Boyd Raeburn & His Orchestra—”Interlude” (“A Night In Tunesia”) (1945)
“Interlude” was composed in 1941-42 by Dizzy Gillespie during his engagement with Benny Carter at Kelly's Stables in New York. During a break in the filming of a soundee, Gillespie sat down at the piano to improvise some chord changes. “Actually, they were thirteenth chords,” Gillespie recalled in his autobiography To Be, Or Not … To Bop. “A-thirteenth resolving to D minor. I looked at the notes of the chords as I played the progression and noticed that they formed a melody. All I had to do was write a bridge, put some rhythm to it, and it was over.” Gillespie called his new tune “Interlude.” Later it became generally known as “Night In Tunisia.”
“Interlude” was first recorded by Boyd Raeburn and His Orchestra with Dizzy Gillespie, Tommy Allison, Stan Fishelson, Benny Harris-trumpet; Walter Robertson- trumpet and trombone; Trummy Young, Jack Carmen and Ollie Wilson-trombone; Johnny Bothwell and Hal McKusick-alto sax; Al Cohn and Joe Megro-tenor sax; Serge Chaloff-baritone saxophone; Ike Carpenter-piano; Steve Jordan-guitar; Oscar Pettiford-double bass; and Shelly Manne-drums. Recorded for the newly founded Guild record company in New York City, on or about January 27, 1945.
Bandleader/saxophonist Boyd Albert Raeburn (1913-1966) developed from directing a highly appreciated society-type dance band to becoming a 'progressive' leader whose innovative, but non-danceable music was appreciated by the critics but less so by the public. Despite jazz critic Leonard Feather’s observation that Raeburn first used a “very commercial type band, slowly moving toward swing policy from the late 1930s” his first outfit must have already sounded innovative. For in 1933 newspapers Raeburn's sound is already described as “the spirited music of Boyd Raeburn’s ‘Young Moderns’.”
Boyd Raeburn was born and raised on a farm near Faith, South Dakota. He studied music privately and while studying medicine at Chicago University. There, Raeburn organized a campus band with which he won a competition that led to his first professional engagement during the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1933-1934.
Right from the start the 19-year-old Raeburn and his collegian band had nightly broadcasts between 6:30 and 6:45 p.m. from the new Fred Harvey’s Embassy Room at the Straus Building on Michigan Avenue and Jackson Boulevard, where Boyd Raeburn and his KYW Broadcasting Orchestra played for dinner dancing. Raeburn himself played tenor sax with the band, later switched to baritone and finally to bass sax in 1946, which gave him the nickname “Man with the horns.”
At 20, Raeburn and his outstanding musical ensemble already left a trail of meteoric success behind them in many of Chicago’s gayest spots. Habitues of Chicago’s famous rendezvous have applauded Raeburn’s “dancapation” from Chicago’s smartest country club, the South Shore, to Chicago’s most notable hotels. From the Colchester room at the Stevens hotel -- then the largest hotel in the world, and now called the Hilton Chicago -- to the College Inn restaurant at the Hotel Sherman -- favorite gathering spot for gangsters as well as local politicians.
Smooth flowing rhythms were said to characterize the Raeburn style of dance music. The band had actually a small band within the band called “Four Beat Waves” that provided tantalizing rhythms on special numbers. Raeburn rewrote old Latin music and the vocalists and “The Embassy Trio” offered a new group of melodies to the Saturday might crowds. “The Trio has been doing a lot of practicing working up new tunes,” Raeburn smiled, “keeps ’em out of mischief and gives the best to those who enjoy good harmony.”
Boyd Raeburn and his band continued their radio broadcast throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. He changed his style in January 1939 and switched to swing music. Encouraged by Paul Whiteman he began in the early Forties to engage outstanding young arrangers with extreme modernistic ideas and formed a new band with a number of top class jazzmen. In 1943 the 30-year old Raeburn contracted Eddie Finckel, who arranged “Interlude - A Night in Tunisia.”
When Finckle left to join Gene Krupa in 1945 George Handy became Raeburn’s next arranger. Actually Krupa’s reorganization of a new band was a wholesale raid of Boyd Reaburn’s crew when he grabbed several of Raeburn’s musicians. On February 5, 1946, Handy was the pianist and producer of the first recording session for Dial, with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. At the Dial session two days later Gillespie would make the first official recording of “Night In Tunisia” under its own title.
In 1944, Raeburn suffered a setback when most of the band's instruments and library were destroyed in a fire at New Jersey's Palisades Amusement Park. But by the end of World War II, he was again leading one of the country’s top progressive jazz bands whose progressive style could be called pre-be bop.
Boyd Raeburn moved to the West Coast in 1946 and his sidemen there included composer/arranger Johnny Mandell, pianist Dodo Marmorosa and clarinet player Buddy De Franco. Leonard Feather said Duke Ellington was one of Raeburn’s most enthusiastic supporters and helped made a generous donation to back the Raeburn band on the West Coast. Raeburn broke up this band in August 1947, reorganized a year later but gave up traveling in 1950 and limited his work to occasional dates around New York City with a pickup band.
In the 1950s, Raeburn concentrated on arranging and returned to band leading with the emphasis more on dance music that the ‘far out’ material of the prime years. When Boyd Raeburn died in 1966, aged 52, he had been out of the music business for almost a decade, pursuing business interests in New York and the Bahamas. His wife, actress Ginny Powell, who was Raeburn’s and Harry James’ band singer, died ten years earlier. Their son, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Ph. D., of New Orleans, became curator of the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at the Tulane University in New Orleans and is the author of a large number of publications on jazz.
