San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bandleader worked hard on, off dance floor
My father, Jean Sarli, once led a dance orchestra in San Antonio and also directed the Rodeo Band. Do you have any information pertaining to his dance orchestra?
— Gary G. Sarli Known in San Antonio as Jean Joseph Sarli, he was billed as “America's Most Versatile Conductor” within a year of his arrival here. He was born Joseph Jean Sarli in 1889 to Josephine Hain and Italian-born Dominic “Don” Sarli, listed in U.S. census records as a theater musician.
In the 1910 census, still-Joseph and his wife of one year, the former Evelyn Wetschky, were living with his parents on Lucky Street in St. Louis. Joseph, 20, also was a theater musician, and Evelyn had been listed in the St. Louis city directory as a clerk, living with her mother, a weaver.
No one in their immediate family appears to have had a connection to San Antonio, and veteran union musician Dominic died in 1922. The first recorded mention of the younger Sarli in Alamo City — with his first and middle names reversed — comes in 1926 advertisements for the Jean Sarli School of Popular and Classical Music, 211½ Broadway. Sarli continued to operate the school for more than a decade, offering “instruction in all instruments,” with the piano as his forte.
From then on, he proved his
versatility, putting together a series of overlapping positions in the local music scene that added up to a living — covering days, nights and weekends, four seasons a year, with more conducting jobs than you could shake a stick at.
Sarli's first big gig was as leader of the orchestra that played in the Aztec Theatre, accompanying the last of the silent movies as well as the stage-show acts and supplying musical interludes between them. As the Aztec Symphoneers, they also performed elsewhere, promoting the theater at other events.
Sarli was hired away by the new “Greater Majestic” (covered here Jan. 19, 2019) when it opened in 1929 and kept the show band as his
bread and butter until 1930, when
he left to concentrate on his music school and his next moves.
Meanwhile, he had been working with the Alamo Heights school district to start the high school's first band in 1929. While still the Alamo Heights music director and producing concerts and PTA shows, he developed an orchestra (a band with stringed instruments) for Lanier High School and, after leaving Alamo Heights in 1935, did the same for San Antonio Vocational and Technical High School (later Fox Tech). His last teaching job was at Edison High School, where he was band director for the last 15 years of his life.
Sarli, who became president of the San Antonio Music Teachers Association, took all his school bands to state and regional competitions and often came home with first-place awards.
At the same time, he was developing a solid reputation as a bandleader who could deliver whatever was needed. Some of these units were temporary, such as Sarli's Saxophones for an early 1930s Fiesta San Antonio parade and Sarli's Harmony Band, whose members sang. There were also occasional jobs, leading the WOAI (radio) Orchestra or the pit and dance orchestras for the annual Franklin D. Roosevelt birthday gala to benefit the March of Dimes.
He and his first wife — mother of his son Don, who followed him into the music business — went through an acrimonious divorce in 1937, countersuing each other and citing “cruel and harsh treatment.”
But Sarli didn't miss a beat, playing private parties, starting an American Legion Municipal Band and a YMCA boys band, and serving as the Elks Club organist, among other mid-1930s projects.
For dances in homes or nightclubs, Sarli fielded 10-piece bands with names that changed with the venues that booked them — Jean Sarli and His Gang, Boys, Dixieland Band, Melodiers, Swing Band or Society Orchestra. Through the 1930s and '40s, he played for dancing at classy places such as the Menger Hotel, big “popularly priced” roof gardens including the Palace on West Travis Street and the Tourist Club on St. Mary's or the occasional raffish joint such as the Rockin' M Ranch on Soledad. Whatever the outfit's name, Sarli usually got the coveted Saturday night spot, playing “favorite top hits for your pleasure” on dance floors all over the city.
Two of his most prestigious recurring jobs didn't involve dancing.
Sarli was the first music director of the San Antonio Civic Opera Company, conducting a 45-piece orchestra through the classic repertoire in the dramatic setting of the Sunken Garden Theater. The other was his long-running stint as leader of the San Antonio Rodeo band from the late 1940s until his death in 1957.
His elder son followed him into both the Edison and rodeo jobs.
It's not clear what kind of formal education Sarli had or why he relocated to San Antonio. He wasn't a tall man, but he exuded authority on the podium and took his responsibilities seriously.
An Edison band alumnus wrote in a letter to the editor of the San Antonio Express and News, April 18, 1970, that “we had the best highschool band in the city at that time — the only one that consistently and successfully put on three to four concerts a year (with) such pieces as Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and the finale to his Fourth Symphony,” Howard T. Harris Jr. said.
“When we were in that band room, (Sarli) was God, mother and country rolled into one.”