BIG BAND CLASSICS (1931-1940)

Jeepers Creepers

Clarinetist and saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey and his brother Tommy led two of the most popular and successful big bands through the swing era of the late '30s and through the war years into the post-war decade until popular music changed in the new socio-economic climate. Jimmy took over leadership of The Dorsey Brothers orchestra in 1935 when Tommy left to form his own band, and over the next two decades maintained a remarkably consistent presence in the pop charts, capturing the zeitgeist of the times with instrumental hits that provided the favoured style of dance music and vocal hits which encapsulated the sentimental, optimistic and escapist themes which kept people going through the difficult times of the war or reflected the upbeat mood of later years - when he died from cancer in 1957, aged just 53, his final hit was still in the charts. During this time, his band featured a number of different male and female singers, who were variously featured on most of the records, including Kay Weber, Helen O'Connell, Bob Eberly, June Richmond, Kitty Kallen, Gladys Tell, Teddy Walters, Jean Cromwell, Bob Carroll and Dee Parker. This great-value 105-track 5-CD set comprises his entries in Billboard, Cash Box and the other US charts which existed before the Billboard record sales charts began in 1940, and includes the No. 1 hits "Is It True What They Say About Dixie?", "Change Partners", "The Breeze and I", "Amapola", "Green Eyes", "My Sister and I", "Maria Elena", "Blue Champagne", "Tangerine" & "Besame Mucho". It's a thorough and entertaining overview of the music that made his orchestra such a fixture in the pop music landscape of the time

Personnel includes: Frank Sinatra, Connie Haines, The Pied Pipers (vocals);
Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra.
Recorded between 1940 & 1942.
In 1939, Frank Sinatra scored his very first success, "All Or Nothing At All," with trumpeter Harry James' Orchestra. The following year the young singer began an extraordinary two year apprenticeship with the much classier Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, a regimen which taught him everything he needed to know about musical taste and judgement if not popular adulation. Make no mistake, however; from the beginning, through sheer dint of will, Sinatra managed to make his time with the master trombonist and bandleader a collaboration of musical equals.
Milestone recordings like "Stardust," "I'll Be Seeing You," "I'll Never Smile Again," "Everything Happens To Me" et al are both big band classics and the beginning of a new age of romantic popular singing. No male singer had ever gone as far as Sinatra did in exploring the tender feelings expressed in these songs, in identifying so completely with a given song's meaning. It was a revolution in popular sensibility that we are still living through several decades later.

W. vocals by Helen O'Connell and Bob Eberly, 22 cuts.