Buddy DeFrancos famous clarinet solo on the big hit of 1944 - OPUS ONE, Tommy Dorsey Orchestra - composed/arranged by Sy Oliver. https://youtube/watch?v=uRIaFOKYN0k&hd=1 Interview: Buddy De Franco, Opus 1 by Marc Myers Recorded November 14, 1944, by Dorseys 31-piece orchestra complete with strings recorded Sy Olivers revamped arrangement of Opus One in Hollywood. Oliver had written the song years earlier for Dorsey, but the band had been playing rather bland versions of it. The band even appeared playing the infectious tune in two MGM feature films—Broadway Rhythm (1943) and Thrill of a Romance (1944). But when the two-year American Federation of Musicians recording ban ended in 1944, Oliver re-arranged the song for the bands return to RCAs studios. Most notably, he created more snap to the rhythm and opened two wide holes in the chart for clarinetist Buddy De Franco to solo. When I spoke with Buddy on Monday, he reflected on the historic session: I didn’t like my solos on there. When the single came out,BuddyDeFranco it became a hit, so going forward Tommy [Dorsey] insisted I play my two solos just the way I had on the record, note for note, over and over again. Sometimes five or six times a day. My solos on the record didn’t sit well with me, but they wound up hung around my neck. When I heard myself, I thought I could have done better—and I did on the other takes. But Tommy was the boss, so he got to choose the one he liked best. I would have picked another. In those days, you couldn’t cut up the recording to make a master from the many different takes. Tape hadn’t been invented yet for studio use. When you recorded, it went straight onto a master disc. So whatever you captured on a particular take was there, both the good and the bad, no matter how subtle. I remember we had to rehearse Opus One quite a bit before that session. Sy A0fb_1_sbl [Oliver] used to write in very difficult keys. The two clarinet solos I had to play were tough. If I recall, one was in G-flat concert and the other in D-concert. Sy liked to move the keys around a lot in a song, to keep it moving and to keep listeners hooked. The band liked Sys chart for Opus One, but it didn’t move us as much as some of the other things he wrote. I think part of the Tommy-Dorsey-1 problem was the band didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse it. Tommy was very strict about being exact, and a recording had to be clean. But we rehearsed for that session on edge—meaning one tune after the next, without much time in between. We had to move through the material quickly. There was a lot of pressure on those sessions, to be perfect early on. Eventually, Buddy grew weary of the playing the same note-for-note solo C02 on Opus One. During one performance in 1946, Buddy played a bop solo on the song, and Dorsey fired him. But Dorsey had to give him eight weeks notice instead of he customary two weeks due to the shortage of musicians. Dorsey, like many bandleaders, disliked bop. In addition to the musics complexity and lack of dance-appeal, bop shifted power to the individual soloist and away from the bandleader. As for Buddy, he had already fallen in love with bop and after leaving Dorsey found work with Boyd Raeburn. Raeburns band not only was one of the most experimental and iconoclastic orchestras of the mid-1940s but also would turn out to be an early hothouse for bop arrangers and players. Once Opus One became a hit, the song was recorded by many different bands of the period. Its particularly interesting to compare Tommy Dorseys 1943 version from Broadway Rhythm with the November 1944 hit. Youll find the one from Broadway Rhythm on Hollywoods 787e62e89da0ac19e54e5110.L Best: The 40s at iTunes or Amazon. The version from November 1944 can be found on Tommy Dorsey: Greatest Hits. To my ear, its very difficult to hear what Buddys issue was with his solo. Barring the slightly hurried pace and moments where he probably would have wanted to linger a fraction of a second longer, his clarinet work sounds spirited and sharp to me. If alternate takes still exist, Id love to hear them.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 17:40:03 +0000
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