Boyd Raeburn

American jazz band leader, tenor and bass saxophonist, born 27 October 1913, Faith, South Dakota, died 2 August 1966, Lafayette, Louisiana. Husband of vocalist Ginnie Powell and father of music historian Bruce Boyd Raeburn. Boyd Raeburn’s band made a big critical splash in New York. Billy Eckstine, whose own bebop big band also suffered from the recording ban, was ecstatic about it, helping Raeburn play a week at the all-black Apollo Theater. Eckstine exhorted the audience to pay attention to what the band was playing. During one of their New York gigs at the Commodore Hotel, their late-night broadcast was heard by trumpeter Roy Eldridge who rushed down and sat in night after night, for free, until the band’s manager simply hired him. (He stayed for two months.) But bad luck dogged Raeburn throughout his career. Finckel left in 1945 to become chief arranger for Gene Krupa’s big band, Sonny Berman and Earl Swope jumped to the high-profile band of Woody Herman, and then as later, no major label wanted to record him because his arrangements were considered “too weird” for dancers. Nevertheless, Raeburn did record 12 sides for the small Guild label in 1945, including performances of “March of the Boyds” and “A Night in Tunisia” on which trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie sat in. These records were later sold to, and reissued by, Albert Marx’s Musicraft label.