Type: documentary
Status: disliked
Author: Peter J. Levinson
Tags: biography music entertainment jazz trombone
Description: "Swing has never gone out of style. It was the music the Greatest Generation danced to"Swing has never gone out of style. It was the music the Greatest Generation danced to - and went to war to. No musician evokes those times more strikingly than Tommy Dorsey (1905-1956), whose trombone style and smash hits created legions of fans and influenced popular music for decades. Dorsey led a rich and complex life. After a harsh childhood in the coal mining towns of eastern Pennsylvania, the young trombonist rose to fame and fortune during the Jazz Age. With his brother Jimmy, Tommy Dorsey created one of the most popular bands of the era and played with such giants as Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. But Dorsey's volcanic personality eventually erupted, and he went off to start his own band. Within a few years, he launched the career of a skinny young singer named Frank Sinatra." Drawing on exhaustive new research and scores of interviews with the musicians who knew him best, Levinson delves into Dorsey's famously eccentric lifestyle and the reasons for his destructive behavior. The bandleader died suddenly in 1956, a victim perhaps of his oversize appetite for perfection, drink, women. The first biography of Dorsey in more than thirty years, Tommy Dorsey is a portrait of one of the Big Band era's brightest star - his tumultuous life, his turbulent times, and the unforgettable music that made him a legend....
2006-01-12
