Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957
There’s not a lot to say about “Blue Champagne”. It’s much more instrumental than the more popular Jimmy Dorsey tunes, which were a) Bob Eberly starts singing low-tempo, b) instrumental section, and then c) Helen O’Connell in swing tempo. Only Bob Eberly sings and he’s late coming in.
Enotes.com has an interesting assessment of the swing era:
Although illusory in nature, the world created by the music and the shared identity of the listeners "is perhaps the happiest and most significant aspect of the Swing Era," Schuller declared. That facet of swing faded, however, when the American consciousness was permanently changed by World War II. Stereo Review's Peter Reilly consequently dismissed the Dorsey brothers' music for modern listeners: "It doesn't have enough vitality or true style to bridge the years."
Indeed, what is amazing is how thoroughly this era of music has been eradicated. Not only that, the eradication came fairly quickly, within the living memory of the biggest fans of the genre. Oh, there were still hangers-on : Lawrence Welk was very popular on TV and the show wasn’t much more than all of those old big band hits played over and over. Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians could always expect a solid paycheck on New Year’s Eve. But the popular attitude toward the last of these big band dinosaurs was always one of derision.
Here’s a thought exercise: think about a musical style from a given decade from the 1940s to the 2000s – how likely is it that a song written under the musical tropes common to that era could make it to the 2012 Billboard Hot 100? Songs written in the style of the 1970s still have enough motive power to influence modern songwriters with their melodies and lyrical arrangements. (It seems that “classic radio” – what some called “oldies” – has been rolled up to 1970 – 1990, with only the biggest hits from the 1960s hanging on and virtually nothing from the 1950s.) If Jimmy Dorsey could be resurrected and arrange something new with Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell, even at the height of his power he’d never make the 2012 Hot 100. The landscape has changed too much.
You could hunt through a barrel of hypotheses as to why this is so. My pet hypothesis is the individualization of American culture, “every man a king and every woman a queen”. The thought of being one performer in a seventeen-piece big band is just hard to stomach. Better to be a bass player in a four-piece rock band. Or in 2012, better to be the lead vocalist with studio backup. (If you can barely carry a note, there’s always autotune.)
The above paragraph says that “the American consciousness was permanently changed by World War II” but that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason for the disappearance of big band. Big bands were still popular during wartime; it’s not like American GIs were exposed to hot rock ‘n’ roll acts on some Pacific island and flipped over to an undiscovered musical style.
More likely, big band music hit a demographic wall. The purchasing power of younger people was starting to make itself felt very slowly. The first wave that hit big band music was the economic post-war financial boom, when teenagers had purchasing power and decided that they didn’t want to spend their cash on big band music. (Either that, or they started watching television, which didn’t have the sonic fidelity afforded to a radio listener.) The second wave – the demographic wave that hit in the 1960s when the war babies became teens – smashed the 1940s era to smithereens.
Presently: Have made it to the 30 minute mark of “The Fabulous Dorseys”. Wow, Janet Blair is easy on the eyes, ain’t she?
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