The Wild Canaries
To paraphrase the old Louis Armstrong song, Tommy Dorsey "Came from a musical family". His father, Thomas F. Dorsey, was a music teacher and the leader of the Elmore Band in their home town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Tommy had a brother called Jimmy, who was twenty-one months older - Jimmy was born in February 1904 and Tommy in November 1905. They were therefore pretty much of an age to be taught together by Thomas senior, and before long they appeared with their father's band. They both started on trumpet but within a few years Jimmy was playing saxophone and Tommy the trombone.
Almost inevitably the brothers formed their own band which was called, with a notable lack of imagination, "Dorseys Novelty Six", later to become "Dorseys Wild Canaries" (almost certainly with yellow waistcoats). The Canaries played a long residency in Baltimore and became one of the first jazz bands to broadcast there. Eventually the Canaries decided to fly off in different directions and Tommy and Jimmy joined Billy Lustig's "Scranton Sirens".
By the early 1920s the brothers were experienced enough to be offered top jobs in the burgeoning dance band world. They both played engagements with the Jean Goldkette Orchestra and the famous Paul Whiteman Orchestra and there was no shortage of work for Tommy and Jimmy.
The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra
From time to time, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the brothers put together, for certain jobs, their own Dorsey Brothers Orchestra and the success of this eventually prompted their first regular band since the days of the "Wild Canaries". This was in the spring of 1934 and the band was an immediate success.
It discovered a distinctive voice by using three trombones and one trumpet instead of the more usual two trombones and three trumpets. The high quality of the music produced by the quite small eleven-piece orchestra can be better understood when we find that the two trombones were Tommy himself and Glenn Miller. The trumpet was none other than the, almost legendary, Bunny Berigan.
Glenn Miller contributed greatly to the formation and success of this first Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. He even found four of the personnel, including the greatly overlooked vocalist, Kay Weber, and in addition he contributed many original arrangements. Kay Weber was the only female vocalist the band ever had, but over the year of its life there were a few notable male singers including Bing Crosby's brother, Bob and Bob Eberly who made the most of his first serious professional job.
The band was busy with engagements at the Sands Point Casino on Long Island and a coveted summer residency at the Glen Island Casino - but behind this success, trouble was brewing.
Relations between the brothers tended to be difficult. Their personalities were as different as could be. Tommy was undoubtedly a born leader who knew exactly what he wanted and was quite ruthless in making sure he achieved his objectives. He was a hard worker and a perfectionist and found it difficult to understand other points of view. Jimmy, on the other hand, the elder brother, was an affable and agreeable man, much liked by other musicians and people in the business. He was quite happy to sit in the reed section and make the occasional coement about the music.
It was one of these remarks that led to the break up of the band in June 1935. One night, on the bandstand, Tommy set the tempo on a number called I'll never say 'never again' again. Jimmy looked up and suggested it was too fast and without another word, Tommy picked up his trombone, walked off the bandstand and out of the band.
Much against his wishes, Jimmy became the leader and after replacing his brother with a brilliant young player called Bobby Byrne, continued to lead the band very successfully - particularly in Hollywood where the band accompanied such stars as Bing Crosby and worked pretty regularly through the difficult war years and the subsequent waning popularity of big bands.
The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra
So much for Jimmy, the reluctant leader, but what of brother Tommy? When he angrily left the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra he could easily have resumed his career as a session musician. There would have been more than enough work for such a talented player - but having sampled life as a leader he was soon making plans for his own band. In the event an old friend called Joe Haymes was leading a band at the McAlpin Hotel in New York, and was persuaded to allow Tommy to take it over, en masse, so Tommy found himself responsible for twelve musicians - including Paul Weston, a young arranger of great promise.
Not satisfied with the band, Dorsey soon set about altering it to his own style and one of their first jobs was to record some sides for RCA Victor in September 1935, which were considered by reviewers as showing a great deal of promise.
More changes were made by Dorsey for their New York debut at the Hotel Lincoln Blue Room, including the arrival of Davey Tough, a brilliant, young drummer and tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman. He also acquired three talented musicians from Bert Block's band - trumpeter Joe Bauer, a vocalist called Jack Leonard and a young arranger called Odd Stordahl, soon to be known as Axel Stordahl, and who was to become a major force in Dorsey's success as well as in the rise of Frank Sinatra. The three new musicians also performed as a vocal trio know as "The Three Esquires".
There were other musicians who joined Dorsey and perhaps the most important was the very fine trumpet star, Bunny Berigan, who had been briefly with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in 1934. Another major signing was the young clarinettist, Johnny Mince, who sometimes sounded remarkably like Benny Goodman. Joe Marsala's guitarist, Carmen Mastren was another talented newcomer. Incidentally, it was Joe Marsala who, having lost further personnel to Dorsey, sent him a note which read, "Dear Tommy, How about giving me a job in your band so I can play with mine".
The regular turnover of musicians in the early Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was quite remarkable and was the result of Tommy's quest for perfection. Allied to this was his habit of tactlessly criticising musicians in front of the rest of the band, which led to several peremptory departures.
As the years went by, Dorsey's manner became slightly less acerbic and the personnel became more established, but he always knew exactly what he wanted from the band and was single-minded in this endeavour.
Dorsey with Strings
By the early 1940s, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra had increased in size and was the biggest band he ever led. It comprised eight brass, five saxes, four rhythm, six singers, seven violins, two violas, a cello and a harp. Most of the strings came from the Artie Shaw Orchestra, recently disbanded to allow Shaw to enlist in the navy.
The large Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was very successful but, sadly, in 1942 World War II was looming in the States which meant that musicians started leaving to join the forces, and the band suffered badly.
By 1944 the situation had started to improve and the finest musicians were once more available to satisfy the Dorsey high standards. Drummer Buddy Rich returned from the marines to give the band an undoubted lift, Bill Finegan came back to contribute his first class arrangements and Tommy hired the band's first black musician, the excellent Charlie Shavers on trumpet.
In the mid 1940s, after the war, conditions were becoming more difficult for big bands. Musicians returning from the forces were reluctant to go on the road and there were fewer places for bands to play. Times were changing and there were now more bands than there were jobs. It seemed that the big bands were no longer viable and at the end of 1946 no fewer than eight of the top bands decided to call it a day - those of Benny Goodman, Les Brown, Benny Carter, Woody Herman, Harry James, Jack Teagarden, Ina Ray Hutton and Tommy Dorsey.
Dorsey without a band
Although he was without the band for the first time in eleven years, Tommy was by no means short of possibilities to fill his time. He had always liked the idea of branching out into other areas of musical interest and, over the years, he had started two music publishers, "Sun" and "Embassy Music", a band booking agency called "Tommy Dorsey Inc." and he became active, with other leaders, Harry James and his brother Jimmy, in operating a large dance venue called "The Casino Gardens". This was in response to the owner of the Hollywood Palladium, who refused to increase payment for the band. The offer was $8,500 a week, but Tommy was sure his band was worth more, and he was probably raght. On his final night at the Palladium he invited the dancers to get down to the nearby Casino Gardens the following week. They certainly did this and flocked to the new venue in Ocean Park where they broke all attendance records.
So, with the booking agency, the publishers and the venue, Dorsey was covering money-making opportunities on the periphery of the band business.
One less successful enterprise was a music magazine called "Bandstand", started by Tommy. This was a lavish give-away affair mainly about the band, and was intended as a publicity venture. Unfortunately, after six issues and with a circulation of 180,000 it proved too costly and Dorsey was left with the bill of $65,000.
Tommy was keenly interested in baseball and it was his great regret that because of the band work, he could seldom get to a game. His response was to start his own team, within the band and he even paid to have the team outfitted with baseball uniforms. They also had, for a while, a professional coach with the impressive name of Grover Cleveland Alexander, who had been one of Dorsey's early baseball heroes.
Back on the road again
Plenty to occupy a redundant, middle-aged band leader, one might think, but in less than two years from the break up of the band in 1946, Tommy was back on the scene with a new band which included Charlie Shavers on trumpet, Louis Bellson - drums, and interestingly a British singer, Denny Dennis.
Eventually, brother Jimmy joined the band too, so it became known as the Dorsey Brother Orchestra. They had some success on a television series organised by an old friend, Jackie Gleason.
Ironic, perhaps, that one of the guests on the show was a comparatively unknown singer called Elvis Presley, whose subsequent amazing success on the popular music scene helped to consign big band music to history.
Final Curtain
The demanding and time-consuming job of running a big, popular swing band seemed to preclude a settled home life - a look at the many marriages of Artie Shaw is perhaps an extreme example of this effect, and although Tommy worked hard at his marriages, things turned out badly.
A week after his fifty-first birthday, he was faced by divorce and maybe the loss of his fine home in Greenwich, Connecticut - to say nothing of his two children. He was deeply upset and after a heavy meal on the night of November 26th 1956 he retired to bed and took some sleeping tablets. Sadly he became nauseous and because of the tablets he was unable to rouse himself and choked to death.
The Music
The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was, arguably, the best of all the many big bands which were popular in the 1930s and 1940s. It was certainly the finest all-round band of the day providing, as it did, everything from modern swinging arrangements to sweet ballads. There were certain bands around, like those of Goodman, Ellington and Basie, who generated a greater degree of swing but nobody could quite match the Tommy Dorsey arrangement of ballads.
It was not for nothing that Dorsey was known, in his publicity, as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing". His mastery of the trombone in ballads was unchallenged and his beautiful tone was almost a trademark of the band.
An important part of the success of the orchestra was to do with the arrangers of the music, whose talents were greatly appreciated by Dorsey. Men like Paul Weston, Axel Stordahl, Dick Jones and, later on and more famously Sy Oliver. When Oliver left Jimmie Lunceford's Band he was approached by Dorsey who said, "Whatever you were paid with Lunceford, I'll pay you $5,000 a year more". An offer Oliver could hardly refuse and he was soon earning his keep with a string of wonderful originals like Quiet Please, Swing High and Opus No. 1. He was also responsible for winning arrangements of such numbers as For You, Swanee River, Chicago and On the Sunny Side of the Street. And when he was not busy with arrangements, he was a useful member of the trumpet section.
The Vocalists
If Tommy appreciated the value of his arrangers, he also knew the worth of his vocalists. He always managed to find first class singers, notably Jack Leonard, Edythe Wright, Connie Haines, Jo Stafford, Dick Haymes and Stuart Foster.
Jack Leonard was the top man for four years in the 1930s and even rivalled Bing Crosby in popularity. He was featured in some early band hits like Marie - one of the most successful of all the Dorsey sides - East of the Sun and Who - all of which also featured what the old 78 record labels used to call "Incidental singing by the Band". It was a simple and successful arrangement which did very well for the band - and which may be heard on this collection.
Edythe Wright was with the band from 1935 to 1939 and was also featured on the band's radio series. She is well represented on this set by the two fine Gershwin songs, They all Laughed and (I've got) Beginners Luck.
Jo Stafford joined the band early in 1940 as part of a vocal quartet called "The Pied Pipers" who were, in addition to Jo, three male singers John Huddleston, who was Jo's husband, Clark Yocum and Chick Lowry. Their notable success was I'll never smile Again, which they recorded with Frank Sinatra (on CD 4). Jo was a very accomplished singer, with perfect pitch and it was not long before she was being featured as a soloist with the band.
Dick Haymes stayed with Dorsey for just a few months but paid tribute to Tommy. "He was the greatest leader in the world to work for. He actually knew all the words to every song I sang!"
Other singers came and were on their way more quickly than they might have anticipated - the victims of Dorsey's high expectation and his vituperative comments.
Frank Sinatra
When Jack Leonard left the band in November 1939, Dorsey hired a singer called Allan DeWitt who soon turned out to be not what Tommy was looking for. At that time the band was working at Palmer House in Chicago and, by chance, Harry James was close by at the Sherman Hotel with his young twenty-four year old singer, Frank Sinatra.
James had heard Sinatra on a broadcast from The Rustic Cabin, Englewood, New Jersey, where Sinatra worked as a part-time singer and M.C. He was finally tracked down by James who offered him a job in his newly formed band. Sinatra was doing well enough with the Harry James Orchestra, but the band was struggling to make the big time and when Dorsey offered him a job, Sinatra accepted, having first talked the matter over with James. Harry generously agreed to release him from his contract.
So "that skinny kid with James", as Dorsey called him, eventually joined the band and took an important step forward in his singing career& It was also an important step financially for Sinatra whose wife, Nancy, was expecting their first baby.
The importance of singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was often acknowledged by Sinatra, and in particular he observed and listened to the way in which Tommy himself used breath control when playing solos.
Frank also got along well with Tommy on a personal level. The singer was young and enthusiastic and Tommy greatly admired his ability. There is no doubt that Sinatra bloomed during his time with Dorsey but even his first appearance with the band at the Lyric Theatre in Indianapolis was a great success. At this time he had only rehearsed two or three songs with the band, but the response was electric. Frank sang My Prayer and the Jack Leonard favourite, Marie. As an encore they did a hastily improvised version of South of the Border.
Tommy had predicted in a radio interview that Sinatra would soon be as important as Crosby, but even he must have been surprised and delighted at how quickly this appeared to be happening.
Frank had a keen ear and worked hard to ensure that his voice blended well with The Pied Pipers. Jo Stafford recalls that Frank was able to make his vibrato match those in the group and that he was meticulous about phrasing and dynamics.
The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra became even more popular with Frank as the number one vocalist and they were often on the road, and just as frequently in the recording studios.
Frank stayed with the band until September 1942 when he decided to leave and become a soloist - a decision which Tommy found hard to accept. Dorsey, the shrewd businessman took over and when Sinatra did go, Tommy along with his manager, Leonard Vannerson, owned almost 50% of Sinatra's future earnings. Eventually, with the help of others, including his booking agency, Sinatra secured his release from this arrangement and he soon went on to become astoundingly successful as a solo performer. It was only a few months later in 1943 that he was an absolute sensation at the Paramount Theatre in New York.
Relations remained cool between Dorsey and Sinatra and on one occasion when he was persuaded by Grace Kelly, against his will, to go on stage at a concert and sing with the Dorsey Orchestra, Tommy greeted him with the ironic words, "I always knew you'd come crawling back".
Frank subsequently refused to appear at a Tommy Dorsey Memorial Concert with the explanation that "It would be hypocritical of me".
The Recordings
Tommy Dorsey first appeared in the recording studios in 1928 as a trumpet player with "Tom Dorsey and his Novelty Orchestra" - which was actually a quartet.
A few years later he was being featured in the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, and his own recording career as a leader started in 1935 with recordings for the American Victor Company.
Dorsey stayed with Victor until he dissolved the band in 1946 and during the eleven years his recordings continued to be very successful. There are well over five hundred titles, a study of which reveals an unfailingly high musical standard and a choice of material which embraced popular songs of the day, standards and jazz classics.
It is an interesting thought that these issues were among the popular records of the day. Records that were bought, sometimes in huge quantities often by dancers, but increasingly by people who wanted to hear the singers who were becoming more important through the 1930s and 1940s.
On some big band recordings of the time, the vocals were occasionally an anti-climax but Tommy's astute selection of singers such as Jo Stafford, The Pied Pipers, Connie Haines, Jack Leonard and, of course, Sinatra himself, ensured that the records became more popular than ever.
Sinatra's contribution to the success of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra would be difficult to exaggerate. Altogether he recorded 83 numbers with the band, including the very fine Everything happens to Me, East of the Sun, Without a Song and How about You.
Altogether there are 49 tracks featuring Sinatra in this set and they tell a story of a unique singer polishing his great vocal skills with the very best of help from the very finest, all-round big band.
JOHN GUNN
This information is featured in the CD booklet.
© Broadsword Int'l Ltd
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