Review: "The Best 101 Children's Songs," arranged by Dr. Bugs Bower

Dr. "Bugs" Bower has quite a variety of musical accomplishments over his long career. He is the author of a number of printed educational methods, and as a record producer, has had eight million-seller "Gold Records" and two Grammies. He has produced jazz, rock and roll, Broadway, spoken word, and children's records.

One of his more recent productions is a 3-CD set called "The Best 101 Children's Songs." It's available on CD from Bugs' website. Amazon has it too, including an MP3 version and a streaming version.

At my music lesson business, Hope Street Music Studios, I'm the person assigned to answering email inquiries (when I'm not teaching saxophone or clarinet). We regularly get inquiries from parents of very young children, who want advice on how to get their kids started on an instrument. My answer is that the best thing they can do is to get the kids singing. It's the most natural way to begin making music - no matter how young - and will provide a foundation for any instrument they may choose later, when they are old enough (issues of coordination, hand size, and attention span are the reasons that school instrumental music usually starts in fourth or fifth grade...although with the right teacher, piano, violin, or voice lessons can be started earlier).

When I put up my last post, a review of Bugs' book of music biz stories, I sent Bugs an email as a courtesy, to let him know. The next day, I received an email back from him, thanking me for the post. Not long after that, I got a phone call from Bugs, and we had a nice chat. Among other things, he mentioned an idea he had: using childrens' songs to learn English (adults or kids). My reaction was, sure - why not? People often use comic books and sitcoms to learn foreign languages. Kids' songs use entry-level vocabulary and grammar, and are also a basic part of the culture.

Besides just about every well-known American kids' song and many folk songs, "The Best 101 Children's Songs" includes originals that use "finger games" to teach addition and subtraction, plus jokes and riddles here and there. The content is intelligent and educational, as well as entertaining.

Whether you use this with your kids or grandkids, or perhaps even as an aid to learning English, this is a great product. Here's a sample:

Review: "Nice Stories About Nice People," by Dr. Bugs Bower

I've been a fan of Maurice "Bugs" Bower's work for years, before I really knew anything about the guy. Back in the 1970s, a friend hipped me to his Bop Duets book, and I've been using it for teaching ever since. (I've also used his Rhythms Complete book).

Some years later, I got to know an older-generation sax player who, as it happened, had served in the 89th Infantry Division band with Bugs during World War II, and had a story about him (see this post). Subsequently, I learned a bit more about Bugs - he was not just the author of educational materials, but had been quite active in the recording business as a producer, with eight gold records (i.e., they sold a million copies each), and two Grammies.

So when I learned that Bugs had written a book of his reminiscences about the music business, I had to get a copy. It's called Nice Stories About Nice People. This little book (93 pages) is, as the title indicates, entirely positive and upbeat. It includes short chapters about recording with Cab Calloway, Perry Como, Kool and the Gang, and Steve Allen; the time he turned down a job directing merchandise sales for a rock group (they turned out to be the Beatles - but who knew?); the recording of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," which earned him a gold record as producer as well as royalties for the song on the flip side; musings about famous musicians with perfect pitch; his creative brainstorms for various commercially successful recordings (e.g., aerobics, children's records, "Tijuana Christmas"); and advice to the reader for a happy life and how to get started in the music business. It's a fun read.

Bugs' 95th birthday was this past July 16.

Here's a short video made for the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Oral History Program, in which Bugs describes how he used the Schillinger system to write his "Rhythms" book in the late 1940s. I'm pretty sure he used the same approach in Bop Duets, as he often sets licks to varied rhythmic patterns. And actually, that's a great pedagogical approach in teaching students to read rhythms. It's also a great technique for jazz players: using different rhythms to get many different licks from one basic one.

Judging from the number of Youtube videos, Bugs' bop duets are still quite popular for teachers, on a number of different instruments. They were probably written originally for trumpet, as that was Bugs' main instrument, but they certainly work well for sax and clarinet.

Here's a link to an excellent article about Bugs in the Jacksonville (Fla.) Times-Union, with a lot more biographical information.

Here's a link to Bugs' own music book website.

Here's Cab Calloway at age 85, singing with a big band arrangement that Bugs did for a recording of Cab's, and that Cab used for years afterwards (the story is in the book) (BTW, I have a feeling that I've played a knockoff of this arrangement in some big band or other):

Finally, here is a 1964 recording by Donna Lynn of a tune written, and I assume produced, by Bugs: "My Boyfriend Got a Beatle Haircut." Cute, but it did not go gold.

The Flat Five As a Blue Note

It seems pretty clear that in early blues (say, pre-1920), musicians did not much employ the b5 as a blue note. By the mid-1920s, we have recordings with b5 licks used as part of the blues/jazz vocabulary. At some later point, the concept of a "blues scale" was conceived. I've been trying to get some historical perspective on all this (see my previous post, Early Blues, Blue Notes, and Blues Scales).

In his autobiography, referring to pre-1914 Southern folk music, W. C. Handy wrote:

[Black Southern folk musicians were] sure to bear down on the third and seventh tones of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton fields of the Delta or on the levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same...

Handy speaks of the flat third and seventh, but does not mention the flat fifth.

Looking at the earliest blues (by Handy and others) that appeared as sheet music pre-1915, I don't see any "blue note" use of the b5 (see the books on early published blues by Peter Muir and Vic Hobson, reviewed here earlier).

Listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924), I don't hear any blues use of the b5. Gershwin was not a blues musician, but as a bright young music industry insider, he would have been quite aware of blues usage in his time, at least the commercial and big-city type (Gershwin was born in 1898; the "blues craze" in popular music began c.1914). If the b5 had been part of what constituted "blues" for him in 1924, he surely would have exploited it in "Rhapsody in Blue."

To me, "blue note" usage of the flat five consists of either scooping the note in the same way and to the same extent that the third was traditionally scooped and bent, or incorporating the b5 into this sort of lick. This is from the opening of the melody in Tadd Dameron's The Squirrel (1947):

This kind of usage doesn't seem to have been there, in the earliest days of blues.

So when did musicians begin to use the b5 as a blue note? The earliest recorded example I could find was this 1925 Bessie Smith recording of "St. Louis Blues," featuring Louis Armstrong:

In the minor-key section, Bessie bends the fifth, and also embellishes the melody with a lick that's very close to the b5 4 b3 1 shape shown above. (Incidentally, check Louis in the second 12-bar strain of the tune, suggesting a IVm chord in bar 6 - pretty harmonically aware for 1925!)

There are a quite a few similar b5 licks in Louis' 1928 recording of "St. James Infirmary":

The b5 licks here are used liberally - in Louis' vocals and cornet solo, and in the clarinet and piano parts as well (Earl Hines was the pianist). The trombone contributes a b5-5 scoop.

You can hear similar b5 licks in later jazz standards like Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing" (1931) and "In a Sentimental Mood" (1935), and in Matt Dennis' "Angel Eyes" (1946).

Interestingly, the b5 licks in these Bessie Smith, Armstrong, Ellington, and Matt Dennis examples all occur in a minor-key context. This might seem to suggest that b5 blues usage started in the mid-1920s, in minor-key tunes.

On the other hand, the mid-20s time frame only reflects minor-key examples that I could find recordings for. "St. James Infirmary," for example, is a very old tune (see this Wikipedia entry). Perhaps Louis was just playing it the way New Orleans players had played it decades earlier, before recordings.

By the 1940s, b5 licks were commonplace in major-key blues as well. (Note: blues usage of the b5 by the bebop players was a different phenomenon than their use of the b5 for harmonic color.)

Some years ago, I researched blues scales for a college course. Surveying books and articles, I found no less than ten different "blues scales." The earliest proposal of a "blues scale" that I could find was by Winthrop Sargeant, in his 1938 book "Jazz - Hot and Hybrid." Here's Sargeant's diagram, as reproduced in Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz":

The arrows indicate prevalent melodic motion. Sargeant stated that this diagram related more to early or traditional blues (from a 1938 perspective).

If this scale is based on C as tonic, it is our present-day "major blues scale" with an added b7, and does not include the b5.

I'm not sure when our present-day "minor blues scale" (1 b3 4 b5 5 b7 1) came into the picture. If a blues scale involving the b5 had become commonly known by the 1940s, could it have influenced b5 usage? It's an interesting thought, but I have a feeling that it didn't happen that way.

I emailed this question to a few jazz musicians who who had learned their stuff in the late 1930s or early 1940s: When you were learning to play, were you aware of any concept of a "blues scale?" I heard back from two of them. One well-known NY pianist had this to say:

When I was learning to play, in the 30's and 40's, there was no "jazz education" to formalize matters, but there were soloists such as Lionel Hampton, Pete Brown, Lester Young,  Harry Edison, Buck Clayton, Charlie Christian, and the boogie-woogie pianists (Ammons, Lewis, James P. Johnson) who employed the blues scale in their solos and their pieces, and we followed what they did without labeling it systematically as "the blues scale."

Maurice "Dr. Bugs" Bower's answer was, "Never heard of it."

A Bugs Bower Story

When I was in college in Portland, a fellow sax player introduced me to some great jazz duets: Bop Duets, by Bugs Bower. My friend’s teacher in Chicago had used them as lesson material when my friend was in high school.

After I finished college, I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area. When I started teaching, naturally I started using the Bop Duets book with some of my students. I had no idea who Bugs was; I just liked the music.

One Sunday afternoon, after I had been teaching for 10 years or so, I was playing in a sax quartet rehearsal at the home of Bob M., the soprano player in the quartet.

We played for an hour or two, and then took a break for coffee. Bob was standing at the kitchen counter mixing up his instant coffee, and the rest of us were sitting at the table. The bari player said, “So, Peter, I hear you are a teacher. What do you use for jazz duets? I like the Lennie Niehaus duets...” I replied, “They’re OK, but I really like the Bugs Bower Bop Duets. Bob, standing with his back to us, sort of froze up and then turned around and said, "Bugs Bower? How do you know that name?"

I started to explain about the duet book, but Bob was already into nostalgic memories. He said, "I was in the Army with Bugs Bower during World War II...when the war ended, we were stationed outside Paris. One time, we had a day free, and we decided to go into Paris to look up Marcel Mule, the world's greatest classical sax player. We found him in the phone book, and took a taxi to his house, in one of the suburbs. We knocked on the door, and introduced ourselves as American servicemen, and Marcel Mule invited us in for lunch. After lunch, we went into a room where he had a collection of antique saxophones, and we played on them all afternoon..."

I couldn't believe how lucky I was to get this great story out of Bob. Besides being a great story, it gave me some idea who Bugs Bower was, besides just a name on a book. I asked Bob what Bugs’ real name was. He said, "I don't know...we called him 'Bugs,' because he was kind of crazy, like Bugs Bunny. I think his name was Maurice."

This was before the internet. I know more about Bugs now. His name is indeed Maurice. After the war, he went on to an illustrious career in the music business: record producer and A&R Director for many major labels, two Grammys, nine Gold Records, worked with Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, Perry Como, Jimmy Dorsey, Kool and the Gang, etc. He also wrote quite a few more educational publications. More recently, he put in some years teaching at Five Towns College in New York.

I managed to contact Bugs, and sent him this story, asking if he remembered it. He sent me this gracious reply:

Sorry---it was too long ago, and thanks for the nice words. I'm 89 and still creating CD's & Music Books. They are all on CD Baby including my latest: THE BEST 101 CHILDREN'S SONGS. 3 Hours of Fun & Music on 3 CD's! 

Stay Well and Happy in the Music Business-- Kindest regards, Dr. "Bugs" 

Here's a link to the site with Dr. Bower's latest books and CDs.

If you don’t know who Marcel Mule was, check out this Wikipedia article.

There’s a nice video clip of an interview with Bugs here.

Thanks again, Dr. Bugs!