The End of the Late-Night Band

There’s a second from a 2012 episode of Conan O’Brien’s former TBS present that I take into consideration typically. O’Brien’s visitor, the comic Eric André, sits down and grabs a microphone from the host’s desk. “Is that this my microphone?” André asks, whereas attempting to determine a solution to connect the desk mike to his shirt. Then he retches and picks up a close-by espresso mug. “What’s in right here, oatmeal?” he asks. For anyone acquainted with André’s comedy, which depends on the surprising and the absurd, all of this is smart.André settles in for a minute, riffing with O’Brien about his personal collection, a parody of late-night speak exhibits, which had lately premièred on Grownup Swim. Then, as O’Brien is talking, André all of the sudden stands up and yells, to O’Brien’s bandleader, “Jimmy Vivino, hit me!” Vivino is on it immediately. We hear a decide slide, and the Primary Cable Band will get into an uptempo vamp. “Two instances,” André says, and the band responds with two horn hits. “Thrice,” he says. Three hits. Then the punchline: “100 instances,” he shouts. The band performs twenty-three hits earlier than O’Brien waves them off.I’d at all times assumed this was a pre-planned shtick, however Vivino lately assured me that it had been spontaneous. “It wasn’t like Eric mentioned to me backstage, ‘We’re gonna do that,’ ” he defined. “Each single individual in that band was additionally a bandleader, so that they concentrate 100 per cent of the time, figuring out that at any time it could possibly be them.” André’s stunt demonstrated the comedic potentialities of getting a bunch of expert and alert performers on the payroll.There are fewer and fewer of these: the late-night-television trade has been contracting for years, and musicians have been early casualties of the price slicing. In 2019, TBS whittled O’Brien’s present, “Conan,” all the way down to a half-hour program, with out Vivino and the band, earlier than cancelling it completely in 2021. “The Late Late Present with James Corden” resulted in 2023, taking the five-piece group fronted by Reggie Watts with it. In 2024, the Fred Armisen-led 8G Band was laid off from “Late Evening with Seth Meyers.” “The Late Present,” which made the bandleaders Paul Shaffer and Jon Batiste into family names, will go off the air in Could, 2026. Louis Cato and the Late Present Band shall be out of a gig.The late-night format is confronting quite a lot of challenges, a lot of them arising from the web. Celebrities now promote new tasks by occurring “Scorching Ones” or “Rooster Store Date,” or by posting to their very own social-media profiles; seeing them on linear tv can really feel stale. Folks more and more watch late-night exhibits in clip kind, on YouTube, quite than staying up and watching them after they air. The economics of the endeavor make much less and fewer sense: “The Late Present with Stephen Colbert” was the top-rated program in its time slot by a large margin; even so, it was reportedly shedding a minimum of forty million {dollars} a 12 months. “There could also be great, artistic individuals working doing the exhibits, however every thing is pushed by cash,” G. E. Smith, who led the “Saturday Evening Stay” band from 1985 to 1995, advised me. “And if you understand that entering into I believe you’ll be able to keep so much saner, figuring out that it’s solely short-term.”A d.j. is reasonable and a playlist cheaper nonetheless; financing a nightly selection present filled with world-class performers is pricey. And paying anyone to attend for a second which will by no means come is a troublesome promote. The tip of the late-night home band will not be a serious tragedy, however a world with out it does really feel—to me, a minimum of—diminished. “A band will get power in individuals. It makes one thing really feel particular. It creates anticipation,” Ian Karmel, a author for the “Tonight Present,” advised me. “It’s Stage 1 of welcoming you to this world. It excuses what’s about to occur, which is a really foolish factor.” Foolish, and likewise communal: the band underlines the dwell, in-person togetherness of the format, which was at all times meant to have a broad attraction, and which was—by necessity, within the early days—of the second. No matter replaces it’s going to, if present developments are any indication, be very totally different.Steve Allen was a pianist, so, when he was creating the “Tonight Present” in 1954, music naturally grew to become a part of this system. The late-night speak present was an experiment; Allen, the present’s first host, was making it up as he went alongside. “It was such a fledgling medium that the viewers was watching to see what would occur,” Mark Malkoff, who hosts the podcast “Inside Late Evening” and is the creator of a forthcoming guide about Johnny Carson, mentioned. “The band members began to develop into family names. This was a brand new medium, however this was going to be the blueprint of what can be for the following sixty years.”On the time, a lot of musicians had been employed by networks—even native associates had orchestras out there to fill programming wants. The phenomenon of the late-night present helped a few of them develop into personalities. A pianist named Skitch Henderson had stuffed in because the conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, however serving because the bandleader on Allen’s late-night program is what made him a star. When Johnny Carson took over because the host of the present, in 1962, he locked within the format that persists at this time. However Carson didn’t but have the clout needed to herald a bandleader of his alternative—at first, he labored with Henderson, after which one other NBC musician, Milton Delugg. It wasn’t till 1967 that he bought the person who would outline his program’s look and sound.Whereas taking part in theatres throughout the nation, Carson had labored with a younger trumpeter named Doc Severinsen, who had been employed as an NBC studio musician at twenty-two and performed lead in Henderson’s orchestra when Allen’s present first aired. He proved to be the proper foil on Carson’s present, with the arrogance of a lead trumpeter and the humility to be the butt of a joke. “Doc Severinsen was a life preserver for Johnny. He at all times knew if a joke tanked that he might make enjoyable of Doc’s outfit, which might get a response from the viewers,” Malkoff mentioned. Severinsen wore purposely garish fits, turning himself into a personality.Because the “Tonight Present” grew, each NBC and different networks tried to duplicate its success by piloting related applications. Every time a brand new present premièred, it got here with a brand new home band meant to convey why this program was totally different from the others. When David Letterman made his late-night début on NBC at 12:30 A.M., in 1982, he wished a rock-and-roll band for the looser, extra rebellious present he would lead. In Paul Shaffer, he discovered a bandleader who might set the present aside from the brassy sound of Carson’s 11:30 P.M. program.“I’ll have been one of many first to make use of rock and roll as my repertoire on a chat present. I’ve heard that music clearance is the most costly a part of the present and that’s as a result of I performed so many oldies, however God love them I believe they understood that was a part of the enjoyable of the present,” Shaffer advised me. Shaffer was a member of the unique “Saturday Evening Stay” band and had rapidly distinguished himself as a multitalented performer, as comfy showing in sketches as he was taking part in keyboards on the bandstand. He additionally, like Severinsen, favored gaudy clothes that Letterman might at all times, in a gradual second, make enjoyable of.Shaffer’s four-piece group, the World’s Most Harmful Band, was sooner and extra reactive than Severinsen’s large band on the “Tonight Present.” Shaffer was a musical encyclopedia, and his band prided itself on having the ability to reply virtually immediately to something that occurred on the present. Letterman, as Shaffer identified to me, “was definitely among the many most spontaneous of the hosts. So that you needed to be prepared for something.”The gig is demanding, however regular, which helps clarify its attraction to musicians who’ve already reached the highest. Earlier than Conan O’Brien went to TBS, he occupied Letterman’s chair at “Late Evening” for sixteen years. His band in these days was led by Max Weinberg, who’d bought his large break 20 years earlier, with Bruce Springsteen and the E Avenue Band. When Jimmy Fallon changed O’Brien, in 2009, he set his sights not solely on a well-known bandleader however a well-known band: he advised producers that he wished to rent the Roots, who’d made two gold information. Nick Bernstein, a veteran late-night govt, cherished the concept, however figured it wasn’t reasonable. “My thought was, That might be unimaginable, however I can’t think about that they’ve an excellent curiosity in being in a single place for 4 or 5 days per week in a metropolis they don’t dwell in. How do you persuade them of that?” To his shock, the pitch labored.Fallon now occupies the spot created by Allen and cemented by Carson on the “Tonight Present.” The Roots got here with him. On the weekends at NBC, “Saturday Evening Stay” nonetheless has an in-house band, too, led by Lenny Pickett, a saxophonist who took over from G. E. Smith in 1995, a down 12 months for the present that led Lorne Michaels to scrub home. I bear in mind watching an episode of “S.N.L.” as a child, having lately been assigned the saxophone within the college band. Because the host mentioned goodbye, I locked in on Pickett, who had beforehand been a member of the funk band Tower of Energy, and who was soloing within the background because the solid hugged onstage. He saved going larger and better into the altissimo register, till his tenor saxophone seemed like a whistle. I had no concept a saxophone might sound like that. I went to mattress fascinated about what I’d simply heard; perhaps in the future I might play notes that top.The opposite members of the band will not be well-known, however the gig stays life-changing. In 2022, the trumpeter Summer season Camargo was twenty years outdated and a scholar at Juilliard when she bought a name from Pickett, who gave her a job after a Zoom audition. Every week that fall, she’d go to class, do her homework, after which, on Saturday evenings, sit in view of thousands and thousands on nationwide tv, over the host’s proper shoulder through the monologue, attempting to not break. The gig is simply in the future per week, however that day is lengthy—an 11 A.M. name time and a collection of rehearsals lead right into a nighttime session pushed by the band. At 7:30 P.M., they play covers of classics from the sixties and seventies to rev up the group. Each week, Keenan Thompson, Ego Nwodim, Chloe Fineman, and Heidi Gardner come out and sing “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” with the band. “I’m taking part in for about six hours earlier than the precise present occurs,” Camargo mentioned.Camargo makes sufficient from “S.N.L.” that she doesn’t must take some other gigs. She will be able to determine what fits her artistically and decline every thing else. She will get provided extra work than she wants. For working musicians, or fashionable creatives of any sort, secure work is a luxurious. Having a wage is like profitable the lottery.This wasn’t at all times the case, Vivino defined to me. Within the seventies and eighties, there was ample work for studio musicians. “There can be three guitars, you understand, two keyboard gamers, a bassist, a drummer, and a percussionist, and it could be an eight-piece rhythm part. We’d be slicing disco songs and so they’d throw a chart in entrance of you,” Vivino mentioned. “You’d do two or three of these a day, and a few jingles.” It was simpler for musicians to make ends meet. However drum machines and synthesizers started changing dwell instrumentation. “It went away. It’ll by no means come again.”Louis Cato bought his fateful cellphone name in 2015, when he was dwelling in Boston. Jon Batiste wished him to provide a studio session in New York. “I might later discover out that it was for producing what can be the theme tune to Stephen’s ‘Late Present’ taking on for Letterman,” Cato advised me. Batiste then requested him to affix the band. The present went on air that September, and Batiste’s group, Keep Human, grew to become a standout a part of this system. Through the subsequent few years, Cato would fill in as bandleader every time Batiste was out. He took over full time in 2022.