Lester Raymond "Les" Brown (March 14, 1912 – January 4, 2001) was an American jazz musician who led the big band Les Brown and His Band of Renown for nearly seven decades from 1938 to 2000.
Raised in Tower City, Pennsylvania, Les' father, a baker by trade, played soprano in a sax quartet that performed the music of John Phillip Sousa. Les began playing sax at an early age and made his professional debut in a band at age nine. At age 14 he formed his own orchestra, The Royal Serertadore.
He enrolled in the Conway Military Band School (later part of Ithaca College) in 1926, studying with famous bandleader Patrick Conway for three years before receiving a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy, where he graduated in 1932. Brown attended college at Duke University from 1932–1936. There he led the group Les Brown and His Blue Devils, who performed regularly on Duke's campus and up and down the east coast.
He later enrolled at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, where he studied classical clarinet. He then attended Duke University and joined the Blue Devils orchestra, which he took over as leader in his junior year.
Brown took the band on an extensive summer tour in 1936. At the end of the tour, while some of the band members returned to Duke to continue their education, others stayed on with Brown and continued to tour, becoming in 1938 the Band of Renown which recorded for Decca. He had planned to take a permanent job with Larry Clinton when the season ended, but club management wouldn't let him quit. At about that same time he switched labels to Bluebird, and an RCA Victor exec took interest in him, convincing him to organize a better band and getting him a booking in the Green Room of New York's Edison Hotel.
Starting with only twelve pieces, the orchestra quickly grew in both quantity and quality. Its greatest failing, however, was a lack of intimacy with its audience. Even the arrival of Doris Day in the summer of 1940 didn't make the band seem any warmer.
Doris had been working for Bob Crosby's group but had decided to quit after, reports say, a member of the band had made strong passes at her and frightened her. She fit right in with Brown's group, who were probably as respectable as swing musicians could be! Doris stayed for only a year, retiring, temporarily, to marry Jimmy Dorsey musician Al Jordan.
In 1942 he and his band concluded work on an RKO picture, "Sweet and Hot"; played at the Palladium Ballroom, Hollywood. A few years later, in 1945, this band brought Doris Day into prominence with their recording of "Sentimental Journey". The song's release coincided with the end of World War II in Europe and became an unofficial homecoming theme for many veterans.
The band had nine other number-one hit songs, including "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm". In 1952-53, Brown was the orchestra leader on Day's radio program, The Doris Day Show, on CBS.
Les Brown and the Band of Renown performed with Bob Hope on radio, stage and television for almost fifty years. They did 18 USO Tours for American troops around the world, and entertained over three million people. Before the Super Bowls were televised, the Bob Hope Christmas Specials were the highest-rated programs in television history. Tony Bennett was "discovered" by Bob Hope and did his first public performance with Brown and the Band.
The first film that Brown and the band appeared in was Seven Days' Leave (1942) starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball. Rock-A-Billy Baby, a low-budget 1957 film, was the Band of Renown's second, and in 1963 they appeared in the Jerry Lewis' comedy The Nutty Professor playing their theme song "Leapfrog".
Brown and the Band were also the house band for The Steve Allen Show (1959–1961) and the Dean Martin Show (1965–1972). Brown and the band performed with virtually every major performer of their time, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole.
In 1996 Les Brown was awarded an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the leader of the longest lasting musical organization in the history of popular music. Despite poor health, Brown continued to play many of the Band of Renown's shows until August 2000, when he was forced by illness into retirement. Les brown died from lung cancer at his Los Angeles area home on January 4th, 2001 and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. He was survived by his wife Evelyn, son Les Jr., and daughter Denise. He was 88 years old at the time of his death.
Brown was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2010.
