Composer captured ‘a real jazz spirit’
Grammy winner helped shape big-band sound
Bill Holman, a Grammy Award-winning jazz arranger and composer who helped shape the big-band music of Stan Kenton and Doc Severinsen’s Tonight Show orchestra and wrote orchestrations for singers such as Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett and Natalie Cole, died May 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96.
He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments, said his stepdaughter, Kathryn King.
Holman served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and studied engineering before launching his music career in his 20s. A skilled tenor saxophonist who played on dozens of recordings, he made his greatest mark as an arranger and composer of tunes for jazz big bands.
He first gained notice in the early 1950s after joining Kenton’s band, a group renowned for its soaring brass and lofty ambition blending the grandeur of classical music with the sizzle of jazz. Holman’s bouncy, rhythmically nimble style didn’t always fit with Kenton’s approach, but he soon became one of the bandleader’s top arrangers, producing orchestrations that helped define the bold Kenton sound.
“Holman cut his teeth with Stan Kenton,” Seattle Times jazz writer Paul de Barros wrote in 2005, “and, since then, has epitomized a type of brainy, buoyant music that features harmonic wit, soft contours, lines moving in contrary motion and unusually beautiful textures.”
Kenton’s acclaimed 1955 album Contemporary Concepts included six tunes arranged by Holman.
By then, Holman and Kenton had already parted ways. Kenton liked a structured sound, and Holman preferred a style of music rooted in dance rhythms and improvisation.
“What I like to capture,” he told musician and writer Ted Gioia for his 1992 book West Coast Jazz, “is a real jazz spirit — so that no matter how much is written down, the music should have all the feeling of improvisation.”
Borrowing from Duke Ellington, Holman often wrote to suit the strengths of individual musicians, including trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and saxophonist Zoot Sims in the Kenton band. By the late 1950s, Holman had begun to write arrangements for singers such as Lee, June Christy, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen Mcrae and Mel Torme.
He released three big band albums as a leader in the 1950s and 1960s and contributed works to other groups, including a Grammy-nominated 1967 arrangement of the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood for drummer Buddy Rich.
As jazz lost popularity in the next few years, Holman turned to other styles, preparing pop arrangements for the Association and the Fifth Dimension. He contributed to TV and film productions but longed to return to jazz.
Willis Leonard Holman was born May 21, 1927, in Olive, Calif., and grew up primarily in Santa Ana, Calif. His father was an accountant and his mother was a homemaker.
His family had no record player, and the only source of music for young Willis — the name his friends and family knew him by — was the radio.
Holman began playing clarinet in junior high school before switching to the saxophone. While serving in the navy, he studied engineering at the University of Colorado and later for one semester at the UCLA. He then used the GI Bill to attend the nowdefunct Westlake College of Music, where he studied with Russ Garcia, a distinguished musical arranger.
After graduating in 1950, he played saxophone in the big band of Charlie Barnet and began to write arrangements. He joined Kenton in 1952.
In 1976, Holman worked with one his idols, Basie, contributing eight original tunes and two arrangements for the album I Told You So. He also wrote more than 30 charts for Severinsen’s Tonight Show orchestra.
Holman wrote six of the arrangements for Unforgettable, Cole’s top-selling album, which won a Grammy Award in 1992. Working with his own group, Holman received a Grammy in 1996 for best instrumental composition for his tune A View From the Side, and another in 1998 for his arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser.
In 2008, Holman wrote arrangements for a Christmas album by Bennett and was named a Jazz Master of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2010.
Holman continued to work on new musical projects until shortly before his death.
“Writing music and arranging never gets easy,” he said in 2008. “I’ve had students ask me, ‘How long does it take before it gets easy?’ I tell them, ‘Never.’”