2023 Christmas Playlist

I remember when I learned John Scott Trotter wrote all of Bing Crosby’s arrangements, and his orchestra played on Crosby’s immortal album “White Christmas.”
John Scott Trotter, Ethel Merman, Bing Crosby
John Scott Trotter (left), Ethel Merman, and Bing Crosby ready a radio show. John Scott arranged Bing’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s song “White Christmas,” which in 2023 is still the bestselling musical recording in history.

     I had already known Scott as the man who played piano with a school band (for which he wrote many of the arrangements) that was formed at the University of North Carolina. In the 1930s they became famous almost overnight, playing aboard big, scheduled passenger ships crossing the Atlantic between New York and Southampton, well before the airlines took over during the mid 1950s.
     The band, called The Hal Kemp Orchestra, was aboard ship one summer and was invited to play for Prince George—he was throwing a big party as the future King of England (later becoming the Duke of Windsor after he renounced his throne “for the woman I love”) as he traveled from New York back across the Atlantic.
     At one point, the Prince, who fancied himself something of a musician (drums) joined the band—that simple gesture made headlines, and Hal Kemp became famous.
     Later John Scott wrote arrangements for many of the Kemp tunes. Some 700 were recorded, all at 78 rpm, before Hal’s untimely death in 1940, after which The Hal Kemp Orchestra was no more.
     But John Scott kept on working, and after he created the arrangement for “White Christmas” in 1942 (still number one single in recording sales), Bing wouldn’t work without him. Up until the mid-1950s, Bing rarely allowed anyone else to arrange his music, but John Scott must have convinced him otherwise.
     The string of hit songs the duo created has never been matched.
     During our early days at Air Cargo News, I had the great pleasure to create a 22-hour musical history of Hal Kemp & his Orchestra for Public Radio in New York City.
     John Scott’s early work for Kemp was full of wonderful musical discoveries brought to America for the first time, like the French song “Boom” and many others.
     John Scott invented the staccato triplets played by the horn section to create a unique sound for the Kemp band on many recordings, “Got a Date With An Angel” and others, and the sound became the band’s trademark—it even caused the great songwriter Johnny Mercer to remark with some admiration, describing Kemp’s signature as “the typewriter band.”
     John Scott’s arrangements influenced everybody from Kay Kyser to Glenn Miller, and of course the greatest crooner of them all, Bing Crosby, who said this about Trotter: “I'm not musically educated enough to really describe what he was in music terms. I just knew he was very good and he had marvelous taste.”
     Blessed Christmastide & all good wishes.
Geoffrey

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Vol. 22 No. 45		Wednesday December 20, 2023