Jerry Herman, composer and lyricist.
In a half-century of work, he scored a dozen Broadway musicals and five Off Broadway revues, composed many of the nation’s most popular songs and was showered with awards, including Tonys for “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles.”
He also made stage history as the first composer-lyricist to have three musicals run more than 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway — “Hello, Dolly!” with 2,844, “Mame” with 1,508 and “La Cage” with 1,761 — and remains one of only two to achieve that feat. (Stephen Schwartz, with “Pippin,” “The Magic Show” and “Wicked,” is the second.) And “La Cage” (1983) was the only Broadway musical to win the Tony for best revival twice, for 2004 and 2010 productions.
I don’t know Jerry Herman, but I saw Woody Herman and the Thundering Herd, in high school,at a different high school. Our jazz band went there,along with several other schools jazz bands,in the afternoon, and the band broke down into sections, with each member going into a different class room,and we went into the room with the person who played the same instrument we did.
We spent maybe an hour or an hour and a half, with the people giving us a lesson from a professional jazz player. I play a lot of instruments, or I did, but in that jazz band, I played tenor sax, so I went with the sax player.
Then in the evening we came back for a concert by Woody Herman and the rest of the band. It was the first concert I ever attended, and it was actually great.
At the age of 30, I finally started playing professionally in a rock band. I played mostly sax, and a little guitar. I still worked in a steel foundry, but had just gone through a divorce, and needed something to keep myself occupied so I found a band looking for a horn player. I played for a few years. We were all in our early 30’s,with families and kids. But we were pretty good, and we played in front of 10,000 people a couple of times.