Lester Lanin, the society bandleader, who is from Philadelphia, who as a child played the piano and the drums, who has played at more than ten thousand weddings and at more than three thousand desbutante parties, who has played in every state of the union except Montana, who has committed to memory the tunes of many thousands of songs, who is in his sixties, who has been conducting a Lester Lanin Orchestra since 1937, who was once married to a woman who was a former Miss Texas, held an open audition recently in a room he rented for four hours in a building on Broadway. Sixty-three musicians showed up for the audition. They had heard about it either from the musicians’-union paper or from a column in the Post or by word of mouth. Of the sixty-three musicians who showed up, five were women, one of whom played the flute, one the trumpet, one the harp, and the two others—sisters, who had just come from playing on the QE2 eighty-day 1980 World Cruise—the violin and the accordion.
It was raining heavily on the day Lester Lanin held the audition, and almost everybody in the studio—a large, white, square room with mirrors covering one wall—looked a little rumpled and damp, the way people look when they have just come in out of the rain. Lester Lanin did not look rumpled and damp. He wore a neatly tailored black suit with a vest, a black-and-white patterned shirt, and a black-and-white patterned tie. He is a small man, about five feet seven, and he stood more or less in the center of the room, surrounded by auditioning musicians—say, a pianist, a drummer, a bass player, a clarinettist, a trumpet player, a trombonist, a flutist, and a guitarist. Every fifteen minutes or so, a new group of musicians assembled. Each musician was asked to play something, and the others joined in.
“Do you know ‘’Swonderful’?” Lester Lanin asked a man who played the trumpet.
“Yes,” said the man. He started playing “’Swonderful,” and the other musicians did their best to join him.
“That’s good,” said Lester Lanin. “But a couple of notes were a little corny. Try ‘Somebody Loves Me.’”
Altogether, in a period of four hours, Lester Lanin asked thirty musicians to play “Somebody Loves Me,” thirty musicians to play “All the Things You Are,” thirty-five musicians to play “’Swonderful,” twenty-seven musicians to play “Willow Weep for Me,” forty-two musicians to play “Muskrat Ramble,” one musician to play “Proud Mary,” three musicians to play “Bad Girl,” the same three musicians to play “Hot Stuff,” four musicians to play “Macho Man,” one musician to play “Freak
Out,” ten musicians to play “Hello, Dolly!,” one musician to play “Ease On Down the Road,” two musicians to play “Just the Way You Are,” and one musician to play “Moonlight Becomes You.” When any of the musicians didn’t know the tunes to the songs, Lester Lanin told them to go out and buy a certain songbook, which had over five hundred songs in it, and learn all the songs in the book. He told them that in his orchestras, of which he sometimes had as many as forty, no one played from sheet music—only from memory. To a man who was a very good trombone player but knew only one of the tunes he was asked to play, Lester Lanin said, “Many famous orchestra musicians have played with me, but they weren’t qualified to play a deb party or other social event, because they couldn’t play the tunes without charts.”
At the end of the audition, Lester Lanin said he thought he would use men who had played the clarinet, the flute, the guitar, and the trombone, and the two sisters who had just come off the QE2 tour.
—August 4, 1980