Tribute to Bill Holman
Big Band musicians world-wide were saddened by death of master composer and arranger Bill Holman on May 6th, 2024, at the age of 97. His long and productive career spanned seven decades and produced hundreds of compositions and arrangements that have become well-loved core repertoire of big bands and their audiences world-wide.
The last time Bill Holman was in Switzerland (2014) he conducted a concert of his music with the Zurich Jazz Orchestra, which still ranks as one of the most memorable performances in the long history of the ZJO. In another related story, our musical directors Daniel Schenker and Ed Partyka first met in 1996 as members of the Generations Festival Big Band in Frauenfeld, which was conducted by (you guessed it) Bill Holman. The Zurich Jazz Orchestra will celebrate the wonderful music and long life of Bill Holman on March 27th, performing some of his most popular works as well as some rarely heard gems that will feature the orchestra and its outstanding soloists.
Bill Holman, a three-time Grammy Award winner nominated on sixteen occasions was at the forefront of West Coast Jazz in the fifties and helped to shape the sounds of famous big bands from Stan Kenton and Buddy Rich to Woody Herman and Terry Gibbs.
When looking back at the remarkable career of arranger, composer, and saxophonist Willis Leonard “Bill” Holman, it is important to consider how he has so profoundly influenced generation after generation of big band players and writers. Of course, many came to know of him for his work with the likes of Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Peggy Lee, Maynard Ferguson, Natalie Cole, and hundreds of others, or perhaps from his humble but top-notch discography as a leader. Yet, at this point, an equal number of younger players are more likely to have first heard the name Bill Holman playing his widely circulated arrangements in school and college bands. Indeed, he has made countless contributions, knowingly or unknowingly, to the pads of bands from legendary to professional to amateur, making it impossible to overstate the influence he has had on large ensemble jazz over the past seven decades.
Holman was already an experienced player by the time he joined Stan Kenton’s band on tenor sax in 1952, and the arrangements he went on to contribute to the band over the following several years are intrinsically linked with the sound of the band from that point on. He and fellow arranger Bill Russo were the perfect geniuses to progress Kenton’s ambition of moving past the commercial music of the forties. Not only did they reshape the band’s repertoire, but they also helped to re-establish the jazz orchestra’s place as part of a more serious art form, in many ways building on what Duke Ellington started two decades prior. Holman especially continued to shape the Kenton band long after he left as a player, contributing chart after chart until well into the seventies.
