Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [37]
Then there was Tommy Dorsey, whose theme song, “I’m Getting Sentimental over You,” spoke for itself; he also had a deliciously corny nickname, the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing. For three years he entranced the fox-trotting masses with his long sweet solos. But swing grew hotter as the 1940s approached—even Glenn Miller’s band was starting to sound punchier—and the critics began to carp about Dorsey’s monotonous mellowness. The truth is, Tommy Dorsey was starting to get bored with himself. Any sentimentality that he possessed was buried under layers of toughness and anger. Nor was he—except when the microphone was on—particularly gentlemanly. Before his public grew bored too, the ever restless, insatiably ambitious bandleader decided to make some changes.
And 1939 was a year for change. Dorsey’s first move was his most radical: that summer, he hired away Jimmie Lunceford’s genius arranger, Melvin James “Sy” Oliver. Other white bands had used black arrangers before: Fletcher Henderson was the secret of Benny Goodman’s success. Tommy Dorsey needed some similar magic, and with Sy Oliver he got it. The immediate and dramatic result of the new acquisition, as Peter J. Levinson noted in Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way, was that “the Dorsey band … became a magnet for jazz musicians who noticed the difference Oliver’s presence made.”
One of those musicians was the ace trumpeter Zeke Zarchy. Another was the percussively and temperamentally explosive twenty-two-year-old drummer Buddy Rich, who had become a national phenomenon that year while playing for Artie Shaw’s band. Rich had first performed onstage at the age of eighteen months, a percussion prodigy of Mozartean éclat (complete with a pushy, less-talented stage father) known as Traps, the Drum Wonder. The famously temperamental Shaw and the volatile, egomaniacal Rich were bound to clash, and clash they did, when Shaw accused Rich—of all things—of not being a team player. Of course Buddy Rich wasn’t a team player: he was a force of nature, a law unto himself, a hard-drumming whirlwind who could give Gene Krupa a run for his money anytime. In November, Rich magnanimously accepted Dorsey’s offer of $750 a week—a fortune then—and joined the band at its engagement at the Palmer House in Chicago.
Buddy Rich loved Tommy Dorsey’s playing (“the greatest melodic trombone player that ever lived. Absolutely”) and detested him personally. Many others felt the same way. Dorsey was really more a dictator than a leader, a martinet who ran an almost militarily rigid organization, enforcing proper dress and decorum, fining or firing violators for drinking or smoking marijuana. (Dorsey’s own heavy drinking and womanizing—he had a wife at home in New Jersey, but was carrying on an affair with his girl singer, Edythe Wright—were theoretically beside the point.) Physically powerful and fearless, he had literally thrown offenders off the band bus. The object wasn’t petty discipline but tight playing and—always—commercial success. He was renowned for firing his entire trumpet section (somehow it was always the trumpet section) if their playing didn’t come up to snuff. His musicians, most of them in their twenties, called him the Old Man. In November 1939, Tommy Dorsey had just turned thirty-four.
In his own way, Jack Leonard was another part of the musical storm forming around the Dorsey band in the late fall of 1939. Over the years, it has become accepted wisdom that Dorsey’s silky-voiced young baritone had grown restless and wanted to go out on his own. In fact Leonard was restless with his domineering boss. Dorsey had learned a cold and cutting wit from his tough family, and was free with it on and off the bandstand. His