Influences With James's childhood spent as a musician in a traveling circus, he picked up a flamboyant style that utilized such techniques as heavy vibrato, half valve and lip glissandi, valve and lip trills, and valve tremolos. These techniques were popular at the time in what was known as
"hot" jazz, epitomized by James's idol
Louis Armstrong, but somewhat fell out of favor by the 1950s with the advent of
"cool" jazz. James's rigorous regime of practice as a child resulted in an exceptional technical proficiency in the more classical techniques of range, fingering and tonguing. Growing up in the South, James was also exposed to
blues music, which had an additional influence on his style. As James explained, "I was brought up in Texas with the blues – when I was eleven or twelve years old down in what they call 'barbecue row' I used to sit in with the guys that had the broken bottlenecks on their guitars, playing the blues; that's all we knew." After hearing James solo on several numbers at a Benny Goodman one-nighter, Armstrong enthused to his friend and Goodman
vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, "That white boy – he plays like a jig!"
Move towards pop After James left Benny Goodman's band in 1939 to form his own band, he soon found that leading a commercially viable musical group required a broader set of skills than those needed to be a gifted musician playing in someone else's band. The James band ran into financial trouble, and it became increasingly difficult for James to pay salaries and keep the band together. In 1940, James lost his contract with
Columbia Records (he returned in 1941), and Frank Sinatra left the band that January. It was not long after this that James made a pivotal decision: he would adopt a "sweeter" style that added strings to the band, and the band would deliver tunes that were in more of a "pop" vein and less true to its jazz roots. From a commercial standpoint, the decision paid off, as James soon enjoyed a string of chart-topping hits that provided commercial success for him and his band. Indeed, a U.S. Treasury report released in 1945 listed Harry James and
Betty Grable as the highest-paid couple in the nation. While James remained commercially successful and personally committed to his music, some critics sought to find fault. In
Peter Levinson's 1999 biography,
Dan Morgenstern, the respected critic and Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, called the 1941 release of the later Grammy Hall of Fame inducted "You Made Me Love You" "the record that the jazz critics never forgave Harry James for recording." With James continuing to employ his flamboyant style on pop hits through the 1940s, his playing was often labeled as "schmaltzy" and dismissed by the critics, although radio discs from this period reveal James's continued commitment to jazz. James's jazz releases during this period, while not as numerous, include a variety of modern arrangements from
Neal Hefti, Frank Devenport,
Johnny Richards and
Jimmy Mundy that often inspired his musicians, and as
bop surpassed
swing by the late 1940s, James was surprisingly open to its influence.
Return to Big Band jazz After coasting through the mid-1950s, James made a complete reevaluation of where he was heading in his musical career.
Count Basie provided the impetus by making a significant comeback with his newly formed "16 Men Swinging" band, and James wanted a band with a decided Basie flavor. James signed with
Capitol Records in 1955, and two years later, after releasing new studio versions of many of his previously released songs from Columbia Records, James recorded ten new tracks for an album entitled
Wild About Harry!. This album was the first in a series released on Capitol, and continuing later on
MGM, representative of the Basie style that James adopted during this period, with some of the arrangements provided by former Basie saxophonist and arranger
Ernie Wilkins, whom James hired for his own band. While James never completely regained favor with jazz critics during his lifetime in spite of his return to more jazz-oriented releases in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, contemporary opinion of his work has shifted. Recent reissues such as Capitol's 2012 7-disc set
The Capitol Vaults Jazz Series: Gene Krupa and Harry James have prompted new, more favorable analyses. In 2014,
Marc Myers of JazzWax commented, "[James's] band of the mid-1940s was more modern than most of the majors, and in 1949 he led one of the finest bands of the year." And on James's releases from 1958 to 1961, Myers noted, "The James band during this period has been eclipsed by bands led by
Basie,
Maynard Ferguson and
Stan Kenton. While each served up its own brand of magnificence, James produced more consistently brilliant tracks than the others... virtually everything James recorded during this period was an uncompromising, swinging gem." James felt strongly about the music he both played and recorded. In 1972 while in London, he did an interview with the English jazz critic
Steve Voce, who asked if the biggest audience was for the commercial numbers he had recorded. James visibly bristled, replying, "That would depend on for whom you are playing. If you're playing for a jazz audience, I'm pretty sure that some of the jazz things we do would be a lot more popular than 'Sleepy Lagoon,' and if we're playing at a country club or playing Vegas, in which we have many, many types of people, then I'm sure that 'Sleepy Lagoon' would be more popular at that particular time. But I really get bugged about these people talking about commercial tunes, because to me, if you're gonna be commercial, you're gonna stand on your head and make funny noises and do idiotic things. I don't think we've ever recorded or played one tune that I didn't particularly love to play. Otherwise, I wouldn't play it." ==Personal life==