When I was a teenager, learning about big band music by listening to it with my friend Louie on his homebrew "hi-fi" (this was pre-stereo), I soon found myself becoming more and more familiar with the star bandleaders and their styles. I got pretty good at telling the difference between the music of Benny and Glenn, or that of the Count and the Duke, but one night Louie put on a new platter and asked what I thought of it.
"Sounds like Glenn Miller", I answered, but I was already beginning to have second thoughts because Louie was grinning like a hyena. I couldn't believe it when he told me it was an English band, led by a guy named Ted Heath. I was floored. How in the world could a bunch of stiffs from across the pond sound that good? After all, at that time British musicians weren't exactly household names in America, and Paul, John, Ringo and George were probably still scuffling around the schoolyards of Liverpool.
But leave it to Louie, who was a talented musician himself, to discover that there was a swing band out there that was putting out pretty good music, even if it didn't get a lot of attention from the average teenager, who at that time was probably more
interested in the emergence of early rock and roll - but that's another story.
There were other British bandleaders during the golden age of swing music, but Ted Heath was probably the best known and most successful. (Which isn't always the same thing.) He and his band were very popular in Great Britain, and performed at a high level through the 1940s, 1950s, and even into the 1960s. During that time, his band was one of the few still clinging to the old style big band dance music when most other jazzmen were moving to bebop and modern jazz.
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