was fast in those days. Mickey and I hit it off, and I did five or six pictures with him.
JW: Who else do you remember from your film days?
VA: I did two films with Joan Crawford, B-pictures—Straight-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965). I have a picture taken with Joan, kissing her at the end of the picture at a party. My wife Beth later jokingly said, “Did you have to kiss her on the mouth.”
JW: Was she a good kisser?
VA: I guess she was.
JW: So what’s the secret of your longevity?
VA: I never touched a cigarette or a drink in my life. I also never touched a woman until I was 11 years old [laughs]—my future wife. My late wife Beth was the love of my life. We had two daughters and now have four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. I guess the key to a long life is to work hard, keep cool and laugh as often as possible.
JazzWax clips: Here's Van Alexander's 1938 arrangement of Chick Webb's A-Tisket, a-Tasket with Ella Fitzgerald on vocal...
Here's Van's 1939 arrangement of If I Didn't Care, with Phyllis Kenny on vocal. Dig the intro and how Van works the sections, especially in the middle...
Here's Van Alexander's The Shake from 1953...
And here's Van's 1959 arrangement of Stompin' at the Savoy...
This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.
