Not as well-known as the cartoon team of Hanna-Barbera, the team of Hanna and Kenton were responsible for a massive pile of big-band arrangements and recordings. Making his reputation in no small way by presenting and encouraging the progressive jazz works of young composers and arrangers, bandleader Stan Kenton featured Ken Hanna in his notoriously ear-bending trumpet section during the second half of the '40s. Kenton had already begun utilizing Hanna charts beginning in 1942, many of these pieces remaining favorites of the Kenton kit and kaboodle through the history of the popular band.

A Baltimore lad, Hanna did his formal studies at the Peabody Institute, learning trombone as well as trumpet. Prior to the Second World War he had already begun gigging and jotting out arrangements for local bands, some of which he predictably led himself in order to get the music performed. Outside of the eventual Kenton connection, Hanna was with the Charlie Barnet group in 1949 and freelanced on the Los Angeles scene during the early '50s. The latter career activity built toward Hanna's resurgence as a bandleader, including albums on his own. Jazz for Dancers was released by Capitol in 1955; other items on the Trend label are even harder to find.

By the '70s, Hanna seems to have shifted to other aspects of the music business, including actual record distribution and sales. As a composer he was able to fit comfortably into many aspects of Kenton's diverse outlook. Obviously the criteria of goofy, conceptual subject matter was well met with Somnambulism, an arrangement that certainly has never put a single listener to sleep. Beeline East is a superior example of a straight-out jazz chart licking at sympathetically intertwined genres: critics happily describe "a wonderful Latin feel...all of the great Hanna harmonies and voicings." The Macumba Suite, documented in several versions on contrasting live recordings, presents Hanna's enjoyable take on the sort of extended composition, with global outlook, that was also a major part of any Kenton program. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi