Search - Tommy Dorsey :: Tommy Dorsey and His Greatest Band

Tommy Dorsey in Hi-Fi !

Jeffrey J. Karpinski | King of Prussia, PA United States | 03/02/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"All right, maybe for most of us Tommy Dorsey's greatest band was the 1940-42 edition with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, but this group comes pretty darn close. The tracks are taken from high-fidelity studio transcription discs recorded in 1944 for later broadcast. Dorsey had a serious interest in quality sound reproduction, and it shows here as many of the performances sound as if they could have been made a good decade later. You can hear the band in full gallop on "Well, Git It" and dream to Tommy's silken trombone on "Like a Leaf in the Wind", as it must have really sounded in that long-ago time. It's particularly interesting to compare the version of "Marie" on this CD with the RCA 78 made just 7 years earlier. It's the same arrangement, the same era, Tommy leading both bands, but what a difference the recording fidelity makes!This probably isn't an album for someone who wants to hear only "classic" Tommy Dorsey performances. More than half of the songs aren't ones that are usually associated with the Dorsey band, and of course by this point Sinatra and the Pied Pipers had given way to Stuart Foster and the Sentimentalists. Nonetheless, the thrill of hearing ANY 1940s Tommy Dorsey band in high fidelity makes this album worth having."