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29 3 The Early 1940s—NewYork At some point in the fall of 1941, Dameron became a staff arranger for Jimmie Lunceford. Gerald Wilson remembers him being with Lunceford late in the year, after they picked him up in Ohio.1 In the 1930s, Tadd had listened with great delight and interest to Lunceford’s band.“As a boy, I was always most interested in Duke Ellington and the Lunceford band, because they were trying to do things differently than anybody else,” said Dameron.2 However, while Tadd may have found inspiration in the music of the Lunceford band, the reality of working for Lunceford was far from glamourous.While the band toured, Dameron worked out of the office of Lunceford’s manager Harold Oxley in New York, only occasionally joining the band on the road to rehearse new material. Dameron’s greatest disappointment seems to have been the lack of recordings of the music he arranged for Lunceford. Asserting that he had written many arrangements for the band, he told Ira Gitler, “Lunceford didn’t record them. That’s been the story of my life. The very good arrangements I’d make for the band, nobody recorded. I made‘I Dream a Lot about You,’ things for the vocal group. . . . Then I quit Lunceford.”3 Actually two or probably three of Dameron’s arrangements were recorded by Jimmie Lunceford: “I’m Losing My Mind Because of You,” “It Had to Be You,” and“I Dream a Lot about You.” Further, his disappointment did not keep Dameron from continuing to write arrangements for Lunceford on a freelance basis, some of them as late as 1945 or 1946. Among the recorded arrangements, there is some uncertainty about Dameron ’s authorship of the arrangement of“I’m Losing My Mind Because of You”4 (recorded Dec. 23, 1941). It seems highly probable that the arrangement is his, 30 DaMeroNIa because in this piece we find many of the same strengths that made Dameron’s work for the Rockets noteworthy. The arrangement is full of interesting details and ideas.“[My] ideas [were] much better than now,” Dameron said of this period in his 1952 radio interview with Harry Frost. “As you write, you settle down. . . . I was real ambitious then.” This highly detailed arrangement certainly seems to be the work of an ambitious young writer. The introduction to“I’m Losing My Mind Because of You”begins with four measures of dominant harmony, G7, during which a little chromatic figure is introduced—first played by muted trumpets then by saxophones—that will be employed as a structural device. The introduction continues with a statement of the first eight measures of the melody in the key of C major, followed by a sudden modulation in the turn-around that takes us to D major,5 the key of the main body of the arrangement. There is a particularly attractive cascading trumpet passage in the turn-around at the end of the first A, and in the final turn-around, muted brass return to set up a reprise of the first two bars of the introduction, which now introduce Willie Smith’s sixteen-bar clarinet solo. Joe Thomas’s tenor sax solo comes in the bridge, at the end of which the turnaround is extended by a development of the opening chromatic figure. Vocalist Dan Grisom finishes out the chorus, this time with a tag. The band then plays a final eight-bar coda built on the tag harmonies. The first four measures are dominated by intense high trumpet notes, the last with subdued saxes, as if a final scream of anguish has been replaced by resignation. Indeed, it is“tone painting ” that stands out in this arrangement. The subject of the lyric has been jilted and has lost not only his heart but his mind as well. The arrangement presents an alternate expression of the lyric in the orchestration, and this sort of “tone painting” shows up in several of Dameron’s vocal arrangements. In his treatment of “It Had to Be You,” by Gus Kahn and Isham Jones, recorded April 14, 1942, Dameron employs two of the band’s stylistic trademarks, the light two-beat feel and the elegantly arranged vocal trio. The introduction has two parts, one instrumental and one vocal, making it a subtle reduction of the entire piece. We can hear suggestions of Dameron’s evolving style in the punctuations behind the vocalists.After an interlude,Dameron sings in his...

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