His yarn begins: "In the 1950s, going downstairs into New York's Birdland (billed as 'The Jazz Center of the World') the sheer exhilarating force of the Count Basie band below almost knocked me into the wall."

Nat writes further: "I grew up listening to the big bands on the radio, imagining them rolling through the night like lit-up trains bringing excitement and romance to big cities and small towns across the land."

This glorious time known as the big band era began in the 1930s. Benny Goodman, who came out of a dirt-poor neighborhood in Chicago, acquired a clarinet at a settlement house. He had a gift for the instrument and he formed a band which knew prompt success.

And so a golden era began. The end was bestirred in the late '40s and into the 1950s when the band singers – Frank Sinatra, for one – went out on their own. And then the musical form known as rock 'n' roll spelled the end for the big bands. And now here's Nat Hentoff with a rave review of the Joe Elefante Big Band. Nat also ponders the lovely thought that the big bands may return to favor.

To borrow a phrase from a bygone lyric, it seems to me I've heard this song before. But who can say?

Nat is clearly an astute judge of musical trends. It is evident that music has taken curious turns. If four lads from Liverpool known as The Beatles could sweep aside the musical past, perhaps the big bands might just make a phenomenal comeback.

At one time bands would play for dancers at all the major hotels. In San Francisco, for example, you could dance at the St. Francis, known as "the Frantic," or the Palace or the Fairmont or the Mark Hopkins or the Sir Francis Drake. Bands were led in the city by Freddy Martin, Paul Pendarvis, Griff Williams, Del Courtney, Jay Grille, Carl Ravazza, Phil Harris. (In the war years, the Top of the Mark, with its romantic view of San Francisco at an incomparable dusk, would become a place for tender farewells.)

The very best of the big bands was, I suspect, the assemblage of virtuoso musicians led by Duke Ellington, composer, pianist and an American institution. Duke, a man of courtly elegance, was a rare and exalted genius. Reminiscing in tempo, the Duke would say on a typically Ellingtonian note of mysticism: "I'm not sure that music and I haven't been on the dark side of the moon. Maybe, shall we say, the dark side of my moon."

All of which summons to mind a time that I was interviewing Bing Crosby up in San Francisco. On that same day, Paul Whiteman, a legendary bandleader, had died. As a young singer, Bing had worked for Whiteman. I asked Bing for his thoughts on Whiteman. Bing said it all in a sentence: "We will not see his like again." Perhaps that is how it is with the big bands.

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Don Freeman can be reached by fax at (619) 260-5093; or at don.freeman@uniontrib.com; or at the Union-Tribune, P.O. Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191.