Willis Leonard Holman (born May 21, 1927), known professionally as Bill Holman, is an American composer, arranger, conductor, saxophonist, and songwriter working in jazz and traditional pop. His career is over seven decades long, having started with the Charlie Barnet orchestra in 1950.
Early life
Bill Holman was born in Olive, California, United States. His family moved to Orange, east of Anaheim, then Santa Ana. He started playing the clarinet in junior high school. While attending Orange High School he played the tenor saxophone and formed a band. Although his family had no musical background, Holman was influenced by Count Basie and Duke Ellington while constantly listening to the radio. He was drafted at the later end of World War II and served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946. Through the Navy, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado and then studied at UCLA.
In the late 1940s, he started to concentrate on music instead of engineering. He enrolled at the Westlake College of Music, and studied with Dave Robertson and Alfred Sendrey. He studied privately with composer and arranger Russ Garcia and Lloyd Reese on the saxophone. He was influenced by the African-American jazz musicians on Central Avenue in Los Angeles. He heard live music while living nearby and attending Westlake College. He got his first professional start with Ike Carpenter's dance band, and then with the Charlie Barnet Orchestra in 1950 as a tenor saxophonist. He continued with that band for about three years. Early commercial work as an arranger came in 1951–52 when he wrote charts for band leader and producer Bob Keane for the album, Dancing on the Ceiling.
The Stan Kenton Orchestra
Through his acquaintance with Gene Roland, Holman was auditioned by Stan Kenton and hired as a tenor saxophone player for two years in March 1952 (replacing Bob Cooper). After working with the band as an instrumentalist, Holman submitted writing to Kenton for the group. His first writing was not an immediate success with Kenton, until he was given an assignment to write "Invention for Guitar and Trumpet" for Sal Salvador and Maynard Ferguson. The chart was to become one of the recognized works for the Kenton orchestra from the album New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm. It was used in the 1955 movie, Blackboard Jungle.
Kenton was attracted to Holman's ability to integrate counterpoint and dissonance in subtle yet distinctive ways, and for his knack for making the Kenton band "swing". Holman became one of Kenton's primary arrangers, creating a signature for the band. His association with the Kenton orchestra lasted nearly 27 years and contribute to Kenton's albums New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm, Contemporary Concepts and the Grammy Award-winning Adventures in Jazz. Kenton featured Holman as a composer and arranger with Bill Russo on the 1954 album Kenton Showcase.
Holman's comments about being most influenced by the writing of Gerry Mulligan as the template for what was correct for the band:
Classical influences from Béla Bartók were also used during this time. Two of the most important arrangements are on the Kenton album, Contemporary Concepts (1955). Holman talked about his arrangements of "What's New?" and "I've Got You Under My Skin":
Zoot Sims joined the group as the solo tenor saxophonist; Kenton asked Holman to write for Sims. Later Holman left the band after an intense discussion about the band's shortcomings; this did not endanger Holman's reputation as a composer and arranger for Kenton. By the mid-1950s, while Holman was in his late 20s, Kenton was commissioning Holman to write as much as he could. He was writing sometimes two charts every week that included concert works, dance charts, originals, and vocals. During the 1952-55 period the two primary composers/arrangers who shaped the signature sound of the Kenton orchestra for years to come, were Holman and Bill Russo (who was a year younger than Holman). Almost two-thirds of the music recorded by Kenton during this period were from these two writers. Two of the original works of Holman's created for the band during that time include "Hav-a-Havana". The other work which has become the quintessential "Holman signature sound" of contrapuntal composition is "The Opener". Though Kenton's taste would evolve and Holman was not functioning as chief arranger by the end of the 1950s, he continued to make key contributions to the Kenton repertoire to 1977 before Kenton's demise in 1979.