Don't find many complete shows from Steve Allen's Tonight Show tenure or those hosted by Ernie Kovacs on Archive.org, YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion. There MUST be musical interludes in the Kovacs episodes! Skitch Henderson led the NBC orchestra at that time and into the Jack Parr and Johnny Carson eras. Doc Severinson and Tommy Newsom followed. The big band was patterned on the ensembles led by Count Basie, Quincy Jones, and (later) Thad Jones & Mel Lewis.
Dizzy Gillespie had an excellent time playing his compositions with the Tonight Show band.
All that said, as much as the Tonight Show band exemplified the Atomic Mr. Basie approach, periodically Johnny had a musical guest on who was not from the big band tradition.
Never to be outdone, Late Night With David Letterman countered with The World's Most Dangerous Band.
Numerous rock, soul, pop and jazz greats performed on David Letterman's NBC and CBS shows. This included the recently departed metal man Ozzy Osbourne & Black Sabbath.
Did the music represented on Letterman run the freakin' gamut? Yes.
Could this band back Keith Emerson and McCoy Tyner? Yes - watch this!
It is not particularly surprising that with The World's Most Dangerous Band took to jazz in a big way. Bassist Will Lee toured with one of our favorites from the jazz universe, Horace Silver.
No doubt, several of musical director Paul Shaffer's heroes got to be on the show.
A memorable spinoff from the NBC incarnation of Late Night With David Letterman involved frequent Letterman guest, session man supreme and Gil Evans Orchestra stalwart David Sanborn, along with Letterman Show bandmates, and would represent something approximating a gold standard in presenting music on late-night television. That was Sunday Night A.K.A. Michelob Presents Night Music. We'll never see its like again.
Can't post the entire series here in this post, so check out this playlist. Would buy a Blu-ray of the complete series, pretty much the last gasp of jazz music on American television (even in late night), if possible.
Am a bit disappointed not to find more clips from The Arsenio Hall Show, which brought quite a variety of music to TV during its late 1980's - early 1990's heydey.
Tend to associate Dick Cavett's late-night program more with rock music than jazz, but, what do you know, here's Buddy Rich, frequent guest of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, bringing that big band sound to The Dick Cavett Show.
In closing, am not quite sure this fits into the late night theme, as Dick Cavett had moved out of the 11:30 p.m. Tonight Show time slot fairly early in his TV career. In any case, this must be one of the earliest instances of David Bowie on American television and precedes his 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Mr. Cavett did a good job interviewing Miles Davis here. If the guests on his late night and subsequent PBS shows were any indication, Dick Cavett was an enthusiastic aficionado of jazz and rock music.
As expected, could barely scratch the surface of this topic, the mighty music of late night TV, in this post!
Happy to offer a little taste of the goodness that was available on the ol' boob tube way back when.
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