From the S&S archives:
Harry James: Still a real swinger

HARRY James is on an ego trip.

"We get spoiled over here by the audiences," the 54-year-old trumpeter and bandleader said in Frankfurt the second night out on a European concert tour. It's the first time James has played in Europe in 13 years.

"We play in Las Vegas 11 months out of the year at the big night clubs," James said during intermission at the Jahrhunderthalle in Hoechst.

"But people are always talking there and drinking and not really paying attention to the music. Here they're listening so closely you can't make a mistake."

There wasn't much chance of James and his 20-man ensemble making a mistake as they played the favorites that have kept them famous for a generation: "Ciribiribin," "I'm Beginning to See the Light," "The Two O'Clock Jump."

It would be hard to err in playing arrangements which hadn't changed a bit since the days right after World War II: days which, to German listeners and critics at least, recalled black market nylons, inflation and the swapping of precious phonograph records. Most of the 700 or so in the audience remembered those days before television and — almost note for note — the music.

It was radio music, meant for Marshall McLuhan's cool medium. The rows of tidy, unpresuming musicians, an electronic bass their only concession to amplifiers, were a bit distant, not to be grooved with. The mood they evoked was not of ecstasy but nostalgia.

"If you feel our music was out of style you wouldn't be listening to it. If we felt it was out of style we wouldn't be playing it," James said in defense of swing.

"There are cycles in music; first it'll be blues, then ballads, something else and then blues again. We just play what we like to play; that's why we've been playing for 30 years."

James shrugged off the charge made last week by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew — in James's own bailiwick of Las Vegas, by the way — that rock music is driving youth to drugs:

"He should've looked around 40 years ago," James said, "There were more musicians using drugs then than now."

James' satisfaction with youth today continued. "There are more and better young musicians today than ever before. It's because of the conservatories — they're turning out a lot of good people. We have four kids in their 20's playing with us now."

If there's anything wrong today with music, this tour by Harry James is not the place to hear it.