Within a year, the Tommy Dorsey Band was at the top of the jazz trade paper polls. Into the 1940s, it remained one of the key aggregations of the Swing Era, despite the shifting personnel problems generated by World War II. Yearend of 1946 when Les Brown, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Ina Ray Hutton, Harry James, and Jack Teagarden dissolved their bands, the Dorsey organization also became a postwar casualty. But Tommy continued to fight the battle of the big bands, and in 1953, he made peace with Jimmy, and once again there was a Dorsey Brothers band. Tommy even made contact with the new teen generation through a television program, headlined by comic Jackie Gleason, in which he gave exposure to rock ‘n’ roll superstars. In the same year (1956), he died in his sleep at the age of 51, leaving the leadership of the reunited band to his brother. But Jimmy, who had cancer, outlived his brother by less than six months. The present album offers a scintillating sampling of a recording career that spanned a quarter of a century. It contains virtually all the highlights – the discs that young people had to have in their collections in ’35 to ’44 to be “in.” Marie: the Irving Berlin ballad in the swinging arrangement which was requested so frequently between ’37 and ’40 that it became a hangup with Tommy and vocalist Jack Leonard. To succeed the latter, Frankie Boy had to demonstrate that he could handle the vocal as deftly as Leonard had. The Lady Is a Tramp: a Clambake Seven favorite that displayed Tommy’s uptempo, driving style, though his originality lay in the handling of slow ballads – creating moonlight moods without sacrificing danceability. Song of India: played in the famous arrangement that featured Tommy’s far-off, silver-toned trombone. No one swung the classics with more sensitivity than Tommy, but he was once cut off the air by a Detroit station for swinging Loch Lomond. Track listing 1971 track listing References Tommy Dorsey albums