Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [36]
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Summit. Frank, Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, circa 1941. (photo credit 7.1)
He was one tough son of a bitch, the second son of a horn-playing family from the coal-mining hills of eastern Pennsylvania, one of the starkest places on earth. His father, Tom Dorsey Sr., was self-taught on cornet and four other instruments, and an even tougher son of a bitch than his sons. Pop Dorsey had used his musical skills to escape the mines, had dragged himself up by his bootstraps from the worst job in the world, and was damned if his sons would have to go down in those black pits. So he pushed them, bullied them really, to learn their instruments: Jimmy, the saxophone, and Tom junior, the trombone. And they learned well, both boys, they were brilliant musicians like their dad, but like their dad they also had the devil in them, a taste for alcohol and a deep black anger, as black as the coal in the mines, as old as Ireland, as explosive as TNT. They got into fistfights with anyone they had to, and many they didn’t have to, and they fought each other, too. They vied for supremacy, Tommy refusing to accept the role of the second son, giving his older brother no deference. They loved each other, but perhaps hated each other a little more.
The brothers played together (and fought together) in dozens of bands as they came up during the 1920s and 1930s: the Scranton Sirens and Jean Goldkette’s band (with an insanely talented, desperately alcoholic cornetist named Bix Beiderbecke) and Paul Whiteman’s; then, against all emotional logic, they formed their own outfit, the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, and fought some more, and then, as the Swing Era was getting started in 1935, Tommy couldn’t take the fighting anymore, and walked out to start on his own.
He was just thirty, but thirty was more like forty in those days, and coming from where he’d come from, and having done what he’d done, Tommy Dorsey had a hundred thousand miles on him. He was five ten and ramrod straight, with a square, pitiless face, a hawk nose, cold blue eyes behind little round glasses. He looked just like a high-school music teacher—he knew it, others knew it, and he tried to shift the impression by dressing more elegantly than other bandleaders (he had an immense wardrobe, over sixty suits) and standing taller (he wore lifts in his shoes, and tended to pose for the camera with his trombone slide extended alongside himself, to emphasize the vertical line). His ambition was titanic, his discipline incomparable. He could (and often did) drink himself into a stupor after a gig, sleep three hours, then get up at 6:00 a.m., play golf, and be fresh as a daisy for the day’s work. No matter how long the road trip or how taxing the engagement, he was never seen in rumpled clothes. He did precisely what he wanted, when he wanted, took shit from nobody, and played an absolutely gorgeous trombone. “He could do something with a trombone that no one had ever done before,” said Artie Shaw, who was stingy with compliments. “He made it into a singing instrument … Before that it was a blatting instrument.”
Dorsey had a massive rib cage and extraordinary lung power. He could play an unbelievable thirty-two-bar legato. And yet he hopelessly idolized the legendary Texas trombonist and vocalist Jack Teagarden, a great jazz artist, a man who could transform a song into something new and sublime and dangerous. Dorsey didn’t transform: he ornamented; he amplified. It was a quibble, really, but not in Dorsey’s mind. There was something about himself—there were a few things—that he didn’t like. When he thought about Teagarden, the pure artist, he would pour himself another drink, turn mean as a snake, go looking for somebody to punch out.1 But when he blew those glorious solos, measure after silken measure seemingly without a pause for breath, you forgot about jazz: Tommy Dorsey made his own rules.
Still, jazz dominated the mid-1930s.