Sam Lanin

Not everyone who had a profound effect on the world of music was necessarily a musician, or had to be a particularly good one -- sometimes it was just a matter of recognizing the latter quality in others and enabling them to do what they did best. Sam Lanin was a musician, but it was not in that capacity that he made his greatest contribution to music -- oh, he played drums here and there in some recording sessions, but that was as far he got generating music himself in a way that lasted beyond a particular performance. He was a band director, an organizer of performing and recording groups, who was as active in that field as anyone in music during the 1920s -- his timing was especially significant because the '20s were, for the majority of Americans (except in the farm belt) a time of unimpeded (and, as it turned out, in major part illusory) prosperity, when entertainment was booming. It was no coincidence that the 1920s saw the organizing of the major film studios in something close to their final forms, the birth of commercial radio, and the massive growth of RCA Victor -- the first modern incarnation of one of the labels that was to dominate recorded music for much of the century -- as well as the spawning of dozens upon dozens of rival recording outfits, and a golden age in American theater. It wasn't easy to get a drink legally, but every other kind of diversion and entertainment was growing as never before. Samuel Lanin was one of ten children of Benjamin and Mary Lanin, Jewish immigrants from Russia who arrived in the United States in the early 1890s and settled in Philadelphia. The whole family was musical -- Sam studied the clarinet and violin as a boy, and his brothers Jimmy, Howard, and Lester also gravitated toward music and eventually became bandleaders,...