Most bandleaders had their moment and then spent the rest of their careers defending it. Herman never played it that way. From the late 1930s through the mid-1980s, he kept finding new music, new players, new angles. His bands — the Herds, as they came to be called — were genuinely different from each other, not just rebranded versions of the same outfit. The First Herd of the mid-1940s was loud, brash, bebop-adjacent swing with a killer reed section and an almost reckless energy. The Second Herd leaned harder into cool and bop. Later editions went into fusion territory, funk, even rock influences. Some of it worked better than others, but none of it was lazy.

As a clarinetist, Herman was solid and soulful without being the kind of virtuoso people built shrines to. He had good blues feeling — he'd started out singing and playing in the style of the territory bands, and that roots-level earthiness never fully left him. His clarinet was more about warmth and directness than technical fireworks. He also had genuine charisma as a front man, which mattered enormously in the big band world, where the leader's personality set the whole temperature of the room.

The First Herd albums from 1945 and 1946 are still the ones most worth starting with. The band had Flip Phillips on tenor, Bill Harris on trombone, and Dave Tough at various points on drums, and the whole thing swings with a kind of controlled chaos that's genuinely exciting even now. Caldonia became a signature — a stomping, shouting blues number that showed exactly what the band could do when it was fully locked in. Igor Stravinsky actually wrote a piece for Herman around this time, Ebony Concerto (1946), which is a fascinating curiosity even if it's more interesting on paper than on record.

The roster of musicians who passed through Herman's bands over the decades reads like a who's who of postwar jazz. Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Serge Chaloff formed the famous Four Brothers saxophone section in the late 1940s — that sound, four saxes blending with a slightly cool, slightly melancholy tone, became one of the defining textures of the era. Later on, players like Chick Corea, Alan Broadbent, and Sal Nistico all put in time with Herman. He had a nose for who was good before everyone else figured it out.

The sad coda to all of this is that Herman spent his final years performing despite serious health problems, largely because the IRS had seized most of his assets over unpaid taxes — the result of a manager's mishandling of his finances years earlier. He was playing right up near the end, not out of vanity but out of necessity. It's a rough way for a fifty-year run to finish. But the music itself holds up. Put on the First Herd recordings and you'll hear a band that genuinely sounds like it's having fun while playing difficult music at a very high level, which is rarer than it sounds.