Steven Cerra - Creating a Reader Factory, and Perhaps the Most Important One So Far
Sorry - couldn't resist
Steven Cerra - Creating a Reader Factory, and Perhaps the Most Important One So Far
Aug 05, 2026
Steven Cerra describes himself as a writer, photographer, web producer, film maker/videographer and audio producer. He has a blog, and he is a fellow Substack writer. But he goes the extra distance by assembling and editing ‘readers,’ volumes that compile written materials on a given subject. He is prolific; so far he has self-published readers on Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne, West Coast Jazz, Saxophone players, Trumpet players, Pianists, and Drummers. He’s a hard man to keep up with! Happily he issues these as not only printed volumes, but also as kindle books at a VERY reasonable price for volumes that are over 700 pages!! I for one ran out of space for small books let alone giant monsters like these, but having them on kindle makes my life much easier. As an historian, I love having these many articles at my fingertips.
While I look forward to his work in progress on “Porgy and Bess,” I am ecstatic over his reader “A Companion Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Jean Goldkette Orchestra.”
Before the 1960s, the Goldkette Orchestra was mostly known by historians of 1920s big bands, and while there were isolated reissues of the recordings of Goldkette, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Whiteman and others in the LP era, research and important articles only appeared in magazines and books in the late 1950s onward. Interviews with musicians started to appear, and books by Rex Stewart, Richard Sudhalter and others were found in bookstores by the mid-to-late 1960s (I well remember The Nostalgia Book Club, an arm of the publisher Arlington House, where you could get books on Bix Beiderbecke, the Dorsey Bros., Benny Goodman and many other musicians, and I got my early education from them).
We now know that Goldkette’s was one of the most important big bands of any era. It had a powerful swing, excellent musicians, and creative arrangements that were copied by other arrangers, in spite of a poor recording legacy. It certainly pointed to the music of the mid-1930’s when the swing era was in its earliest days.
Goldkette was a concert pianist, who started to play in jazz ensembles. He eventually became a ballroom owner and a booker of bands. His 1924-1926 orchestra was a real crowd pleaser; musicians included Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Steve Brown, ‘Doc’ Ryker, Bill Rank, Don Murray, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Russ Morgan and arranger Bill Challis. The band was so good that it shocked Fletcher Henderson’s musicians when they played opposite each other at Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Unfortunately, their records did not properly show off what they could do. Goldkette lost money on the ensemble, and Paul Whiteman offered the musicians places in his band. Beiderbecke, Trumbauer, Venuti, Lang and others joined; the resulting ensemble was one of the best that Whiteman led.
The original book of arrangements for the Goldkette ensemble mysteriously disappeared, but thankfully Whiteman asked Challis to recreate it for his band, and those versions are safely stored at Williams College with the rest of the Whiteman Collection. Challis has been cited by no less than Benny Carter as one of the best arrangers of that era.
Many years later, Challis re-created the Goldkette sound, adapting new arrangements from his Whiteman re-do’s. Ironically, Vince Giordano, who produced this album, told me that Challis destroyed them after the session (the liner notes for the album are included in the reader of course).
Cerra gathers many fabulous articles, liner notes and book excerpts printed over the years detailing the Goldkette band’s importance and coverage of his many legendary sidemen, and as with most of his readers, several of these are obscure and hard to get. Such writers as Gene Lees, John Chilton, Albert McCarthy, Brian Rust, Dan Morgenstern, and Sudhalter may be found here, as well as Rex Stewart’s reminiscences of his ‘meeting’ with the band as Roseland. Of course there is duplication of information which is inevitable, but Cerra wisely does not edit the articles.
Since they were also part of the Goldkette story, he has wisely included material about other bands that Goldkette managed - the equally legendary McKinney’s Cotton Pickers directed by Don Redman, and The Orange Blossoms, which later became another pioneering dance orchestra, the Casa Loma Orchestra. Most thankfully, he has included big chunks from Sudhalter’s, Philip R. Evans, and William Dean Myatt’s book on Beiderbecke, which for several reasons has not been available for many years (the reasons are too detailed to chronicle here; as my readers know, Dick Sudhalter was my friend for many years, and was very sad about this. Recently, there has been some discussion about this book on Facebook).
This is a treasure trove of material about a very important chapter of American music. Thank you, Steven.
Here is a link for this publication:
The recording legacy is the frustrating part. Clementine came out of the September 1927 session, right at the end of the band's life, and it's one of the few sides that actually sounds like what people say the band was. Everything before it you kind of have to take on faith from the eyewitnesses.