The Song Is You
I missed an important birthday. This past Saturday would have marked the 100th birthday of jazz trombonist and big band leader, Tommy Dorsey, who died suddenly in his sleep in 1956. Dorsey played with all the greats, from Paul Whiteman to Louis Armstrong, and teamed with his brother, Jimmy, to lead the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in the early '30s. His greatest link to the cosmos, though, would come leading his own band, and hiring away a skinny Italian baritone from the Harry James band in 1939 named Frank Sinatra. The Chairman credited Dorsey's skill with the trombone as the inspiration for his unique breath control, and together, they recorded such World War II classics as "I'll Never Smile Again" and America's definitive interpretation of "I'll Be Seeing You." Sinatra went out on his own-- with some eventual success :) -- in 1943 after a tough but fair negotiation. He did not wiggle out of the deal in such a manner as Michael Corleone describes in reference to Johnny Fontaine in Mario Puzo's entirely fictitious novel "The Godfather."Buy this CD.
---
My time-consuming defense this week of the United States' illegally-detained and tortured free range turkeys is going to mean a premature end to holiday blogging. I leave you with the best known words of minister John Bunyan's 1678 prayer, The Pilgrim's Progress:
A man there was,
Tho' some did count him mad
The more he cast away
The more he had
posted by CM @ 9:53 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home