Stan Kenton's orchestra was never the place to hear a nice tune played sweetly; arrangers including Kenton himself, Pete Rugolo, Bob Graettinger, and Bill Holman commonly emphasized the progressive end of jazz -- advanced harmonics, complex charts, powerful soloists -- much more than such a simple thing as swing. When Kenton decided to record an album of show tunes in 1958, however, he proceeded directly to Lennie Niehaus. Niehaus, an altoist with the Kenton band beginning nearly a decade earlier, had written a chart for "Pennies from Heaven" in 1953 that proved to be a highlight of the Sketches on Standards LP. (Kenton would probably have chosen Bill Russo, who had helmed his two previous standards LPs of the '50s, but he had left the band a few years earlier.) Kenton's band of 1958 didn't boast the firepower of earlier editions, but new arrivals Jack Sheldon and Bill Trujillo contribute a lot to the highlight, "The Party's Over" (which, Michael Sparke's liner notes tell us, was often used by the contrarian Kenton to begin his sets). Elsewhere, Niehaus gives himself a feature on the hard-swinging "Baubles, Bangles & Beads."
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