Albert Boyd Raeburn (October 27, 1913 – August 2, 1966) was an American jazz bandleader and bass saxophonist.

Like the contemporaneous band of clarinetist Woody Herman, the Raeburn orchestra evolved from its simpler, more commercial beginnings to far more advanced and complex charts during the union-imposed recording ban that took effect in October 1942 and lasted about a year and a half. The “new” Raeburn band debuted at the Arcadia Ballroom in November 1942 with arrangements by two African-American writers from Earl Hines’ band, Budd Johnson and Jerry Valentine. The band was a big hit in Chicago but when Raeburn decided to tour after nine months, most of the Chicago-based musicians refused to go with him. He was forced to build a new band to open at the Roosevelt Hotel in Washington, D.C., and was lucky enough to find such outstanding musicians as trumpeters Emmett Carls, Sonny Dunham, Marky Markowitz and Sonny Berman, trombonists Earl Swope and Tommy Pederson (who later played with Spike Jones’ City Slickers), alto saxist Johnny Bothwell, and drummer Don Lamond. Raeburn was also lucky to find an outstanding new arranger, Eddie Finckel, who wrote a sizable new book for the band.

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Albert Boyd Raeburn (October 27, 1913 – August 2, 1966) was an American jazz bandleader and bass saxophonist.

Raeburn’s bands kept failing and rebuilding throughout the 1940s. Between October 1945 and November 1946 he recorded his best discs (in terms of both performance and sound quality) for drummer Ben Pollack’s tiny Jewel label. These records, too, had little or no distribution. After one of his several bankruptcies the band was infused with cash thanks to a very generous donation from famed bandleader Duke Ellington, himself an avid fan of Raeburn. The Raeburn band made their last records, four sides featuring vocalist Ginny Powell (who had become Mrs. Raeburn in 1945), for Nesuhi Ertegun’s fledgling Atlantic label in August, 1947. Despite several attempts at trying to score pop hits for a mass market (“Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and “How High the Moon” with Powell among them), the Raeburn band consistently failed to find any mass marketing niche. It finally folded for good in the fall of 1949.

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