Larry Elgart, a saxophonist who formed a popular big band with his older brother, Les, co-wrote the theme song to "American Bandstand," and had his biggest hit album in 1982, a disco-pulsing medley of 1940s standards called "Hooked on Swing," died Aug. 29 at a hospice center in Sarasota, Fla. He was 95.
His wife, Lynn Elgart, confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause. He lived in Longboat Key, Fla.
A precociously talented musician, Mr. Elgart was traveling with bands at 15 to support his family during the Great Depression. He played alto sax in orchestras led by Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Red Norvo and Charlie Spivak, some of the biggest-name outfits of the day, and was an adventurous-minded player who also helped compose ballet scores and musical tone poems.
He first teamed with his brother in 1947 to start a band with dynamic arrangers, such as Nelson Riddle and Ralph Flanagan, but it proved a commercial failure. Mr. Elgart and Charles Albertine, a saxophonist-composer with avant-garde sensibilities, formed a new orchestra in 1952 and installed trumpeter Les Elgart as the nominal frontman.
It was the last breath of the jazz and swing era, and rock-and-roll soon emerged as the dominant commercial force. But the brothers managed to keep the Les Elgart Orchestra — later renamed the Les and Larry Elgart Orchestra — humming along lucratively for the next 15 years by playing campus proms, country club dates and cruise ship ballrooms.
They were traveling widely to promote the radio success of one of their first albums, "Sophisticated Swing" (1953), when they landed in Philadelphia and met Bob Horn, who hosted a local TV dance show called "Bandstand."
“My brother said to him, ‘If we record a theme for you, would you use it?,’ ” Larry Elgart told the Longboat Observer in Florida. “. . . Our next recording date, we recorded [“Bandstand Boogie,” written with Albertine] and took it to Bob Horn, and he said, ‘Absolutely. That’s it.’ . . . If you hear Barry Manilow at times, he’ll say he wrote ‘Bandstand Boogie.’ It’s not true. He just wrote the lyrics” decades later.
The song, cut in 1954, remained the anthem for what became “American Bandstand,” which soon had a youthful new host, Dick Clark, and Mr. Elgart enjoyed royalties from the song for the next six decades.
The Elgart band's repertoire shifted away from its earlier experiments in jazz into a polite lineup of big-band favorites, cha-chas and bossa nova standards. It was distinguished less by its choice of material than what Larry Elgart did with it. He fostered what he called the "Elgart sound" — the lilting bounce of its tempos, the crisp precision of its horn section and the swingy flourishes of its saxes.
"They produced music that was intended to be inoffensive, and neither demanding nor intrusive," observed Rob Bamberger, host of WAMU's "Hot Jazz Saturday Night." "In LPs built around new and resuscitated popular trends, such as 'The Twist Goes to College,' or 'Big Band Hootennany,' the Elgarts pasteurized it for a big-band format, making such music palatable to people who really couldn't abide the twist, or would rather have had a dislocated shoulder shoved into place than be found at a hootenanny.
“Buying an Elgart LP allowed purchasers far more comfortable with the big band, easy listening idiom to feel current and hip (possibly even smugly so), even if by today’s standards, the music sounds hip with dysplasia,” Bamberger said.
After the brothers separated in the late 1960s, Larry Elgart continued a prolific recording career. His biggest commercial hit was his most unlikely.
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“Hooked on Swing” (1982) was a concept propelled by K-Tel, the company that prospered with TV infomercials before getting into the record business. They had astronomical success with “Hooked on Classics,” a 1981 album that featured the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra rendering Beethoven, Mozart and other composers to a contemporary beat. It briefly turned “classical disco” into a sensation.
Mr. Elgart said he was initially unreceptive to undertaking “Hooked on Swing,” with its disco-izing of songs first popularized during the 1930s and 1940s by Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. He credited his wife with talking him into the project, figuring it would generate his best sales in years, however modest.
It peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard charts, sold more than 3 million copies and launched two more “Hooked on Swing” albums of what he called “fusion swing” arranged by pianist Dick Hyman.
“Hooked on Swing” was credited at times with helping kick off a revival of interest in big-band music. “I feel very good about the renewed interest in swing,” Mr. Elgart told United Press International in 1983, adding that he “tried to make the music of the swing era something today’s young people can relate to. The music was fun then and should be now.”
Lawrence Joseph Elgart was born in New London, Conn., on March 20, 1922, and grew up mostly in Pompton Lakes, N.J. His father was a jack of all trades — working variously as a candymaker and steamfitter, among other jobs, during the Depression.
As a child, Larry had been mesmerized by big bands on the radio, and he began playing clarinet by 9 before taking up the sax.
His first early marriage, to Grace Sims, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 54 years, Lynn Walzer Elgart, who co-wrote his 2014 memoir "The Music Business and the Monkey Business"; two sons from his first marriage, Brock Elgart of Framingham, Mass., and Brad Elgart of Ashland, Mass.; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Les Elgart died in 1995.
One of Mr. Elgart's first records in his own name was "Impressions of Outer Space" (1953), an avant-garde LP with arrangements by Albertine and whose impressionistic mood was reflected in such titles as "Airless Moon," "Gravitational Whirlpool" and "Asteroid Ballet." His 1981 record "Flight of the Condor," also showcased his interest in experimental jazz.
Over the years, Mr. Elgart explained that he personally was drawn to such modern jazz masters as Dizzy Gillespie and Art Farmer and tried, within commercial parameters, to sneak some of that sensibility into his arrangements — even in works like “Hooked on Swing.”
“I am amazed, really,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1989. “Young people know these tunes. They can’t tell you how they know them — old films, TV? We were talking about [arrangers such as] Gil Evans and Bill Finegan. They wouldn’t know who they were, but they know every tune.”
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