1927

This album of vintage recordings of Cole Porter songs mixes eight of Porter's own performances of his compositions with renditions that were hits when the songs were new. The basic selection criterion is revealed in the album's title; there is an emphasis placed here on Porter's more risqué and provocative numbers. Songs like "Let's Misbehave" (in a version by Irving Aaronson & His Commanders that was the equivalent of a Top Ten hit in 1928) and "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)" (even in this prim rendering by Rudy Vallée) leave nothing to the imagination, of course. "Love for Sale" (by Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians) is clearly about prostitution, "Miss Otis Regrets" (by Ethel Waters) is a tale of jealousy and murder, and "Find Me a Primitive Man" (by Lee Wiley) is about the attraction of animal lust.

This CD features the great pianist Mary Lou Williams during her earliest period. She is heard in 1927 on six selections with The Synco Jazzers (a small group that included her then-husband John Williams on alto) and then on the first 19 selections ever recorded under her own name. Performed during the long period when she was the regular pianist with Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy, Williams is featured on two hot stride solos in 1930, leading trios in 1936 and 1938, playing "Little Joe from Chicago" unaccompanied in 1939 and heading septets in 1940; among her sidemen were trumpeter Harold "Shorty" Baker and the legendary tenor Dick Wilson. Many of the compositions were written by Williams including "Night Life," "New Froggy Bottom," "Mary's special," and "Scratchin' the Gravel;" her version of Jelly Roll Morton's "The Pearls" is a highpoint.

The story usually goes that rock & roll was born in 1954 when a young truck driver named Elvis Presley opted to sing black blues his way, and there is no debate that Presley became a catalyst for the explosion that became known as rock & roll. But like most explosions, it had been brewing for a while, and this is the case that Roots of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1927-1938 (from the French label Frémeaux) tries to present, drawing together early blues, jazz, folk, and country 78 rpm's in a two-disc package that spans genres and styles. That rock & roll was an evolutionary sponge, soaking up elements of all of these music strands, is obvious, but pinpointing exact musical ancestors can be tough. It is difficult to imagine, for example, some of the artists collected here as proto-rockers (Louis Armstrong, Gene Autrey, Django Reinhardt)…