Donn Trenner: a life in jazz, global and local
When you see the scene in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” where Lenny
Bruce is performing on the Steve Allen Show, imagine Donn Trenner in the show’s backing band.
Trenner could vouch firsthand for how the legendary “sick comic” would “play to the band,” even turning his back to the audience, and even when on national television.
Trenner, the Connecticut jazz legend who died this month at the age of 93, was the music director and pianist for “The Steve Allen Show” — a tough gig, since Allen was a skilled pianist himself, and prone to spontaneity on the air.
From that and other piano bench perches, Trenner traveled in just about every dimension of jazz during the second half of the 20th century. For the last quarter-century of his life he was in Connecticut, playing weekly in Hartford and Guilford as well as at Mohegan Sun Casino.
According to his personal assistant, archivist and longtime friend Liz
Coburn, Trenner was born in New Haven and started playing piano at the age of 6. His parents encouraged his ambitions, taking him to concerts in New York. He headed his own high school jazz orchestra. He was in a big band with Doc Severinsen when both men were still in their teens. He was accepted to Juilliard School of Music but didn’t go because he assumed he’d be drafted. He organized three separate bands while serving in the Air Force in 1945.
Trenner was part of the Big Band era, in the famous bands of Tommy Dorsey and Charlie Barnett. Then he became a bebop pioneer, playing with the likes of Charlie Parker, Chet Baker and Stan Getz in the early 1950s. From 1954 to ’61 he was with Les Brown and His Band of Renown.
That’s Trenner you hear playing the opening riff on one of the most famous jazz TV themes of all time, “Route 66.” He spent the first half of the ’60s with “The Steve Allen Show,” later becoming the musical director for Nancy Wilson, Ann-Margret (for nearly 20 years), Shirley MacLaine (earning an Emmy nomination for her special “Gypsy in My Soul” and Rita
Moreno. He was in constant demand as an accompanist. In 1976, Trenner played at Kennedy Center on the eve of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration.
Besides Steve Allen and his guests such as Lenny Bruce, Trenner’s comedy connections included years as the piano accompanist for Bob Hope. He was a member of Yarmy’s Army, a comedy supergroup that raises money for charities and dates back to the
1960s.
After decades in California, an earthquake convinced Trenner to return to Connecticut in 1996. He settled in Guilford, performing throughout the state. That included Sunday nights at Guilford’s Ayuthai restaurant.
Trenner’s final performance was in Hartford March 9, at his regular weekly gig with the Hartford Jazz Orchestra at Arch Street Tavern. As it happens, it was a special birthday celebration for him; he was born March 10, 1927. He’d been the ensemble’s music director for 20 years, following the death of Chick Cicchetti. Coburn says he never missed a show. “Every Monday night was unique. The room was always packed. Some nights Donn would be ecstatic because everything would just click. There was such camaraderie, a musical family gathering every Monday. It was magic.”
Besides the steady gig with the orchestras, Trenner was still putting backing bands together for shows at Mohegan Sun.
The “Golden Boys” tours of Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell were among those that specifically requested his input.
Coburn’s husband John Brighenti is a longtime member of the Hartford Jazz Orchestra, and it was through talking to Trenner there and impressing him with her research skills that Coburn became his archivist and assistant. Among the treasures she’s found among his possessions: a photo he took of Jayne Mansfield in an angora bikini, a reel-to-reel tape of a 1967 Nancy Wilson Vegas show and 40 boxes of his sheet music arrangements.
A few years ago, “as a joke, because he was so humble,” Coburn started a Donn Trenner Fan Club page on Facebook. It took off, and is now a repository for photos and memories of Trenner, included a famous shot of him with Charlie Parker, with the Les Brown Band in the mid-1950s and a flier from a club gig (as “Donn Trio and Helen,” with vocalist Helen Carr) from the Havana Room in Bakersfield, California in 1949.
“I’m still going through stuff,” Coburn says. “I was on the phone with him almost every day.” Trenner published his memoirs, “Leave It to Me… My Life in Music,” co-authored by jazz trombonist Tim Atherton, who encouraged him to write it. “We started getting him out there to talk about the book,” Coburn says. “He’d never have publicized it without us pushing him. That’s how humble he was. I really think he’s unsung.”
Donn Trenner, Coburn says, “was a real romantic. He loved the American songbook. The emotion he brought to his playing was incredible.”