The career of Charles Dornberger included early and important participation in the reed section of the Paul Whiteman band. But he also had a fair amount of success in the '20s and '30s leading the Charles Dornberger Orchestra, particularly in Canada. Descending from hard-working German stock, Dornberger was said to have been a skilled musician who could get around fairly well on many of the instruments in the orchestra. Family members have been unable to recall any formal training, meaning he picked up these abilities on his own and did it well enough to pass muster with Whiteman, his first and historically most important employer as a professional musician. The two had met during service in the U.S. Navy in 1918; Dornberger was a pilot and Whiteman was training musicians for various service bands.

By the mid-'20s Dornberger had stepped out of both the cockpit and the reed section to start up his own band, leading to a contract with Victor as well as the creation of a series of musical shorts for Warner Bros. Discographer Tom Lord lists Dornberger's final recording sessions as having taken place in 1929, but he continued leading bands for at least another decade, sometimes fronting as many as 35 musicians. A series of skilled players and arrangers emerged from his organization -- such as Frank Ventre, who went on to create hit material for Fats Waller. Dornberger orchestra recordings have continued to be of great interest to collectors of nostalgia, but by the early '40s the bandleader himself could have hardly understood the long-range appeal of his projects. He retired early from the music business, opening a bar in Santa Ana, California known as the Piccadilly Circus in a space formerly occupied by the Prado Cafe, which he had owned and managed beginning in September 1938. Dornberger died when a plane he was piloting crashed; the accident also took the life of his girlfriend. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi