With genuine thanks to mom, gram, and Joy Cayler, I grew up loving and playing big band music. I also grew up listening to The Tonight Show Band (The real one. Not Leno) which was really the last giant of the genre.

Tommy Newsom was the lead alto player, and a great musician. He was also, apparently, arranged charts for the band, which is news to me, and makes me even sadder that he’s no longer with us.

I hope they bury him with some good reeds.

Tommy Newsom, longtime saxophonist for “the Tonight Show” orchestra who regularly subbed for bandleader Doc Severinsen and earned the tongue-in-cheek nickname “Mr. Excitement” as the low-key butt of Johnny Carson’s jokes, has died. He was 78. Mr. Newsom, who had bladder and liver cancer, died Saturday at his home in Portsmouth, Va., said Pat, his wife of 49 years.

Mr. Newsom toured with Benny Goodman’s big band in Latin America and the Soviet Union, and in 1962 became an NBC staff musician. Shortly after joining the network, he was assigned to “the Tonight Show,” where he remained until Carson retired in 1992.

“He was, of course, a fantastic arranger, composer and saxophone player — that goes without saying,” Severinsen said Monday. “He was one of the sweetest guys that ever came down the pike, a gentleman through and through.”

Mr. Newsom, who wrote arrangements for the “the Tonight Show” orchestra and played lead alto sax — Severinsen credited him with helping “make that band what it was” — became assistant conductor in 1968. (Read More)