I figure that I owe my affection for big band music to Glen Gray — or maybe it would be more accurate say that I owe it in equal parts to him and my old buddy Louie (who has shown up in my postings before). He was a high school friend of mine - Louie, not Glen - and we would sometimes go down to his basement and listen to music on his home-brew "hi-fi", while chomping on the butter-drenched popcorn his mom would make for us.

Louie knew music — he could play three instruments and was in both the school marching band and the dance band — and he had cobbled together some mismatched components and made a pretty good hi-fi system. I think he had taken a  turntable out of an old console radio/record-player (remember those?) and replaced the cartridge and needle with a more modern version, then wired it up with an amp and a big old speaker he'd salvaged from somewhere. This was before stereo became the norm - at least in our limited arena - but his rig sounded both loud and good.

I'd heard some big band music on our old 78 rpm record player at home but had dismissed it as the stuff my parents grew up with — sort of like the Hit Parade tunes that bored me silly. Early rock and roll was not really to my taste and I hadn't yet discovered modern jazz, so I was musically adrift. However, when Louie put on his new record of Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, it really opened my eyes (actually my ears) and I was an instant fan — not only of the band, but of the whole genre.