Deane Kincaide Quintet

While Deane Kincaide could get around quite well on as many as half-a-dozen different musical instruments, a great deal of his career was devoted to jotting down notes for others to play. He wrote arrangements for big bands that aimed at an audience who listened closely and seriously, but he also wrote many, many charts that were commercial backgrounds, meant to fit somewhere in the background of the public's consciousness. Kincaide was born in Houston but grew up in the Midwest; he learned flute, piano, and trombone as a teenager, gigging professionally in a band led by Byron Hart. Soon he began primarily blowing the tenor sax, hitting the road west to Nebraska, south to Louisiana, and then back home again, working with Wingy Manone and Ben Pollack, among others. From the mid-'30s, Kincaide performed in groups led by Lennie Hayton and Bob Crosby. It was in the latter ensemble that he first began passing out arrangements, working his way up from a simple sentry of the reed section to staff arranger. He moved on to a similar role in Woody Herman's big band, returned to the side of both Crosby and Manone, and finished out the '30s with Tommy Dorsey. At least three years of the following decade were spent on the U.S.S. Franklin with Saxie Dowell's Orchestra; Kincaide also added credits with Glenn Miller and Muggsy Spanier to his impressive resumé. The major difference in his postwar career was that he no longer seemed as interested in doubling as a player and arranger, although in an ongoing relationship with bandleader Ray McKinley he still seemed willing to carry horn cases around. Kincaide toured with Yank Lawson in the early '60s, but had been reaching a much larger listening audience with his themes for television programs as the previously mentioned commercial interruptions.
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