Henry Busse (May 19, 1894 – April 23, 1955) was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1916 where he found work playing trumpet in a movie theatre pit band. He formed his own band and toured the country ending up in San Francisco where they disbanded. In 1917 he was playing trumpet with the Frisco Jass Band and in 1918 he joined the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.
Busse was a major contributor to Whiteman’s Orchestra. He co-composed several of the band’s early hit songs including “Hot Lips” and “Wang Wang Blues” . Busse stayed with Whiteman until 1928 when he left the band and formed his own group the Henry Busse Orchestra. This group which was more of a sweet dance band than a jazz band had a very successful career. They continued to record and perform up until Busse’s death in 1955.
| Busse’s Buzzards | Henry Busse and his Orchestra |
| Title | Director | Year |
| Starlit Days at the Lido | M·G·M short | 1935 |
| Busse Rhythm | Paramount short | 1938 |
| Lady Let’s Dance | Frank Woodruff | 1944 |
| Rhapsody In Blue | Irving Rapper | 1945 |
| The Fabulous Dorseys | Alfred E. Green | 1947 |
Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.
