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Examining a pivotal year in the history of the noted seven-piece jazz band made up of Disney creative personnel

On Monday evening, January 23, 1950, a seven-piece jazz band roared up Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard aboard an antique fire engine. Each musician was dressed in the garb of a fireman, albeit of some decades earlier: red shirts, white suspenders, blue pants with a red handkerchief, and a gleaming white antique helmet with the number 5 emblazoned on the shield. With a wail of the siren and screech of the brakes, the engine came to a halt outside the Mocambo, one of the biggest nightclubs on the Sunset Strip. Traffic congested to a swarm. Onlookers craned their necks for a View as the firemen ran inside with instruments in hand. Onstage, they looked onto a crowd overflowing with Hollywood elite. A sense of expectant curiosity hung in the air. Ward Kimball, the bandleader and trombonist, called the group to order, and they erupted with. another siren wail into their first song. Feet tapped, hips swung, and bodies quickly moved to the dance floor. The crowd seemed in a trance, taken hold by the band’s rhythm. It was the Firehouse Five Plus Two, and this was their spare-time job.

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