Crash Course Timeline, No. 39: Jimmy Dorsey, the Nice One

A man and his (signature) horn.

My favorite story about either of the Dorsey Brothers is the one about their famous split. From their Wikipedia page:

“The band performed live mainly in the New England area, with acrimony between the brothers steadily building up, until a definitive falling out between Tommy and Jimmy over the tempo of ‘I'll Never Say Never Again Again’ in May 1935, after which Tommy walked off the stage.”

That brotherly feud didn’t formally end for 18 years. Over tempo. Related, because I placed this chapter in the late 1930s/1940s, I decided to write about each Dorsey as they played and functioned for all those years, i.e., separately. From what I gather, Jimmy, the older brother and the subject of this post, was the nicer of the two. Then again, I’ve only really read his side so far.

James Francis Dorsey was born in 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His father worked as a coal miner at the time of his birth, but moved to teaching music at local schools and leading his own marching band shortly after. Both Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey played, and well, from a very young age, as demonstrated by the fact Jimmy started playing in his dad’s band by age seven. He started on trumpet and had the chops to play with a New York-based group called J. Carson McGee’s King Trumpeters by age nine, but he switched to the instrument that made him famous, the alto saxophone, by the time he turned 11. (Just to note it, he played clarinet as well, using the Albert system.)

It's fair to call both brothers precocious: as early as 1920, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey formed a third of their first band together, the Dorsey’s Novelty Six, a name they later changed to Dorsey’s Wild Canaries. They had some success with this group, even landed some airtime on the radio as “one of the first jazz bands to broadcast.” [Ed. - I can’t document it, but that doesn’t sound right.] With so much experience under their belts, and at such a young age, both Dorseys moved to New York to work as professional, full-time musicians.

Neither of them struggled for work. They played live, worked recording sessions, and did radio work throughout the 1920s, a lot of that time with decade’s best (e.g., the Paul Whiteman Orchestra). Jimmy, at least, played every orchestra of the 1920s I’ve ever heard of; he even recorded “the iconic 1927 jazz standard” “Singin’ the Blues” with the Frankie Trumbauer opposite the half-legendary Bix Beiderbecke. Before long, the Dorseys, some friends, peers and competitor built on what they learned playing in the ever-expanding orchestras of the late 1920s/early 1930s to create (white, mainstream) popular music’s next big thing. To name one early partner, Glenn Miller co-wrote, arranged and played trombone on a couple of collaborations with the Dorseys at the tail-end of the 1920s - e.g., “Annie's Cousin Fanny,” “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” and “Dese Dem Dose.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 34: Bing Crosby, American Colossus

His happy place, from what I gather.

“396 chart singles, including roughly 41 No. 1 hits. [Bing] Crosby had separate charting singles every year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of 'White Christmas' extended that streak to 1957."

“For fifteen years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top ten acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he topped the world.”

“If he’s not the most important vocal artist of the 20th century, he’s in the top 1 1/2.”
- Will Friedwald (American author/critic)

That last quote comes out of a good, but fairly hagiographicPBS documentary, while the other two came from Wikipedia - which, for the record, was the only one of the few sources I read willing to pick through the garbage. I’ll get to that, but I wanted to start this post by driving home the main truth about Bing Crosby: the man was fucking HUGE, nothing less than a colossus of American popular culture. When they asked GIs to name who they thought contributed most to winning World War II, they named Crosby. His famous 1941 recording “White Christmas” (released on vinyl in discs, V-Records, and shipped to the troops) sold 50 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all-time (and No. 2’s a ways behind; full, weird list here); A Public Broadcasting Service timeline of his career pegged his all-time sales land somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion - after a certain point, why count? - and he spent the 1930s and 1940s, two entire decades, as the most successful vocal artist, quite likely in the world. As noted by the once-best-selling artist in Africa, Dorothy Masuka, once said, “Only Bing Crosby the famous American crooner sold more records than me in Africa.”

Now, for how that happened.

He didn’t start as “Bing,” for one. His parents, Harry Lowe Crosby, Sr. and Catherine Helen Crosby named him Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. at his birth in 1903. A child of the Pacific Northwest, he was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew all the way up in Spokane, even attending college at Gonzaga University. As for the nickname he made famous, Crosby told several stories - e.g, a story about the sounds me made firing an imaginary gun - but Wikipedia, which I trust for its comparative sobriety, gives the honors to a one-time neighbor, Valentine Hobart, who named him “Bing” after an old comic called “Bingo from Bingville.” (Another story has it that was Bing’s favorite comic.)

Though a decent student and a solid athlete, Crosby fell in love with singing at age 14, when he got a summer job working at Spokane’s Auditorium, a venue for vaudeville acts and orchestras. He watched the performances from the wings and, thanks to an audiographic memory, Crosby could perform the songs he heard when he got home after his shifts; when the legendary (and complicated) Al Jolson came to town, he discovered his first idol.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 21: The (Paul) Whiteman Cometh

Paul Whiteman at the office.

Paul Whiteman led the most popular “jazz” orchestra for the duration of the 1920s, but the internet doesn’t have much to say about him or that. All of what’s below mainly relies on just two sources (Wikipedia and a piece for Syncopated Times), and most of the information between those two sources repeats. Call it historical revisionism, call it historical correction, the memory-hole has by and large swallowed Whiteman’s legacy. Still, his life and career open a revealing window into how popular music and the way people talk about it has evolved.

Some part of the that follows from a latter-day controversy over his promotional nickname as “the King of Jazz,” an appellation that doesn’t work on at least two levels. First, and on a purely stylistic level, Whiteman discouraged improvisation - aka, the “heart of jazz” - to the point of excluding it outright; his orchestras played carefully constructed arrangements instead, in which no one went off script. Second, and more significantly, he borrowed a musical form created by Black artists - a lot of them his contemporaries - polished it up and presented it to White audiences. To repeat a phrase I read over and over in the light research I did, Whiteman wanted to “make a lady out of jazz.” Or, to borrow from a couple places:

“While most jazz musicians and fans consider improvisation to be essential to the musical style, Whiteman thought the genre could be improved by orchestrating the best of it, with formal written arrangements.” (Wikipedia)

“But for the ‘King of Jazz’ title to be given to a white musician who never took a jazz solo instead of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or any of a dozen other African-American jazz greats hurt Whiteman’s reputation despite his contributions to American music and the jazz age.” (Syncopated Times, 2020)

I appreciate that he had nothing to do with it, but the fact that his surname is “Whiteman” borders on Dickensian…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 20: Bix Beiderbecke, Davenport, Iowa's Hippest (Drunkest) Son

Why not go with the famous photo?

With an eye to future chapters, this post drags music back to the jazz of the 1920s - specifically to one of the genre's great innovators, Bix Beiderbecke. Even though he was born miles, and arguably worlds, away from the cities where jazz was born, Beiderbecke’s name moved in the same circles as the legends. That respect went both ways too, as noted on a Stanford University site called Riverwalk Jazz:

“Later, both Bix and Louis avowed that the other was ‘the best horn player he had ever heard.’”

I saw comparisons between Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke over and over as I dug into the latter’s legend - and it is a very much a legend. Some of those comparisons read differently today than the would have two, three decades ago. For example:

“Where Armstrong's playing was bravura, regularly optimistic, and openly emotional, Beiderbecke's contained a range of intellectual alternatives. Where Armstrong, at the head of an ensemble, played it hard, straight and true, Beiderbecke, like a shadow-boxer, invented his own way of phrasing 'around the lead.' Where Armstrong's superior strength delighted in the sheer power of what a cornet could produce, Beiderbecke's cool approach invited rather than commanded you to listen.”

Fans of American football should hear a faint echo from conversations about, say, wide receivers in that...

Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke was born into a well-to-do family in Davenport, Iowa in 1903; a lively, if pointless, dispute surrounds whether his middle name was actually Bismark or Bix, but he clearly preferred the latter and never went by anything else (as he signed off in a letter to his mother, written when he was 9-years-old, “frome your Leon Bix Beiderbecke not Bismark Remember”). His father trafficked in coal and lumber and his mother’s father was a steamboat pilot, but Beiderbecke must have fallen in love with music the second he heard it. His sister recalls him playing piano by age three - he played with his hands over his head - and, when the local press caught wind of him, they hailed him as a seven-year-old boy musical wonder,” and under headlines reading, “Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears.” He learned how to play a couple instruments, but he would latch onto the cornet and never let go.