Music
My Hero, Dorough
From Miles Davis to generations of cartoon-watching kids, everyone loves Plainview ex Bob Dorough, one of jazz’s heppest cats.
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In 1956 Dorough released his debut, Devil May Care, which sported an in-the-know version of Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” and the winning “Baltimore Oriole.” The response was good, but sales were cut short when the Bethlehem label went out of business shortly after the album was released. The promise of another recording contract—with a bankrupt label, it turned out—led him to hitchhike west to Los Angeles, where he began to gig in earnest. He jammed, joined a combo, played between sets by comic Lenny Bruce, and, through a mutual friend, met Miles Davis.
“Terry Morel, a jazz singer and a fan of mine, had Miles over, and he spotted my album,” Dorough recalls. “Terry played some of it, and the next day he showed up and said”—Dorough does a raspy Miles imitation—“‘Put that on again.’ After she told me, I said, ‘Let’s go see Miles.’ I figured if he digs my LP, I gotta say hi. We went to the gig and Terry says, ‘Miles! This is Bob Dorough.’ So Miles says, ‘Hey, Bob, go play “Baltimore Oriole.”’ No ‘Pleased to meet you’ or anything. I played while he stood there watching me, and when I was done, he just walked off. After that, whenever I saw him, he always wanted me to play and sing. When I got back to New York, he even gave me an opening spot for his quintet at the Village Vanguard.”
In 1962 Dorough was invited to compose a Christmas song for Davis. They recorded his cynical “Blue Xmas” for Columbia Records’ Jingle Bell Jazz and also his “Nothing Like You.” “It was a Gil Evans arrangement,” Dorough says. “Miles called Gil up to his house, and we worked all night on the chart. The next day we recorded. I didn’t even think it turned out that well. But Miles dropped it on his album Sorcerer in 1966. Because of that, the song became quite famous.” Yet Dorough would never work with Davis again. “I kind of blew it,” he says. “I was getting busy with my family; we moved to Pennsylvania. Every time I called, his number was changed. I really lost track of him, and I’ll always regret that.” (In Davis’ autobiography, he devoted just a single sentence to Dorough, labeling him that “silly singer.”)
In the mid-sixties “Comin’ Home Baby,” a demo Dorough wrote with his bassist friend Ben Tucker, found its way to Mel Tormé, who made it a huge hit. Still, no contract came his way. In 1966 disc jockey Mort Fega recorded Dorough’s second album, Just About Everything, for his Focus label. Amazingly, after the album’s release, that label folded too. Jazz work became so scarce that Dorough took to arranging and producing pop acts like Spanky and Our Gang and writing advertising jingles.
Then he was approached by the creators of Schoolhouse Rock. The idea had been hatched about a year earlier by ad executive David B. McCall, who noted that his son couldn’t grasp multiplication tables but had memorized every word of his Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix records. Sensing an opportunity for an educational record album, McCall enlisted other talents in his firm, and together they began auditioning jingle composers. The project’s creative director, George Newall, was a pianist who haunted the Hickory House jazz nightclub, where he had befriended Ben Tucker. In addition to having worked with Dorough on “Comin’ Home Baby,” Tucker had also heard one of his experimental albums, This Is a Recording, which consisted entirely of lyrics taken from discarded scraps of paper like receipts and laundry tickets. When Newall expressed his frustration at not being able to find the right writer to transfer the rigidity of math into music, Tucker spoke up: “Get Bob Dorough. He can put anything to music!”
Initially wary of the project, Dorough was persuaded when he was told he didn’t have to write down to children. Using his daughter, Aralee, as a barometer (she is now the principal flutist for the Houston Symphony), he stuck to the approach he took for his jazz work: Keep things happy, funny, and clever. His first entry, “Three Is a Magic Number,” was storyboarded and presented to ABC, a client of McCall’s. At the time, the networks were under fire for their lack of responsible offerings, so the timing couldn’t have been better. ABC executives—including Michael Eisner, then the head of children’s programming, now the CEO of Disney, which owns the whole network—were so enthusiastic about the project that they cut the length of their Saturday morning shows by three minutes and tacked on Schoolhouse Rock at the end. Suddenly Dorough, who had spent the past few years sporadically employed, found the prodigious demands of TV on his shoulders. In a few months’ time he would complete most of the twelve multiplication songs.
By the mid-seventies, as his work on the series continued, Dorough revitalized his jazz career. He began a stint at the New York jazz club Bradley’s—the first vocalist to play the famed, now defunct venue—released albums on a label he co-owns, Laissez-Faire, and collaborated on a variety of projects with everyone from Art Garfunkel to John Zorn. Nonetheless, he remained relegated to cult status until an old friend offered some posthumous help. In 1996 Columbia Records released Miles Davis and Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings. Included in the set were Dorough’s tunes, along with another piece of his that Davis had recorded. This new visibility helped lend to the surprise phone call from Blue Note.
Released in 1997, Dorough’s Blue Note album, Right on My Way Home, is among his finest: a jaunty romp that captures his eccentric talent in professional, high style. The unusual set of songs, including Dorough’s boyhood favorite “I Get the Neck of the Chicken,” features well-thought-out arrangements, and ringers such as saxophonist Joe Lovano add considerable punch. Despite modest sales, the record has done much to raise Dorough’s public profile; he even performed on the Central Park Summer Stage this past season.
All of this attention pleases Dorough’s longtime fans in his adopted hometown of Mount Bethel, which is situated in a lush valley on the Eastern Pennsylvania border. He has lived in the area since 1966—one of a number of jazz dignitaries, including Urbie Green and Dave Liebman, who set up shop there so they could play regular gigs at the now faded resorts in the Pocono Mountains—and many residents have grown up around him. On the night after his schoolhouse gigs in Scranton, the local hero made one of his infrequent appearances at the nearby Deer Head Inn, center stage for the rural location’s still-vibrant jazz scene (alto-saxophone legend Phil Woods lives up the road, and late bandleader Fred Waring’s compound sits across the street). The place was jammed with the young and the old, friends and relations. A thirty-year-old in a “Conjunction Junction” T-shirt hovered in the back. Dorough knew each audience member by name, and he greeted them warmly.
When Dorough took the stage, he exuded a giddy excitement throughout each of his three one-hour sets. Refusing to sit still at the piano, he grimaced, mugged, thrusted his lower lip, and flung his hands with rock star braggadocio. The piano keys flew as his reedy twang filled the room and spilled out to the overflow crowd on the porch. “I’ve got just about everything I need,” he sang, and that night, at least, no one in the room doubted it.
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