Jazzed history

I'm on a history kick with I've Got a Secret lately. A couple more posts of mine on the subject from the GSN Classics board...

Just uploaded to YouTube: this nice bit from I've Got a Secret's 12/5/66 episode. The all-female Kit Kat band from the then-running Broadway musical Cabaret performs the show's theme song in 1930s jazz style. Steve Allen has some fun with the introductions. IGAS was just a few months from bye-bye, but it could still entertain.

By the way, the entire I've Got a Secret segment with the Kit Kat band, including the panel Q&A, was previously posted on YouTube. Henry Morgan gets buzzed at a strategic point, and Betsy Palmer wanders into some, er, delicate areas. There's also a really nice comment from a daughter of the band's pianist at YouTube:

I cannot thank you enough for posting this video. My mother was Maryann Burns on the piano, and the other ladies in the Kit Kat Band were among her dearest friends. Not to mention, together they comprised one hot jazz quartet!! I have not seen this broadcast since I was 2 years old. *Amazing.* Thank you again!

Not sure how she could remember a broadcast from when she was two, but the comment seems authentic otherwise. Oh well, she was probably told about the broadcast later. You never know what you're going to find once you start poking around those videos.

And Google tells me that the band's drummer, Viola Smith, was called "the Female Gene Krupa for the way she would hurl her drumstick onto her drum, then jump up in the air and catch it as it bounced." Viola was apparently something of a feminist crusader in the jazz ranks. In a 1942 issue of Down Beat magazine she extolled the virtues of "hep girls" in jazz bands.