The Dorsey brothers, Jimmy and Tommy, could have jointly led the band that kicked off the swing era in jazz. Their breakup opened the door for Benny Goodman.

Both brothers led successful bands, but the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra dominated the era. It still survives as a ghost band. Ironically, some aspects of Dorsey’s success led directly to the end of the swing era and to the end of jazz as the embodiment of American popular music.

The brothers grew up in Pennsylvania coal country. Their father, a self-taught musician, worked in the mines for 20 years until his musical activities enabled him to escape. He led 52 municipal bands at one time or another. Determined that his sons would not become miners themselves, he pushed them to excel in music. Both could play multiple instruments at age 10.

The boys played in several local bands until the mid-1920s, then they moved to New York. Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller had already established themselves there. The Dorseys joined the Whiteman band in 1927 and participated in some notable recordings.

They formed the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in 1928 and quickly became successful and well respected. Their first recording with Okey Records, “Round Evening,” included Tommy’s idol Jack Teagarden on trombone and two vocals by Bing Crosby.

After scoring a few hits, they formed a full-time touring band in 1934, but the brothers always had a tense relationship. They frequently fought, both verbally and with fists. When Jimmy quibbled about a tempo on stage and offended Tommy in 1935, Tommy simply walked away. The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra became Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Tommy hired musicians away from Joe Haymes to form the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

The Tommy Dorsey sound

The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was never a jazz band. It was a dance band that carefully straddled the line between swing and sweet. The eclectic mixture ensured that a wide variety of listeners and dancers would find something to like in his programs.

Dorsey also demanded and got great precision in ensemble, rhythm, and intonation. At the same time, his band played with an ease that no other similarly disciplined band could match. But the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra never had a distinctive stylistic profile.

Nonetheless, according to jazz writer George T. Simon, “Tommy Dorsey’s must be recognized as the greatest all-around dance band of them all,” Simon concludes. “Others may have swung harder and developed more distinctive styles, but Tommy Dorsey’s could do more things better than any other could.”

Tommy Dorsey signed with RCA and immediately produced four hit records in December 1935 alone. He continued to produce multiple Top Ten hits every year until after the start of the Second World War. His success earned him his own radio show, which aired for almost three years. The band also appeared in several motion pictures.

By 1939, though, critics, and even Dorsey himself were becoming bored with too much mellowness.  He hired arranger Sy Oliver. His arrangements helped Dorsey update his style from the Dixieland approach it exhibited before. Oliver attracted jazz musicians to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, including trumpeter Zeke Zarchy and drummer Buddy Rich.

Dorsey as trombonist.

If rival dance bands had a more easily recognized style or played more consistent jazz, none of them had a trombone soloist like Dorsey. His influence spread far beyond the world of jazz, or even popular music. In the classical music world, Arturo Toscanini considered him the world’s greatest trombonist. Marcel Tabuteau, the principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, used Dorsey’s playing as a model for good legato playing and breath control.

Artie Shaw remarked that Dorsey had changed the trombone from a blatting instrument to a singing instrument. While earlier trombonists like Kid Ory and Miff Mole can be accused of blatting, Jack Teagarden certainly made his trombone sing. But not like Dorsey.

One aspect of Dorsey’s legato may be that he reached his fame after the microphone changed popular singing. It enabled the crooning style of a Bing Crosby to replace the forceful loudness of an Al Jolson. With a microphone, Dorsey could fill a room with sound with less effort and less breath.

He also mastered the technique of circular breathing. That is, he could store air in his cheeks and push it out while exhaling with his nose. It enabled him to play very long phrases without interrupting them for breath.

Frank Sinatra joins Dorsey—and leaves

At the time, both the Tommy Dorsey and Harry James bands were performing in Chicago. One of Dorsey’s pals suggested he should hire James’ boy vocalist, Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra soon had a following greater than that of any big-band vocalist. On May 21, 1940, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra opened at the Astor Hotel’s Roof Garden. At the time, it had only one solo feature for Sinatra, “Begin the Beguine.” But after they performed it, the audience demanded an encore.

Dorsey decided to let Sinatra sing whatever he wanted, with only piano accompaniment. Instead of a single encore, Sinatra sang three or four.

Young women always swooned as he sang. He was becoming bigger than the band. Years later, Dorsey remembered, “I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos. You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinee idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. And yet what he did to women was something awful.”

After a while, Sinatra persuaded Dorsey to let him make some recordings on his own. No singer had succeeded in a solo career since Bing Crosby launched his in 1931. Dick Haymes, however, had started to perform solo club dates. Sinatra feared that if he didn’t leave Dorsey to strike out on his own, someone else would beat him to it.

With ten months left on his three-year contract, Sinatra informed Dorsey that he would not renew it. Dorsey was sure that no singer could succeed without being part of a band. He was wrong. In fact, Sinatra’s success spelled the beginning of the end of the primacy of big bands and ushered in the age of solo vocalists.

The end of an era . . .

The war years caused trouble for all big bands, as travel became difficult. And when the American Federation of Musicians went on strike in 1942, it forbade its members from entering recording studios. The strike lasted until after RCA ran out of unreleased Tommy Dorsey recordings in 1944. The company continued to score Top Ten hits by repackaging older recordings. When the strike ended in 1945, Dorsey promptly made six more Top Ten hits.

Clubs had to pay big money to hire big bands. Bebop combos and independent singers came less expensive. Plus, they were new. Popular music has always thrived on novelty. The year 1946 marks end of the big band era. In that year, eight of the top in bands folded: Woody Herman, Harry James, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Ina Ray Horton, Les Brown, and Tommy Dorsey.

It’s not that bands ceased to exist. Jimmy Dorsey’s, Duke Ellington’s, Count Basie’s, and others continued as successful organizations. Tommy Dorsey, indeed, was unwilling to give up on bands. He soon formed another one.

When Jimmy Dorsey broke up his band in 1953, the two brothers reconciled and joined forces. They launched a television series in 1954 to serve as a summer replacement for the Jackie Gleason show. It proved successful enough to return occasionally during the 1954-1955 season, and then every week the following season.

Elvis Presley made six consecutive appearances on the show, beginning in January 1956. It marked his first appearances on national television. In November of that year, Tommy Dorsey choked to death on his vomit while he slept. Jimmy died of cancer the following year. By that time, rock music, led by Presley, had begun to eclipse jazz in popular music.

But not the end of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra!

The deaths of the Dorseys and other big-name bandleaders did not spell the end of bands that carried their names. Many of the bands were reconstituted as ghost bands, playing all the old standard arrangements under different leadership. Trombonists Warren Covington, and then Buddy Morrow led the Tommy Dorsey ghost band for many years. Under Covington, the band issued yet another Top Ten recording.

The sidemen in all these bands, mostly in their 20s, graduated from top American music schools. The audiences, on the other hand, were largely contemporaries with the original bandleaders. The great old names became like brand names, a guarantee of musical quality. Under Morrow, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra played mostly the old arrangements Dorsey made famous, but about 25% whatever else he felt like playing. After all, there are still talented arrangers who know how to write big band charts.

Leonard Feather described an increasingly aging audience that wanted to hear the old classic arrangements from a live band. In fact, the transfer of so many of the old records to compact disc demonstrates that the music still appeals to an audience as yet unborn during the big band era. Quite likely, their parents have no first-hand memories, either.

The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra is still going strong. Ironically, the current leader, Terry Myers, is not a trombonist. Like Jimmy Dorsey, he plays clarinet and saxophone.

Sources:

The Dorsey sound: recovering “the greatest dance band of them all,” and the man who created it / Terry Teachout, Commentary. November 2005.
Ghost bands’ proud to carry great names /Leonard Feather, Windsor [Ontario] Star. August 25, 1988 – Found on ProQuest
The night Sinatra happened / James Kaplan, Vanity Fair. September 20, 2010
Swingin’ memories: A hundred years after his birth in Schuylkill County, Tommy Dorsey still revered / Ron Devlin, Morning Call [Allentown, Pennsylvania]. November 13, 2005 –Found on Proquest
Tommy Dorsey / William Ruhlmann, All Music