Lester Raymond 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.[1][2]

Contents

1 Biography

1.1 Les Brown Jr.

2 Discography

3 Musical short films

4 Television

5 References

6 External links

Biography

Brown was born in Reinerton, Pennsylvania.[1] 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,[3] who performed regularly on Duke's campus and up and down the east coast. 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. The band's original drummer, Don Kramer, became the acting manager and helped define their future. In 1942, Brown 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".[1] The song's release coincided with the end of World War II in Europe and became an unofficial homecoming theme for many veterans.[3] 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.[4]

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".[5]

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. The annual Les Brown Big Band Festival, started March 2006 in Les' hometown, features area big bands preserving the songs of the big band era. At the 2012 festival celebrating the 100th birthday anniversary, the town of Reinerton renamed the street near Les' birthplace to Les Brown Lane. In 2013 his hometown of Reinerton, PA adopted as the town's official slogan: Reinerton: The Town of Renown in honor of Les and his band.[citation needed]

Les Brown Sr. died of lung cancer in 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.

His grandson, Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, co-created the show Phineas and Ferb.[6]

Brown was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2010.[7]

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Les Brown (bandleader) among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.[8]

Les Brown Jr.

In 2001, Les Brown Jr., born 1940, became the full-time leader of the Band of Renown. It continues to perform throughout the world and have a regular big band show in Branson, Missouri. Brown Jr. also hosts a national radio show on the Music of Your Life network. Brown Jr. was a television actor in the 1960s (Gunsmoke, General Hospital, The Baileys of Balboa, Gilligan's Island), a rock musician and producer who worked with Carlos Santana, and a concert promoter for many country music artists including Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn. In 2004, Brown Jr. received the "Ambassador of Patriotism" award from the POW Network.

Discography

Connee Boswell I Don't Know (1950)

Connee Boswell Martha (1950)

Over the Rainbow (1951)

Palladium Concert 1953 (Group 7, 2005)

Live at the Hollywood Palladium (1954)

Dancer's Choice (Capitol, 1956)

Les Brown & His Orchestra, Vol. 2 (Hindsight, 1949)

Radio Days Live (early radio recordings, 2001)

Les Brown & His Band of Renown (Coral, 1957)

Swing Song Book (Coral, 1957)

Concert Modern (Capitol, 1958)

Live at Elitch Gardens 1959 (1959)

The Les Brown Story: His Greatest Hits in Today's Sound (Capitol, 1959)

The Lerner and Loewe Bandbook (Columbia, 1961)

Play Hits From The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Others (Columbia, 1963)

Stereophonic Suite for Two Bands: The Les Brown Band and Vic Schoen and His Orchestra (Kapp, 1959)

A Sign of the Times (Decca, 1966)

Today (MPS, 1976)

Goes Direct to Disc (The Great American Gramophone Company, 1977)

Digital Swing (Fantasy, 1986)

Anything Goes (USA, 1994)

America Swings (Hindsight, 1995)

Bandland / Revolution in Sound (Collectables, 1995)

Sentimental Thing with Bing Crosby & Billy Eckstine (Sounds of Yesteryear, 2003)

The Les Brown All-Stars (Group 7, 2006)

No Name Bop

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Thank You for Your Fine Attention

The One and Only (Intersound / Memorylane, 2016)

Musical short films

Spreadin' the Jam (1945) dir: Charles Walters

Les Brown (1948) (10 min) dir: Jack Scholl

Les Brown and His Band of Renown (1949) (15 min) dir: Will Cowan

Art Lund-Tex Beneke-Les Brown (1948) (10 min) dir: Jack Scholl

Connee Boswell and Les Brown's Orchestra (1950) (15 min) dir: Will Cowan

Crazy Frolic (1953) (19 min) dir: Will Cowan

Dance Demons (1957) (14 min) dir: Will Cowan

Rockabilly Baby (1957) (81 min) dir: William F.Claxton

Television

Bob Hope Show (1945) NBC Radio

Bob Hope Show (1959–1966) NBC

The Steve Allen Show (1958–1960) NBC

The New Steve Allen Show (1961) NBC

Hennesey (1962) CBS

Hollywood Palace (1964) NBC

Bob Hope Thanksgiving Show (1964) NBC

Dean Martin Show (1965) NBC

Dean Martin Summer Show (1966) NBC

Rowan and Martin at the Movies (1968) NBC

Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968) NBC

Dean Martin and the Golddigger's (1968) NBC

Bob Hope Special: Joys (1976) NBC

The Good Old Days of Radio (1976) NBC

Doris Day's Best Friends (1985) NBC

Ooh-La-La, It's Bob Hope's Fun Birthday Special from Paris (1981) NBC

Biography: Doris Day "It's Magic" (1985)

Rocko’s Modern Life

Les Brown, in the background, leading his band during a White House gala for returned American POWs from Vietnam, May 25, 1973.    

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Les Brown, in the background, leading his band during a White House gala for...

For some four decades, Bob Hope, the most peripatetic of entertainers, boasted he never left home without Les Brown. Lucky for Hope, then, that the only excuse Brown's father would accept from his young son for avoiding work in the family bakery was Les's music lessons. Otherwise, Les Brown might have spent his life sweating over a pastry oven instead of cooking with his celebrated band.

For sixty years, Les Brown and His Band of Renown were American institutions, equally at home playing for proms or presidents, and from the late 1940s on, touring with Hope on his Christmas jaunts around the globe to entertain American service men and women.

Image of the band sitting in chairs and Les Brown standing at a microphone. Front row, l to r:  Herb Muse (sax & vocalist), Joe Gardrou (alto sax), Les Brown (standing), Dutch McMillan(tenor sax), Gus Brannou (tenor sax), Coon Plyler (piano).  Back row, l to r:  Walt Moffet (trombone), Bob Thorn (trumpet), Jack Atkins (trumpet), unknown (trumpet), Don Kramer (drums), Tom Herb (tuba)    

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Les Brown with his Duke Blue Devils dance band, circa 1935.

To be fair to Les's father, Reinerton's baker was thrilled that his son preferred the cornet and saxophone to corn muffins and soufflés. Raymond Brown was a musician at heart, an accomplished saxophonist with great hopes that his three sons would not only grow to love music the way he did, but also become professional musicians. On that score, he didn't have much to worry about with Les.

Raymond Brown made sure his three sons grew up around music, but none so fully immersed himself in it as Les, born Lester Raymond Brown on March 14, 1912. In the days before every home had a record player, the only way small communities heard music was live, and the only way to assure live music on a regular basis was to form a town band. And in Reinerton, about forty miles northeast of Harrisburg in Pennsylvania's coal country, Raymond was its leader. On summer nights, the town, mostly hardscrabble mining families, would gather in the park around the bandstand to hear their neighbors regale them with favorites from John Phillip Sousa, Victor Herbert, and perhaps markerGeorge Rosenkrans. Young Les wanted to regale them, too.Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, New York Yankee slugger (left), gets an earful of Les Brown's saxophone at Liederkranz Hall New York City during a recording session of Brown's Orcherstra.

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Les Brown with New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, August 17, 1941.

He began studying the cornet, and soon switched to the soprano sax his father played; later, he'd add the clarinet and bassoon, too. At nine, he played his first gig, at a school dance, and by sixteen, his father was so convinced of his son's potential, that he sent Les off to the Patrick Conway Military Band School in Ithaca, N.Y., to study theory, harmony, counterpoint, and the classics. Two years later, Les entered the New York Military Academy on a full scholarship, hoping to use the academy as a stepping stone toward a saxophonist's seat in the U.S. Marine band that Sousa had raised to international prominence.

For a year or so, Brown kept in step with the program. He even wrote march music for the academy band. But when he began tapping his toes to the hip, new swinging sounds of Big Band leaders Paul Whiteman and Bix Beiderbecke, his education marched to a different drummer - to Duke University in North Carolina, home of the Blue Devils swing band, the hottest college combo in the country. Brown's enrollment only raised its temperature: for two years, he blew sax and wrote arrangements, then stepped front and center to lead it from 1935-1936. Indeed, he led it all the way to New York, via a series of celebrated one-night stands up the East Coast, in 1937.

Portrait of Doris Day and Les Brown, Aquarium, New York, N.Y., ca. July 1946

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Doris Day and Les Brown, New York, NY, July, 1946.

After the tour, Brown stayed in New York, arranging scores for Jimmy Dorsey, Larry Clinton, Red Nichols, and other top bandleaders. By 1938, Victor Records was backing him as front man for a twelve-piece combo, based in the ballroom of the Edison Hotel near Broadway, which would eventually gel into the institution he would lead for the rest of his life. When a radio announcer mistakenly introduced the prosaically named Les Brown's Orchestra as Les Brown and His Band of Renown, the name stuck.

In 1941, the band, which now included Brown's younger brother Clyde - better known as Stumpy - on trombone and keeping the books, cut its first hit record, "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio," a novelty song marking the Yankee outfielder's 56-game hitting streak. Four years later, magic happened when Brown co-wrote a tune he called "Sentimental Journey."Image of the boys walking down a street. 

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Les Brown and his Band of Renown

The sweet, yearning voice of the band's young singer, Doris Day, elevated the song into a timeless, dreamy anthem of soldiers coming home from World War II. The record was a sensation. It sold well over a million copies - it has since been covered countless times - and spent five weeks at No. 1 on the radio Hit Parade. Brown followed it the next year with another smash - and enduring standard - "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm."

In 1947, Brown teamed up with Bob Hope. For the next forty years, Brown was the comedian's music director on radio, television, and eighteen overseas tours for the USO. He also led TV bands for Steve Allen and Dean Martin.

But what he most loved was playing the music that lifted folks, young and old, out of their seats and onto the dance floor. He lifted them on dozens of recordings - at inaugural festivities for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, a gala hosted by Frank Sinatra for England's Queen Elizabeth, other countless public ballrooms and private parties, and, finally, at the age of eighty-eight, for the student body at California's Citrus Community College, less than three months before his death on Jan. 6, 2001.

 

The leader of a first-class jazz-oriented dance band for over 60 years, Les Brown's music was never innovative but was generally quite pleasing. Brown was born in Reinerton, PA, into the family of a baker. He got started in music early, taking up the saxophone at age seven with the strong encouragement of his father, who played the trombone. He knew how to sight-read before he was ten, and was playing alongside his father by that time at local dances. Brown left high school after one year, choosing instead to attend the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, where he studied theory, harmony, and composition. He passed through the New York Military Academy before landing at Duke University, where he joined the Duke Blue Devils, the university's official dance band, in 1935. Their sound was modeled after the Casa Loma Orchestra, which was then one of the most popular dance bands in the country, especially among college audiences.

Brown made his first recordings as a member of the Blue Devils in 1936 for Decca, but by the following year they'd split up, as the members who were still undergraduates returned to school. Brown went to New York and spent a year working for Jimmy Dorsey, Isham Jones, and Larry Clinton as an arranger. His chance at forming a new band came in 1938 when an executive at RCA arranged a booking for him at the Hotel Edison in Manhattan, if he could put a group together. Brown secured a loan from his father to get the band off the ground and he soon had a 12-piece outfit playing at the hotel. A series of regular live radio broadcasts of the band soon had their reputation spreading far beyond the ranks of the hotel's dance patrons, and RCA Victor quickly signed them to its Bluebird imprint.

The group was doing well as the 1930s closed out, drawing a healthy dance audience and a substantial listenership. Their records weren't the most ambitious in the world -- mostly covers of standards and other bands' hits, interspersed with an occasional Les Brown original -- but they sold well enough to keep the recording industry interested in them. In the late '30s, most of their sound was built on ensemble playing, and they displayed a rich, full tone that came off well, both in person and over the air as well as on record. Brown insisted on a polished, precise sound and audiences seemed to devour it. But starting in 1940, he began altering their sound by allowing room for his soloists to go to work doing that they did best, and audiences liked it even better. Then he hired his first vocalist, a teenager named Doris Day, who sang with a depth and level of sophistication far beyond her 17 years, and their popularity soared. Day's first stay with the group wasn't long -- less than a year -- before she left to get married. Her replacement, Betty Bonney, was aboard when the band cut a song devoted to the then-current phenomenon of Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak -- "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio" became their first chart hit. When the smoke cleared, the band found itself ranked among the top ten most popular performing outfits in the country.

It was a radio show, Spotlight Band, that inadvertently played a big role in their subsequent history. The Les Brown band appeared regularly on the program, which went to service audiences around the country (and made them permanent favorites of millions of men in uniform). But it was a chance moment in 1942, when an announcer referred to them as "Les Brown & His Band of Renown," that proved a key to their future. The reference sounded great, and it stuck, and it became the band's permanent name. They came to occupy a peculiar niche in the musical world as it existed in those years -- although it wasn't really a jazz band, Brown's group employed enough elements of jazz, and enough high-quality soloists (and Brown seldom featured himself in the latter capacity, though he was a good player), that they were treated with a great deal of respect by jazz players and in the jazz journals of the period.

The next pivotal moment came in 1943 when Brown persuaded Doris Day, now divorced and raising a son (actually, future producer Terry Melcher), to return to the band. The result, in 1944, was one of the most enduring hits of World War II, "Sentimental Journey." It not only became one of the defining hits of the big-band era, but also Brown's signature tune (and, to a lesser degree, Day's signature tune) for the next 50 years, and even in the 21st century is totally identified with both of them. The song was written by Ben Homer, a composer and arranger who was also responsible for the various dance adaptations of classical works that Brown's band recorded. Brown spent most of the 1940s signed to Columbia Records, which was also the home of Doris Day as a solo act. Brown's career momentum was slowed only when the Second World War drew to a close, and he decided to spend more time with his wife and family, which meant giving up touring -- he'd had some excellent soloists in his band, including Abe Most and Ted Nash, but they soon began drifting away to other work once Brown settled down in Los Angeles.

In early 1947, Brown took on an extended engagement at the Hollywood Bowl, which resulted in his reactivating the band in a new incarnation, made up of freelancers -- he also discovered that there were enough truly high-caliber examples of the latter that the music didn't suffer at all. As a result of that engagement, he also picked up what proved to be the longest running gig of his career when he started working with Bob Hope. The association with Hope -- which resulted in Brown touring for many years in tandem with the legendary comedian's performances on behalf of American servicemen -- made it possible for the orchestra to stay together for many decades. The Dave Pell Octet, which was quite popular in the mid-'50s, was comprised of some of Brown's sidemen. In the late '50s, Brown became one of the founding members of the Recording Academy. Brown was signed to Capitol Records during this same period and enjoyed a fresh string of hit singles and successful LPs through the end of the decade -- such was his reputation that he was easily able to recruit top players (such a reedman Billy Usselton) for those later bands, and those Capitol recordings have found an enduring audience much as his earlier Columbia sides did. Additionally, his work with Hope helped to keep his name alive for several generations of television viewers, among others, well into the 1980s. Brown also occasionally toured throughout the last decades of his life, even performing within a year of his death on January 4, 2001, at the age of 88. His son, Les Brown, Jr., a musician who was primarily known as an actor, took over the Band of Renown during the 21st century and has kept it going since.

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Les Brown, whose Band of Renown was one of the most enduring orchestras that grew out of the swing era of the 1930's, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.

Mr. Brown was one of the last swing bandleaders to remain active as the century drew to a close. He and his band were best known for their classic 1945 recording of ''Sentimental Journey'' with Doris Day, their hit 1946 record ''I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm'' and for their long association with Bob Hope. Mr. Brown became the musical director of Mr. Hope's radio and television shows in 1947 and later accompanied him on 18 Christmas tours around the world to entertain American troops.

For more than 60 years, the Les Brown orchestra was a frequent attraction, providing dance music at college proms and ballrooms and appearing at the Presidential inauguration galas for Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The band also entertained Queen Elizabeth II at a ball arranged by Frank Sinatra.

With the help of such resourceful arrangers as Ben Homer, Frank Comstock, and Skip Martin, Mr. Brown fashioned an orchestra that made people want to dance.

''We strove for a cleanliness and a certain conservativeness that was commercially successful,'' Mr. Brown said in The Instrumentalist magazine in 1990. ''For the most part we played ballads on the pretty side, rather than swinging them like Benny Goodman.''

Over the years, the Brown orchestra's muscular, tight approach to its music, with its emphasis on sure intonation and intentions that were always clear and serious, were rewarded with critical and popular success. John S. Wilson, jazz critic of The New York Times, noted in 1983 that Mr. Brown's group had ''retained the style and sound'' of the swing period and yet had a ''freshness that makes it seem quite up to date.''

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Mr. Brown teamed up with Ben Homer to write the music for one of the memorable songs that emerged from World War II, ''Sentimental Journey.'' The record was released in 1944 and became a big hit in 1945, largely because of Ms. Day's lovely vocal and the lyrics of Bud Green, which evoked the eagerness of G.I.'s returning to see their loved ones again.

Got my bag, I got my

reservation,

Spent each dime I could afford.

Like a child in wild anticipation

Long to hear that 'All aboard.'

Seven, that's the time we leave,

at seven.

I'll be waiting up for heaven,

Countin' every mile of railroad

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track

That takes me back.

The Day-Brown combination on ''Sentimental Journey'' sold a million records for Columbia. The song stayed on the radio's hit parade for 16 weeks, became the nation's No. 1 song for five weeks and can still be heard on classic pop radio stations. It also provided a major boost to the career of Ms. Day, who was the band's popular girl singer in the war years.

Most of the other Brown hits were instrumentals, including ''I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,'' ''Bizet Has His Day,'' ''Midnight Sun,'' ''Mexican Hat Dance,'' ''Ramona'' and ''Leap Frog,'' a jerky uptempo number that became the orchestra's signature piece. In 1941 the band also had a novelty best seller with ''Joltin' Joe DiMaggio,'' inspired by the Yankee center fielder's 56-game hitting streak. The band continued to get requests for its songs years after they were recorded.

Mr. Brown credited the freshness of his music not just to his arrangers, but to his players as well. He liked to tell interviewers that the musicians he hired were generally not big-name soloists but sidemen who were excellent readers and who worked especially well in sections.

''Good soloists aren't necessarily good section men,'' Mr. Brown said in The Instrumentalist. ''There's nothing worse than an all-star band with no teamwork.''

That team varied over the years, but at times included well-regarded musicians like Matt Uttel, alto saxophonist; Bud Madison, Wes Hensel and Don Fagerquist, trumpet players; Don Rader, who played fluegelhorn and trumpet; Lou Ciotto, tenor saxophonist; Abe Most, the jazz-flavored clarinetist and alto saxophonist; Tony Rizzi, guitarist; Jeff Clarkson, pianist; and Warren Brown, Si Zentner, Andy Martin and Ray Sims, tenor trombonists. Mr. Brown's younger brother, Clyde Brown, who was known as Stumpy, was a long-time stalwart on bass trombone.

The ''regular'' vocalists came and went; in addition to Ms. Day, they included Jo Ann Greer, Butch Stone, Lucy Ann Polk and Ellen Wilson. In the early days, when the occasion called for guest vocalists Mr. Brown called on Johnny Mercer and the songwriter Richard Whiting's young daughter, Margaret. The chemistry of the group was such that people who knew little about music loved to dance to the Band of Renown; people who knew a great deal about it listened with equal enthusiasm.

The band had quite a consistent approach to its music over the years, even though Mr. Brown sometimes tinkered with the size and scope of the instrumentation.

''Although I started with a 12-piece band in 1938 that has grown and shrunk in size over the years, the instrumentation never went through radical changes,'' Mr. Brown said. ''Instead of the four 'bones we used in 1942, we use three today. We started with three trumpets, but had to compete with Goodman and Dorsey, so we hired a fourth.''

Lester Raymond Brown was born on March 12, 1912, in Reinerton, Pa. His father was Raymond Winfield Brown, the town baker, who had a good ear for music, played a fine soprano sax and always wanted to be a professional musician but never went beyond being named conductor of the town's concert band. In those days, many towns and villages across the nation had concert bands that would play the works of Franz von Suppe, John Philip Sousa and Victor Herbert in park bandstands on a summer's evening. The band under the elder Mr. Brown's baton played for tired Pennsylvania coal miners and their families.

Les Brown and his two brothers were expected to help out in the bakery but they soon learned that the one way out of it was to agree to take music lessons. Les started out playing cornet and switched over to soprano saxophone and learned clarinet and bassoon.

In 1926 he showed enough promise so that his father permitted him to enroll in the Patrick Conway Military Band School in Ithaca, N.Y., named after a e fabled Civil War-era bandmaster. The school was later absorbed into the Ithaca Conservatory of Music and ultimately became Ithaca College. At Conway he studied theory, harmony, counterpoint and composition with Wallingford Rewigger, who encouraged young Brown's interest in symphonic music. He became especially fond of Mahler, with Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Debussy and Ravel not far behind.

After three years at Conway, Mr. Brown received a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy in Cornwall, N.Y., which awarded scholarships to instrumentalists who could benefit its military band. He played saxophone in the band and began to write music. He also became infatuated with big band music, listening to radio programs and records that featured Gene Goldkette, Paul Whiteman, Red Nichols, Fletcher Henderson and Bix Beiderbecke. .

Mr. Brown aspired to study at the University of Pennsylvania but in 1932 he went to Duke University instead because it had the best-known college swing bands, the Blue Devils. He became its leader and toured the east coast with the band, playing one-nighters for more than a year. Most of the Blue Devils returned to Duke in September 1937. Mr. Brown went to New York City and wrote arrangements for the bands of Isham Jones, Jimmy Dorsey, Larry Clinton and Mr. Nichols. In 1938 he gained the backing of Victor Records and started the orchestra that became Les Brown and His Band of Renown. For a time the band was a fixture at the Edison Hotel in Times Square.

Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Evelyn, and their son, Les Jr., and daughter, Denise Marsh.

Over the years, the Band of Renown played for broadcasting stars like Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Dean Martin. Mr. Brown's association with Mr. Martin lasted from 1965 to 1974, the band's longest run on television. But its longest gig was in the employ of Mr. Hope. It started in the middle 1940's, when Mr. Brown was appearing at the Hollywood Palladium and had a drink with Mr. Hope's agent, who invited him to play for the Hope radio show.

Mr. Brown remained with Mr. Hope when he made the move to television and also accompanied the comedian on his tours to entertain American troops. The association lasted more than 40 years and more than 800 shows. Mr. Hope used to say that he never left home without Les Brown.

The Band of Renown's songs were released, rereleased and sometimes rerecorded to take advantage of superior sound technology. Three of the more recent issues were ''Anything Goes'' and ''Les Brown: The Best of the Big Bands,'' both in the 1990's, and ''The Les Brown Story,'' in the late 1980's. Mr. Brown worked well into his later years, refusing to retire, even as he saw his bookings decline.

''Let's face it,'' he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. ''We're going to fade out. There won't be much demand for big bands soon.''