“Turbans on Parade”/Danse Arabe
Composed by Pyotr Tchaikovsky; probably arranged by Johnny Thompson.
Recorded by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra for Decca on April 15, 1953 in New York.
Thomas F. Dorsey, Jr. first and solo trombone, directing: Billy Marshall, Daryl “Flea” Campbell, both of whom played lead parts in this band; John McCormick and George Cherb, trumpets; Nick Di Maio, Sam Hyster and Vahey “Tak” Takvorian, trombones; Marv Koral and Allen Fields, alto saxophones; Stanley “Buzzy” Brauner and Gene Cipriano, tenor saxophones; Teddy Lee, baritone saxophone; Doug Talbert, piano; Sam Herman, guitar; Billy Cronk, bass; Jackie Mills, drums.
This is the first of two posts here at swingandbeyond.com about music from Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker” (in swing time of course) …that I will publish to kick-off the 2025 holiday season. Tchaikovsky had a great gift of melody, and we celebrate great melodies here. My wish is that everyone who will visit this blog over the next several weeks will have the happiest and healthiest of holidays!
The story:
In mid-1950, after fifteen tumultuous years as one of the best-selling artists on the Victor record label, Tommy Dorsey decided to make a change. He signed a three-year contract with Decca Records that guaranteed him a minimum of fifty-two thousand dollars a year (multiply by 15 to get the value in today’s dollar), in exchange for which he had to record a minimum of fifty sides a year. That Decca contract started with a recording session on August 25, 1950. As usual, Tommy Dorsey was very industrious: by the end of 1950, he had already recorded thirty-six sides for Decca.
Soon after Dorsey started recording for Decca, he fired his personal manager, Leonard Vannerson. TD had received a recommendation from Larry Barnett of Music Corporation of America (MCA), his booking agent, that a young man called Tino Barzie was beginning to show great promise as a personal manager. In fact, Barzie had tentatively agreed to become Gene Krupa’s personal manager when the following tableau unfolded: “I was living at the Picadilly Hotel in New York, (Barzie recalled), when I got a person-to-person phone call from Tommy Dorsey one day in November of 1950. He said, ‘I need some help for a couple of weeks. I just fired my manager. Can you meet me tomorrow in Canton, Ohio'”?
Barzie met Dorsey the next day, “…and went over the contracts with him for the dates ahead. The next day he drove with Dorsey in his Cadillac convertible to Akron. ‘This guy drove like a maniac…He was going 75 miles an hour. He plugged his electric shaver into the cigarette lighter with one hand and begins shaving. He’s driving with the other!’ They discussed the status of the current band. That evening, at the date in Akron, Tommy ‘…asked me how I liked the band. I told him it was great. Then he tells me to give notice to a trombonist, a saxophonist and two trumpeters – and to get them out of there. I asked him if he had some replacements coming in. ‘No, you get them,’ he said. I got it done and that impressed him.'”
“At the end of two weeks, I showed him all the receipts. Then he said, ‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to stay right here.’ ‘What about Gene?’ I asked. ‘I’ll straighten that out with Barnett…’ Sure enough, he called Larry the next morning and said, ‘I’m keeping this guy. Tell Gene I owe him one.'” (1)
Shortly after this, Tommy Dorsey made another important change: he severed his fifteen-year relationship with MCA. Tommy complained constantly to his liaisons with MCA that the agency was not giving him the kind of representation it had at the height of the swing era. That was undoubtedly true. But by the end of 1950, the market for big bands had undergone a rather large change, and not for the better. Theaters were by then rarely presenting big bands on their stages. Ballrooms across the USA were closing. Hotels and night clubs were increasingly presenting smaller musical groups, or none at all. And MCA itself was increasing its focus on representing Hollywood film stars, directors of films, writers and others involved in making movies. Soon, they began working in the new medium of television. Representing bandleaders was not where the action was. But from Tommy’s perspective, MCA was not doing their job as well as he thought they should.
When they went their separate ways, Tommy immediately placed ads in various trade papers announcing that he was doing his own booking. But he did it with the Dorsey flair, tinged with hostility. He also had vanity license plates made for his car which read “4QMCA.”
Tommy Dorsey was clearly not just a bandleader. By the early 1950s, he was beginning to evolve further as an entertainment industry entrepreneur. He had done about everything that could be done as the leader of a big band. He started out doing one-night dance dates and making records; then he got his own sponsored network radio show and began appearing at the largest theaters in the country; then he started and operated a music publishing business; then he started making feature films with his band in Hollywood. All the while, he continued playing one-night dance dates and making records, and appearing on radio as frequently as possible. He came to understand that by the early 1950s, television as an entertainment medium was here to stay. It was a new frontier for him, one that he began planning and plotting to break into. By mid-1954, he was actively involved in television.
No one tried harder than Tommy Dorsey from 1950 to 1953 to make his association with Decca Records successful. At Decca he recorded with outside (of the Dorsey band) vocalists like Bing Crosby, Don Cherry, Dick Haymes and the Mills Brothers; he made Dixieland recordings with a new version of his Clambake Seven; and he recorded with various vocal groups. He also worked with Decca producers to begin what through the 1950s became a trend among recording artists: to put together albums of recordings with a common theme. These came to be known as “concept albums” in the long-playing record era. Among them: You and the Night and the Music – Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra Play the musical comedy hits of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz (1951); Ecstacy – Tommy Dorsey – Trombone Solos with Victor Young and His Singing Strings and Orchestra; and Your Invitation to Dance (both issued in 1953). (These were 10″ 33 rpm LPs that contained eight tracks.) Tommy also recorded many excellent instrumental sides for Decca that showed that his current band was in top form.
Although Tommy Dorsey aggressively took care of the business side of his band through the early 1950s, he also definitely continued to take care of the music side of his band. The TD band then was never less than very good – immaculately rehearsed, they played arrangements that ranged from good to great. And Tommy’s own trombone playing remained at a very high level. When Ted Heath, leader of a great British band, was in America in the mid-1950s, he (a former trombonist) and his lead trombonist Don Lusher made it a point to check out Tommy and his band. Lusher later said: “…I will always recall being at the Statler Hotel in New York (formerly and then later known ad Hotel Pennsylvania) seeing and hearing Tommy Dorsey’s band. It was magnificent. Ted turned to me and said, ‘You will never hear anything better than this, Don.'” (2)
Anyone who led a big band knew that quality arrangements are the life-blood of any good band. Tommy understood this well, and always engaged arrangers whose talents fit his band. During the early and mid-1950s, TD bought arrangements from among many others: Bill Finegan, Deane Kincaide, Neal Hefti, Johnny Thompson, Howard Gibeling, and Ernie Wilkins. He made sure, through rigorous rehearsal, that whatever arrangement his band was playing at any given time, it was played with accuracy and verve. (Above left: arranger Johnny Thompson with TD – early 1950s. As the 1950s progressed, Tommy increasingly resembled a gray-haired Irish prelate, albeit one with an explosive temper.)
The music:
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed the music for a ballet The Nutcracker in 1892. It is a two-act classical ballet set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child’s imagination. It was premiered on December 18, 1892 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. The first performance of The Nutcracker was not successful. The ballet languished in Russia after that until it was first performed in its entirety in England in 1934. The first complete performance of it in the United States took place in San Francisco on December 24, 1944, staged by William Christensen. It was a resounding success. The New York City Ballet gave its first of what would become wildly successful annual performances of George Balanchine’s reworked staging of The Nutcracker on February 2, 1954. There was much media buzz around Balanchine’s development of this ballet. That initial performance, with Maria Tallchief in the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy, helped elevate the work from obscurity into an annual Christmas classic, and the ballet world’s most reliable box-office draw.(3)
Tommy Dorsey’s antennae picked-up the excitement surrounding the arrival if The Nutcracker in New York. He commissioned a couple of arrangements, probably written by Johnny Thompson, on melodic segments from the ballet that are a part of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral Nutcracker Suite that concert music audiences were beginning to notice in 1953. One was on The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which Tommy called “Fruit Cocktail,” and the other was on Danse Arabe, which he called “Turbans on Parade.”
Tommy Dorsey’s recording of “Turbans on Parade” begins with a short introduction built around a unison ten-note ostinato anchored by the baritone saxophone of Teddy Lee, blended with the rhythm section instruments. (How delicately drummer Jackie Mills taps his tom-tom!) This ostinato will continue to appear as a recurring motive throughout the performance. TD on trombone appears with another melodic fragment, joined by his three trombone section colleagues playing in harmony.
This is followed by a brief full band interlude, which sets up the entry of the saxophone quintet with another of Tchaikovsky’s melodic fragments, soon abetted by the brass and the swinging rhythm section. The opening ostinato is repeated as a prelude to the fiery brass leading the full band ensemble blast that comes next. The syncopated trumpets are underlined by tasty saxophone and rich trombone chords. The music quiets down and then we hear the ostinato/trombone motive for a third time.
Another of Tchaikovsky’s melodies appears in the next sequence, carried at first by Tommy’s open trombone and probably first trumpeter Daryl Campbell’s Harmon-muted trumpet, played in unison and backed by the saxophone section, then by the saxophones (and a clarinet) and the trombones. The last pass at the melody here is played by the four trumpets in unison cushioned by rolling saxophones and low pedal tones provided by the trombone quartet.
The finale comes with a slightly altered version of the recurring ostinato with which this marvelous performance began.
This is high-content music performed brilliantly by Tommy Dorsey and his bandsmen.
The recording presented with this post was digitally remastered by Mike Zirpolo.
Notes and links:
(1) Tommy Dorsey …Livin’ in a Great Big Way, by Peter J. Levinson (2005), 236-237.
(2) The Greatest Swing Band in the World … The Ted Heath Story, by Tony Parker (1993), 127.
(3) The information regarding the history of The Nutcracker ballet was extracted from the article on it at Wikipedia.
Here are some links to other great performances by Tommy Dorsey’s band from the late 1940s and 1950s:
https://swingandbeyond.com/2020/10/21/cheek-to-cheek-1953-tommy-dorsey-bill-finegan/
Here is a link to a video of “Danse Arabe” from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutctacker which shows dancing to this marvelous music. Listen for the magical interplay between the woodwinds and the strings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNytVwZq1w
Here is a link to a different take on “Danse Arabe” by Claude Thornhill and Gil Evans: https://swingandbeyond.com/2019/05/03/arab-dance-1946-and-la-paloma-1947-claude-thornhill-and-gil-evans/
Interesting article about Tommy Dorsey, Mike. In March of 1951, Dorsey performed at the nightclub that my dad played trumpet at for 25 years. The bandleader from one of the bands that my dad was in prior to the Elmwood was Sam Donahue. He later became the leader of Dorsey’s orchestra. My dad probably would have ended up playing in the Dorsey band if it weren’t for securing a steadier job at the Elmwood. It was located only 20 minutes away from our home.