Five of the most awesome band cameos in movies

LOUIS ARMSTRONG AND HIS BAND – in High Society (1956)

From the time movies started talking in the late 1920s, big bands started showing up to add a touch of class. Check out any musical from the early days and you might find Xavier Cugat standing in the background waving a baton in front of his orchestra.

Glenn Miller is there in Sun Valley Serenade. Count Basie and his orchestra play “The Anniversary Song” in Sex and the Single Girl, but don’t watch it. It’s terrible. (Not the Count – just the movie.) Basie also shows up in the 1943 musical Reveille with Beverly, along with Duke Ellington, The Mills Brothers, and Frank Sinatra, among others. It’s kind of silly and dated, but still fun to watch.

However, the best of the classic big band cameos in a Hollywood movie came from Louis Armstrong and his orchestra in High Society, the musical adaptation of the screwball classic The Philadelphia Story. With A-listers Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly in the lead roles and music by Cole Porter, the movie was a big hit, even if most people recognized it wasn’t anywhere nearly as sharp and funny as The Philadelphia Story.

Watching today, one of the real pleasures is the presence of Armstrong, along with his band, playing themselves as a kind of Greek chorus. They open the movie with the calypso-tinged title track. They are on a bus headed up to Newport for a performance that will figure into the movie. As Satchmo says when the opening number concludes, “End of song – beginning of story.”

They will reprise this at the finale after about thirty seconds of some jazzy “Here Comes the Bride” with Satch’s “End of story.” But first we get a bona fide jazz performance from the whole the band on “Now You Has Jazz.”

Unfortunately, the number is crooned by star Bing Crosby who kind of introduces the band as they play. This is basically Sly Stone doing “Dance to the Music” a decade later, only whereas Sly was unspeakably cool, Bing Crosby is not. But I tend to just tune him out and listen to the band. Works for me.