Sam Wooding

This early American jazz bandleader's choice of career objectives is the principal reason he is not the household word among jazz fans like some other bandleaders of his generation. There are many critics who feel that things would have been very different for Sam Wooding had he not become one of the first wave of American expatriate jazz musicians living in Europe. If he had instead stayed on in America and gotten in on the raging domestic big band scene, odds are likely he would be as well-known as his contemporaries Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Instead, Wooding's ...