Sentimental Sy - Sy Oliver

Yes Indeed

Sentimental Sy
Sy Oliver and His Orchestra
Dot DLP 3132
1958

From the back cover: Like almost everybody else, Sy Oliver has his sentimental moments. But Sy's sentimental moments have a special significance that the others usually lack – special, at least, for anyone who remembers the early Forties or thereabouts.

For Sy Oliver was, in many ways, the musical voice of that era. His arrangements gave to the far-famed Tommy Dorsey orchestra, and, earlier, to the great Jimmy Lunceford band, the distinctive sounds that so entranced their listeners everywhere.

Thus, in his sentimental moments, Sy recalls the happy crowds that danced to his music at the Meadowbrook on the Newark-Pompton Turnpike, at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, at the Casino Gardens on the pier at Ocean Park. Those were the days when Swing was king, the Dorsey band was in its glory, and Sy was turning out arrangement after arrangement destined to become a big band "classic."

In this album, with great delight, Sy presents some of those arrangements once again. Three of the songs are his own compositions – Opus One, Well Git It and Yes Indeed. Sy sings the last of these, as he does East Of The Sun, Blue Skies and On The Sunny Side Of The Street. In the Dorsey days they were sung by another vocalist, one Frank Sinatra, but that doesn't intimidate Sy. In his own subtly swinging way he does an equally convincing job.

Sy Oliver has been making popular music history for about thirty years now (he began a notable trumpet career while still a teen-ager). During this time he managed to do regularly what few arrangers have done at all – to create an arrangement of a song that is so "right" that it in effect becomes the song, and all other versions seem somewhat wrong.

Ranked with Duke Ellington and Benny Carter as one of the arranging giants of jazz, Sy never let himself be trapped by preconceived notions of how a tune should be played. He may shift a normally slow number into high, or slow a normally uptempo tune to a walk; his arrangements may venture into complicated counterpoint or relax in single-finger simplicity. He plays constantly with new sounds and new instrumental relationships; there is always in his work a fresh, dynamic approach to the basic qualities of the music.

On The Sunny Side Of The Street
Then I'll Be Happy
Star Dust
Without A Song
Yes Indeed
Opus One
Well Git It
Chicago
East Of The Sun
Blue Skies
For You
Swanee River