Remembering Tommy

Buddy Morrow Insures Tommy Dorsey's Music Is Alive And Well

The following article on Buddy Morrow was originally published in the June 2000 issue of Jazz Connection Magazine.

   Buddy Morrow has had a lot of experience being a ghost.

The trombonist/bandleader was more than a ghost in the early 1950s when he led his orchestra to record such hits as "Night Train," "One Mint Julep," and "Hey, Mrs. Jones."

When the Glenn Miller estate was looking for someone to lead its "ghost" band, they wanted Morrow.

Now, for the past 23 years (and still going!), Morrow has been the musical director of the Tommy Dorsey ("ghost") Orchestra insuring that the Dorsey sound is alive and well.  And Morrow will be the first to tell you that Dorsey was very special.

"Tommy open a lot of doors for me," said Morrow, 81, last month via telephone from his home in Maitland, FL.  "I worked in Tommy's band from 1938-39.  He helped give me a goal and a way of presentation as a musician and as a leader."

Dorsey, known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing," led one of the best all-around dance bands during the 1930s and '40s.  He was a very demanding musician who knew what he wanted and who also demanded a lot from the musicians who worked for him. 

To achieve the sound he wanted, he hired many talented composers and arrangers such as Matt Dennis, Paul Weston, Sy Oliver and Axel Stordahl.   He showcased singers who could project a variety of musical moods wonderfully :  Jack Leonard, Jo Stafford, Connie Haines, the Pied Pipers, and the legendary Frank Sinatra.

Over the years, many top-notch musicians filtered through the Dorsey ranks such as Bud Freeman, Heine Beau, Don Lodice, Buddy Rich, Skeets Herfurt, Max Kaminsky, Johnny Mince, Buddy DeFranco, Peewee Erwin, Ziggy Elman, Joe Bushkin, Charlie Shavers, Babe Russin, Bunny Berigan and of course, Buddy Morrow.

"Tommy loved talent and wanted to showcase it whenever he could," Morrow recalled.  "He was also unpredictable.  He could be a wonderful friend and a formidable enemy.  If you take Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich and put them all together, you'd have Tommy Dorsey.  He was the nicest guy in the world yet he could be the toughest guy in the world.  He could also be very generous when it was his idea."

It was Dorsey's generous words uttered to his young teenage trombonist that proved to be prophetic.

"Tommy once told me, 'Someday you are going to lead this band,' " Morrow said.  "I was 19 at the time.  It took a little while, but, here I am!"

Born Moe Zudokoff on February 8, 1919, in New Haven, CT, Morrow came from a musical family of six having early musical training on the violin and cello.  At age 12 he was given a trombone at school because they were short on trombonists that year.

"No one knew how well I was going to do on the horn," Morrow said.  "After about six months, it was evident that the trombone and myself were going to do pretty well together."

By age 15 he was playing with the Yale Collegians, a group of college musicians.

Acting on the advice of a friend, he headed to New York City and in November 1936, hooked up with clarinetist Artie Shaw who was forming a new band at the time consisting of a string quartet, two trumpets, one trombone, a tenor sax and rhythm section.  It became known as "Art Shaw and His New Music."

"We had four future bandleaders in Artie's group," Morrow pointed out.  "There was Lee Castle on trumpet, Tony Pastor on tenor sax, myself, and Glenn Miller's arranger, Jerry Gray, who played violin and accordion."

In December of that year, Shaw recorded  "Sobbin' Blues," on which the teenage Morrow's trombone could be heard.

After six months of struggle, Shaw scrapped the string quartet and formed a more conventional swing band which featured bigger and more blasting brass sections.  

"It was a wonderful band and very musical,"  Morrow said.  "Artie was a brilliant leader.  In my observation, he was like the Tchaikovsky of Jazz, playing with a much bigger sound with too many ideas.  While Artie's main rival on the clarinet, Benny Goodman, was the Picasso of Jazz, playing with very clear beautiful lines."

When Shaw disbanded his orchestra, Morrow stayed in New York and applied for admission to the Julliard School of Music.  Showing up for the initial audition without any music, Morrow basically winged it.

"I was trained as a youngster in classical music and so I played some examples from the classics that I knew," he said.  "The committee wanted me to play something more complicated so I played a tough trumpet solo piece that I had studied.  I played the heck out of it!  Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten the remainder of the piece, so I improvised.  Two weeks later, I got accepted with a full scholarship!"

By the time he was ready to enter Julliard, Morrow accepted an offer to join society pianist Eddie Duchin in May 1937.  He stayed with the band about a year, replacing Frank Saracco as the sole trombonist.

In the summer of 1938, Morrow joined the Tommy Dorsey orchestra.

During his brief stay with Dorsey, Morrow helped to record such Dorsey standards as "Hawaiian War Chant" (July 1938) and "Boogie Woogie" (Sept. 16, 1938).

Morrow would have been contented to stay longer with Dorsey but he rebelled when Dorsey hired a third trombonist, Elmer Smithers, and paid him $40 a week more than what Morrow was earning.  When Morrow protested, Dorsey gave him a $10 raise.  Instead, Morrow joined the Paul Whiteman band, replacing the legendary Jack Teagarden, who left to form his own outfit.  With Whiteman, Morrow was earning $50 a week more than with Dorsey.

But there is one thing that Morrow appreciated from his time spent with Dorsey - something that money couldn't buy and which he has carried with him throughout his musical career - and that is phrasing.

"Phrasing is a wonderful thing through the art of trombone playing," Morrow said. "There has to be a sense of fluidity, a sense of being able to contribute something musically.  That's what I appreciated most from Tommy.  Up until Tommy came along, the trombone had been appreciated, but unused in the manner that Tommy used it.  He was a great ballad player with excellent taste.  He was a perfectionist with his musicians as he was with himself."

Whiteman, who had pioneered a symphonic approach to dance music and had gained the misnomer as "The King of Jazz" was "a great storyteller and he knew how to choose and showcase talent," Morrow said.

A stint with Bob Crosby soon followed - this time as Muni Morrow.

"The name change came as a result of a very convenient telephone book,"  Morrow related.  "I opened the page and Wham! there I had it!  I later went by the name Buddy."

When America entered World War II, Morrow served in the merchant marine, then the Navy for three years.  He got his first experience leading a band as a Musician First Class in the Navy.

After the war, Morrow joined Jimmy Dorsey.  On one occasion when Dorsey took ill, Morrow filled in as leader. 

 He soon formed his own band.

RCA Victor signed Morrow to record under his own name but by the early '50s, the band wasn't enjoying the commercial success it had earlier.

Then one night in Detroit, the famed radio disc jockey, Ed McKenzie, known to his listeners as "Jack The Bell Boy," suggested to Morrow that he record an exciting rhythm and blues number called "Night Train."

Morrow recorded it and the song became a national sensation selling over a million copies.  The band had established itself as one of the big musical attractions on the road.

"I had no idea that 'Night Train' would become a standard when I recorded it,"  Morrow said.  "It was part of our last desperate attempt to create something that was marketable."

Then followed hit records that included "One Mint Julep," "I Don't Know" and "Hey, Mrs. Jones."  Among Morrow's albums are Night Train, Big Band Guitar, New Blues Scene, Impact, Double Impact, Campus After Dark and several albums in tribute to both Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

Morrow returned to the studios for awhile and appeared on the Sid Caesar and Perry Como shows.  He conducted for the Jimmy Rodgers television show and was on staff at NBC for years as a featured player on the Tonight Show.

He was also a frequent performer leading a big band at Disneyland, when the renowned theme park featured its Big Band Showcase during the summers.

Then in 1977, he took over at the helm of the 17-piece Tommy Dorsey Orchestra when trombonist and leader Murray McEachern died.  Since Dorsey's death in 1956, other leaders who preceded Morrow in this assignment were saxophonist Sam Donahue and trombonist Warren Covington.

Morrow's artistic vision  made him the right choice for the job.

"I've always looked to playing my best and looking at what was going on around me," Morrow said.  "My motto has always been: 'Anything you can do, I can do better.'  I practiced until I could do it better.  I'd make sure that I'd always wanted to add a little something more to the cake.  Every time one picks up a horn, there's a certain amount of artistic endeavor there."

Morrow will admit that his music would have it's place in nostalgia if it weren't for him leading the Tommy Dorsey band.

"Oh sure," he said.  "My band ended up being a rhythm and blues band before we started misnaming it with rock and roll."

Morrow takes his job as leader of the Dorsey orchestra very seriously.  For him, it's like being on a mission.

"The mission is to play the Tommy Dorsey arrangements as they were supposed to be played and with the perfection that Tommy insisted upon," Morrow said.  "We do that with complete regard for what I consider his way of doing things."

Yet the band does not play Dorsey standards as if it were a live 78 RPM record.  They sometimes take an old arrangement and "tweak" it a little to give it a contemporary edge, Morrow said.

"You have to go with the times," he said.

While every tune in the band's library it not strictly a Dorsey tune, the band does play other selections that fit the parameters of the Dorsey sound, Morrow said.

"We are permitted by the Dorsey estate to play non-Dorsey tunes but we use them sparingly," Morrow said.  "To use them all the time I might as well drop the Dorsey name and go as Buddy Morrow and his Orchestra.  We have a certain percentage that we adhere to pretty well."

Sometimes band members want to disregard their mission and branch out to play other material.  When that happens, Morrow has to step in to police the action, he said.

"As bandleader, I'm somewhat of a dictator and that's the way the band has to be," Morrow said.  "The band has to reflect what is demanded.  I do what I think is right.  You have to look at your audience and decide what brings out the best in all.   It's a lesson in plain common sense, which is very uncommon.  I know we have a job to do and it's my effort to see that we have an audience satisfaction."

It is Morrow's hope that listeners will walk away from a Tommy Dorsey Orchestra performance whistling some of the tunes, he said.

"More than anything, I want listeners to walk away with a big smile knowing that they had a good time and knowing we did what we were supposed to do," Morrow said.

Although turnovers in the band are a constant problem, the average age of the band members is about 25, Morrow said.

"We get good musicians any way we can find them," he said.  "It's tough to find guys who can double out of Tommy's book."

Depending on the condition and place, attendance by more young people at a Tommy Dorsey Orchestra performance has increased over the years, Morrow said.

While spending about 42 weeks a year on the road, Morrow and company perform seventy percent of there gigs in concert settings, he said.

"It's a concert of dance music," he said.  "It was dance music at the time, and it's now become a type of presentation that is a little different than five or six guys on stage electrifying an audience."

Last month, the band spent nine days performing aboard a Rotterdam Cruise line from New York to Lisbon, Portugal. The band itinerary also includes four or five cruises a year down the Mississippi River, Morrow said.

The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra also maintains a web site which also includes the band's performance schedule.  The web site address is:  www.tommydorseyorchestra.com  

Morrow has also been asked to reproduce a lot of the Dorsey material to be recorded on CD.  Although still in the planning stage, final approval for the project would have to come from the Tommy Dorsey estate, he said.

"We will be coming out with a new product of old tunes," Morrow said.

Having spent over two decades of leading the Dorsey band with its sometimes grueling travel schedule, Morrow brings freshness to his role as musical director by approaching every performance as though it was his first, he said.

"We have to do that in order to have the strength and the emotional stamina to do what is needed for the Tommy Dorsey band," Morrow said.  "Tommy had very high standards for his music.  It's up to us to be part and partial to those particular standards."

For Morrow, every Dorsey tune has a certain gem-like quality to them and he is particularly attracted to the ballad selections that are in the band's library.

"I loved the ballads and how they they were constructed and how they featured Tommy,"  Morrow said.  " I'll never forget a recording that Tommy made with Jack Leonard doing the vocal on 'All The Things You Are.'  It's a beautiful piece.  It set a certain standard for trombone playing.  It 's one of my favorite arrangements."

However, Morrow's favorites are what the public enjoys the most, he said.

"In that respect, the altruism stops at the cashier's table," he said.

With over 65 years in the music business and with no signs of slowing down, Morrow said he would still do it all over again.

"I'd be more flamboyant about it, though," he said.  "I would know that were in a very special period and we were playing a very special kind of music that would last a long time and would have its place.  The audiences are at its biggest at the day the music id developing.  The music we have here in our band is quality.  Even though it's old and wrinkled, it still has value!"

It's Morrow's quality of musical artistry and taste that he offers as his legacy to music, he said.

"My legacy is being one of the top trombone players in the world and still being at an age to tell you how it's done," he said.  "It's also hopefully exhibiting good taste and a respect for all music that's done with good taste of what was wanted by the composer or arranger.  To this day, the arrangers don't have the credit that they deserve.  They are instrumental in making a band sound great."

*****

***  Coda: After winning a successful battle against throat cancer, Buddy Morrow, at age 88, is still leading the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.  ***