Trad Jazz

This CD has most of Fats Waller's best band recordings of the '20s, including eight selections by his "Buddies" (highlighted by "The Minor Drag" and "Harlem Fuss"), six (counting two alternate takes) from the Louisiana Sugar Babes (an odd quartet featuring...

The most important musician of the century past has had a trumpet-load of retrospectives appear since the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2001, and few are more brisk, enjoyable, shot full of goofy energy, and essential than the remastered reissue of The Best of Louis Armstrong: The Hot Five...

Even 34 years after his death, Louis Armstrong is still the most famous and beloved of all jazz musicians. While widely recognized for his sunny and humorous personality, distinctive guttural singing, beautiful tone on the trumpet and for such hits as Hello Dolly and Mack the Knife, Armstrong...

Another European Trad (traditional jazz) man, Acker Bilk, updates (I think). We'll give the chap credit for an original tone (clarinet), but with the strings and non-jazz material there is little else here...There were ten tracks, including a medley of his hit Stranger on the Shore, All...

The repertoire performed by Chris Barber's band on this CD may be full of warhorses, but the hot Dixieland performances are full of such enthusiasm and high musicianship that this set is highly recommended. With trumpeter Pat Halcox and the reeds of John Crocker and Ian Wheeler joining...

The second of three TOM CDs that put the focus on the great C-melody saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer includes his features with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra and his own sessions as a leader during a 12-month period. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke had departed by then, but Tram is in prime form. He...

Not many of the Chicago jazzmen who were active in the 1920s and 1930s were still alive when the 21st century rolled around; Franz Jackson is among the few. Born in Rock Island, IL, in 1912, the veteran saxman/clarinetist was a teenager during Prohibition and a young man during the Great...

The phrase " rad jazz" is officially applied to the old-fashioned sort of New Orleans-inspired music that was cooked up by British traditionalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Sackville's delightful The Other Parlophones 1951-1954 is one definitive rad jazz compilation. This...

There were two distinctly different ensembles that recorded under the name of the Little Ramblers. One was an often racially integrated swing band that came out with about 20 sides on Victor's Bluebird subsidiary during the mid-'30s. The original Little Ramblers, and the subject of a...

A fine collection covering the years 1935 to 1956, with a particular emphasis on Louis Armstrong's late-'30s ig band sides, More Priceless Jazz is a very good introduction to one of the more overlooked periods of Armstrong's long and varied career. Because Armstrong had made his...

This 1998 CD for the first time released six selections taken from a concert that the Duke Ellington Orchestra performed in Santa Monica, CA. The personnel listing is slightly suspect (it is doubtful if there were four trombones on the date) but the key players are properly named: trumpeters Ray...

This first volume of a 1972 Paris concert by Count Basie & His Orchestra has a diverse program full of enjoyable moments. "Whirly Bird," a contribution by Neal Hefti, is one of the big crowd pleasers of the evening. Basie himself was never one to hog the spotlight, but is featured...

Player piano roll technology is much more versatile than most people -- even a surprising number of jazz specialists -- seem to realize or want to admit. The quality of the listening experience is determined to some extent by how the roll was originally played, more so by what happened to it...

Although this reissue was released under the name the Count Basie Bunch, only a few of the selections actually employ Count Basie. Rather, Cool Too is a collection of excellent 1954-58 small-group recordings that are led by such Basie sidemen as trumpeters Buck Clayton & Joe Newman and...

This single CD has all 22 recordings by the Halfway House Orchestra, including four selections not originally released until the 1970s. One of the finest jazz bands active in New Orleans during the 1920s, the group was led by Albert Brunies and was somewhat reminiscent at times of his brother...