Adventures in Jazz is a 1962 album by the Stan Kenton Orchestra. The album won a Grammy Award in the category for Best Jazz Performance – Large Group (Instrumental) category in 1963. This was Kenton's second Grammy, after his first received for Kenton's West Side Story in 1962. It was also nominated for Best Engineering Contribution – Other Than Novelty and Other Than Classical at the 1963 Grammys.Billboard Magazine, Apr 20, 1963, p.30

The 1999 CD re-issue of Adventures In Jazz is augmented with two alternate takes from the original recording sessions and one track from Kenton's release Sophisticated Approach.

Background The Kenton orchestra had been on a slow decline in sales and popularity in the late 1950s with having to compete with newer, popular music artists such as Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin, and The Platters. The nadir of this decline was around 1958 and coincided with a recession that was affecting the entire country.Sparke, Michael (2010). "Stan Kenton: This Is An Orchestra". University of North Texas Press. p. 138 . There were far fewer big bands on the road and live music venues were hard to book for the Kenton orchestra. The band would end 1959 beaten up by poor attendance at concerts and having to rely far more on dance halls than real jazz concerts.Ironically, Standards in Silhouette was recorded at the end of this very difficult financial period in the last studio sessions with this 1950s incarnation of the Kenton orchestra. The album is one of the crowning artistic achievements of Kenton's musical career. The band would reform in 1960 with a new look and new sound; Adventures In Jazz would be one of the albums to be part of an upsurge in Kenton's popularity.Sparke, Michael; Venudor, Peter (1998). "Stan Kenton, The Studio Sessions". Balboa Books. .

This set of record dates for the Kenton organization's Adventures In Jazz is a high point for what was known as the "mellophonium band" (after the new brass instrument prominently featured) or as Kenton himself had coined the phrase "A New Era In Modern American Music."Easton, Carol, Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton. William Morrow & Company, Inc. New York, N.Y. 1973. The group was able to turn a minimal profit and use those resources to record what would be a total of 11 albums in a three-year span. Touring up to nine months of the year did not leave much time to record; studio schedules were hectic. On the other hand, the band had been playing together so much on the road they were musically familiar and close-knit with one another. As a unit, the quality of the Kenton orchestra on the December 1961 Adventures In Jazz LP tracks is outstanding, particularly with an expanded orchestra of 22 musicians that included a mellophonium section. Kenton had tried to staff a musical group larger than this during the "Innovations in Modern Music" tour and recording sessions from 1950, with it ending in financial failure. Though not considered a "financial windfall," Adventures In Jazz and other "mellophonium band" projects were far more solvent than those of the aforementioned group from more than a decade earlier.

Until the "Adventures" recording sessions of December 1961, the history of the Kenton band using mellophoniums was rocky. Though the band was touring with a mellophonium section throughout the second half of 1960, it was not until the Merry Christmas recordings of February and March 1961 that Lee Gillette and Stan Kenton deemed any recordings with a Kenton mellophonium band acceptable for release to the public. The instrument plays notoriously out of tune and trumpet players had to be converted to the mellophonium. Prior to June 1960, the horn was new and untested in a real, musical playing environment. Two entire albums of material (sessions from Sept. 1960 and Feb. 1961) were left unreleased for more than a decade due to the problems associated with recording mellophoniums. Kenton commented, "The mellophonium is a peculiar instrument when you get in the upper register, you don't know what's going to come out from the thing, and it's hard to control." The kinks were worked out and the personnel of the Kenton orchestra persevered; Merry Christmas become both Billboard and Variety's top Christmas LP; both Kenton's West Side Story and Adventures In Jazz earned Grammys in 1962 and 1963 respectively.Note from editor: The Sept. 26 1961 New York sessions containing Body And Soul and Waltz Of The Prophets can be heard on the reissued CD. In sharp contrast to the later December sessions these are not good. The band is sloppy and soloists sound like they are sleeping (Sam Donahue's solo sounds very distracted); mellophoniums are a problem but not the biggest one. It is no wonder Kenton rejected this initial "Adventures" session.

For Kenton it was a very difficult time personally, even with the successes of the West Side Story and Adventures In Jazz albums. During the time of the recording in 1961, Kenton was suffering a huge personal embarrassment that surfaced in his professional life. His wife Ann Richards had done a nude layout for Hugh Hefner's Playboy, which came out in the June 1961 edition.Playboy Magazine, June 1961, Ann Richards photo layout She had also signed a contract to record with Atco Records, without her husband's knowledge.The LP cover photo of Ann Richards for the Atco Records release is a picture taken from the Playboy photo shoot, but edited Kenton himself found out about the Playboy layout out on the road while playing at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, when handed the magazine by Charles Suter, who was the editor for Down Beat magazine at the time.Harris, Steven. The Kenton Kronicles. Dynaflow Publications. 2000. Richards was 23 years younger than Kenton and was not typically on the road with the band, though she had recorded Two Much! just a couple of years earlier with Kenton. Divorce papers were filed in August 1961. While Kenton was being confronted by the personal embarrassment of the situation and the divorce was going through the courts in Los Angeles, he was riding on a new wave of success with the West Side Story album charting for 28 weeks in Billboard, peaking out at #16. The band had done the initial recording for Adventures In Jazz and would record the entire "Adventures" sessions in December.

Adventures In Jazz marks a high point in Kenton's jazz career as a band leader, due to the mellophonium experiment succeeding to at least a moderate level even with the LP released as a loose, disparate set of instrumental titles. The timing and success of Adventures in Jazz as a serious jazz album is of no coincidence, preceded by both hit LPs Merry Christmas and West Side Story. Through these two previous LPs the public got re-acquainted with Stan Kenton, allowing greater acceptance of a lesser-known set of musical numbers on Adventures In Jazz. Kenton also recorded a country single in September 1962 (as singer/narrator on "Mama Sang a Song") that made it to #32 on the Billboard Top 40, thereby helping to fund projects like the "Adventures" records.Stan Kenton – Mama Sang A Song The LPs recorded with Tex Ritter and singer Jean Turner just before Adventures in Jazz did not gain any acceptance or financial gain.Stan Kenton/Tex Ritter – High NoonStan Kenton/Jean Turner – Love Walked In The environment for Kenton's pop music commercial successes was far more measured than 10 years earlier; the sound of a 22-piece mellophonium-style orchestra did not sell well to anything but a smaller, serious jazz audience. The group was far better equipped to present music designed specifically for only jazz instrumentals on a recording such as Adventures In Jazz.

This would be the last set of Kenton bandsmen that were closer to him in age and respectability as "jazz stars." Sam Donahue appears as a soloist, arranger, and section player, having established himself on earlier Artie Shaw and Woody Herman recordings; Donahue had a couple of successful recordings with Capitol himself. By December 1961, Kenton had turned 50; many of his contemporaries from earlier Kenton groups had established their own careers and moved on. On Adventures in Jazz the Kenton band plays at a mature, musical level due to the set of older players with much more diverse backgrounds than later personnel on the bands. The very talented younger players just out of school such as Dee Barton, Marvin Stamm, and Dwight Carver were trained by veteran players such as Bob Fitzpatrick and Gene Roland. This was not necessarily the case in the late 1960s and 1970s Kenton bands having to rely heavily on schools such as University of North Texas, Berklee School of Music, and Eastman School of Music. Those schools could provide young, adept jazz players who could travel but were far less experienced in professional musical settings. The artistic success of Adventures In Jazz is a testament to a combination of Kenton's perseverance, timing, individual musicians, and talented composer/arrangers who were a part of those recording sessions.

The Music for Adventures In Jazz

"Turtle Talk" starts the album and is the "opening act" for Dee Barton as a composer and new trombonist for the Kenton Orchestra. Barton would later take the drum chair on the Kenton band showing the multi-talents he brought to the table for this group and later studio work he would do. Both "Turtle Talk" and "Waltz of the Prophets" use the same harmonic pallet of relying on augmented chords and whole tone scales. "Waltz of the Prophets" had been recorded a couple of years earlier by the University of North Texas One O'Clock Lab Band and was Barton's résumé material to write for the Kenton group. Both works carve a new niche in the Kenton book, but do not vary in terms of fit or finish, for what is expected from the Kenton repertoire. "Waltz of the Prophets" is unique in the overtly gospel aspects of the work showing Barton's musical roots having been raised in Mississippi. These two works as well as several others on the album served as mainstay pieces that would be played for years to come in live performances for the Kenton orchestra; not all Kenton works lasted this long on the bandstand. Barton later went on to fame (like other Kenton writers Pete Rugolo and Lennie Niehaus) as a composer for films such as Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me.

Easily the two tracks making the album sparkle are "Limehouse Blues" and "Malagueña" arranged by Bill Holman. Though Holman is well known for Kenton charts on the New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm, Contemporary Concepts, and Stan Kenton Presents Bill Holman LPs, these two instrumental charts penned for Kenton are now hallmarks of the modern jazz orchestra repertoire. Kenton would use "Malagueña" with the band all the way to his death in 1978. The two charts have also become staples of both drums corpsBill Holman's arrangement of "Malagueña" has become the signature work for the Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps, winning them a DCI championship in 1988 and marching bands because of the inventiveness Bill Holman has with musical material. Great credit should be given to the band itself; these are very difficult works Holman created. These are flag-waver pieces that catch the ears of the normal listener and especially a NARAS/Grammy panel that might not know the jazz orchestra genre but certainly knows exciting and well-played music.