“BUNNY was great, but he had no business dying that young,” said Louis Armstrong on the death of Bunny Berigan at the age of 33.

Harry Isaacs examined the career of this outstanding Swing Era trumpeter whose greatest hit, I Can’t Get Started, is still heard today more than seventy years after he recorded it.

Harry concentrated on Bunny’s recordings as a member of groups making instrumentals and supporting jazz-like singers, as the lead and solo trumpeter with big swing orchestras and from 1937, mainly as the leader of his own big band.

We heard him with the Dorsey Brothers Band (Shim-Sham- Shimmy) and backing the excellent Boswell Sisters (Everybody Loves My Baby) and Mildred Bailey (Willow Tree). While Billie’s Blues found him blowing obbligatos behind Billie Holiday.

He was in absolutely excellent form on Nothing But The Blues, Blues In E Flat and I’m Coming Virginia.

Then, as the myth goes, in 1935, as lead trumpeter with Benny Goodman, he inaugurated the Swing Age when he ripped into King Porter Stomp at the Palomar ballroom, Los Angeles and the crowd went wild. Harry played Bunny’s classic solo from the recording he had made a few weeks earlier.

Later he was the featured soloist with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and had hits with Marie and Song Of India and then formed his own big band. Unfortunately his alcoholism and lack of business sense made this a difficult task, but he did make some successful recordings such as Black Bottom and Jelly Roll Blues.

By the early 40s he was ill from alcohol abuse and died in 1942. Harry concluded his talk with Bunny’s evergreen I Can’t Get Started.