Tommy Dorsey and the meaning of life.

I remember being awake on a windy evening in spring, listening to the new leaves rustle through the open windows, and hearing the song “Manhattan Serenade” in my head, as performed by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. It’s a forgettable pop tune by almost any standard, but for whatever reason, in the mind of a ten-year-old, it prompted thoughts of life and death and ultimate meanings. I’ve no idea why. It just did.

Which is to say that it isn’t necessary for me to Google the name of Tommy Dorsey to know who he was.

More than fifty years after Dorsey’s death, a big band stocked with younger musicians bearing his name still tours the country, playing tunes that the famous bandleader made famous during his heyday in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The band is playing two Mother’s Day shows this evening at the Speakeasy, and my wife and I will be escorting my mother to the first of these.

Back in the day, Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra was in the upper tier in terms of visibility and record (78 rpm) sales. Before and after the period of his greatest success, he worked alongside his brother Jimmy, and these were volatile working arrangements not unlike those of the Robinson (Black Crowes) and Gallagher (Oasis) brothers of the current age.

It’s often forgotten that Elvis Presley’s first network television exposure came on a show hosted by the Dorsey Brothers.

Tommy Dorsey played in the studio with Bix Beiderbecke, did credible Dixieland with his Clambake Seven side project, hired some of the period’s finest sidemen (Bunny Berigan, Ziggy Elman, Buddy Rich and arranger Sy Oliver), and provided Frank Sinatra with the model for the young singer’s breathing technique by virtue of his own approach on the trombone. Dorsey was acclaimed for his “sweet” ballads, but the “swing” numbers rock hard, even today, seventy years after some were rcorded.

My exposure to the big band phenomenon came very early in life, at the behest of a father who had no musical skills whatsoever, but forever associated the music with his youth, and more importantly, the period of his wartime experience in the Pacific theater. My dad’s favorite was Glenn Miller, but I came to prefer Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw among the famous white bandleaders, reserving my ultimate accolades for Duke Ellington -- genius not so much as performer as a songwriter.

Miller always was a bit too calculated and commercial for my tastes, and his legacy as synonymous with the “Great Band Era” primarily owes to an untimely death while serving with the military in Europe. The other bandleaders mentioned here were jazzier from the start, and also lived to preside somehow over changing tastes and the decline of the genre, which has survived, albeit at the fringe of the listening public’s imagination.

No matter. Big bands remain embedded in my consciousness, even if genetics doomed me to as little musical comprehension as preceding generations of the family. Tonight at the Speakeasy there’ll be food, wine and merriment, and I hope my mother enjoys it. However, I’ll be thinking about Tommy Dorsey, the long forgotten “Manhattan Serenade,” life, death and ultimate meanings.

After all, it’s a long tradition inside melancholics like me.