Search - Tommy Dorsey :: 17 #1's

Carelessly produced compilation: historic, but...

Jon Warshawsky | San Diego, CA USA | 10/24/2000

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I enjoy big band music, and Tommy Dorsey's trombone is STILL incredible. However, the present collection was compiled very literally as all of the band's singles that charted at number one. Much of the band's best music did NOT make it to number one, so we miss some real treasures such as 'Opus One', 'Blue Skies' and almost all of the early career of Frank Sinatra. To make things worse, the sound quality on many of these number ones is atrocious. This would be understandable in light of the era (1930s), but the Homefront collection from a couple of years later sounds so much cleaner that this album is a distraction.That said, there are still a few gems here. 'Indian Summer' and 'Satan Takes a Holiday' are great instrumentals, and the Dorsey/Sinatra 'In the Blue of Evening' is treasurable. Others, such as 'Dolores' and 'Marie' really were huge hits and remain listenable. But 'The Music Goes Round' and 'Dipsy Doodle' have aged very poorly -- Edythe Wright may have been a talent in her era, but these novelty ditties do not serve her well. If you are seriously interested in the history of American popular music, you will appreciate the entire album, but I otherwise doubt you will find many occasions to drag these old chestnuts out for the CD player.If you are interested in a nice TD sampler, the Homefront 1941-1945 album is more listenable. For completists, the 17 Number Ones is an important purchase."

A trouble-plagued anthology

Gene DeSantis | Philadelphia, PA United States | 01/03/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This has several problems to which others have alluded: the first is it seems to have been thrown together willy-nilly from whatever was available, and neither of the credited creators seems to have cared much. So we get ancient heavy filtering and deticking in some tracks and unaltered metal parts on others. Every track on this album could sound good. But Sony Music is essentially abandoning all but the latest pop dreck, so there will be no room for improvements even for downloads.



The second is the selection. These may be "number-ones" by some arbitrary eenie-meenie-minie-moe of Joel Whitburn's (and record popularity polls from these days were very arbitrary), but for the most part they may not even rank in the top-ten with some Dorsey fans, being largely the plush, sedate, metronomic stuff of the days when TD led a dull conventional pop band, before Sy Oliver arrived; and he didn't change everything as most of the concluding ballads are Axel Stordahl's, for better and for worse. What we do not have is the zing and pow of some of his best jazz sides; these appear on other anthologies which of course SME has deigned fit to delete -- not to mention three Rhino MGM-soundtrack albums, all of which are long gone. Indeed SME's idea of the perfect Tommy Dorsey anthology is the one that ends with the stripper music for Elvis. Thankfully its two-disc revise of selections from its '94 all-Sinatra box shows that, with a dedicated producer, TD's power will always shine through."

Terrible, inconsistent sound

Ted Ison | East Coast USA | 02/14/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Downright amateurish! That's all I can say about this one. It was obviously thrown together as a quick, cheap after-thought by pulling various cuts from previous reissues and assembling them without regard to their sound. Some of them are muffled and bland. Others are tinny and squeaky. A few sound good, but they all should. "I'll Never Smile Again", one of the most moving TD recordings, is horribly marred by some kind of filter being turned up and down at random during playback.



Awful, guys! Just awful. Should be done over."