First, a few myths get cleared up by the very existence of this box, which goes far beyond the original Columbia compilations with the same name. For starters, Columbia goes a long way to setting the record straight that Charlie Christian was not the first electric guitarist or the first jazz guitarist or the first electric guitarist in jazz. For another, they concentrate on only one thing here: documenting Christian's seminal tenure with Benny Goodman's various bands from 1939-1941. While in essence, that's all there really is, various dodgy compilations have been made advertising Christian playing with Lester Young or Lionel Hampton.
Back in 1940, Keynote Recordings Inc. was a new, small and independent New York company with offices at 522 Fifth Ave., recently founded by Eric Bernay, the owner of a midtown Manhattan record store called The Music Room. Bernay was musically openminded and, looking for a place in the increasingly convulsed American record industry, he launched a catalog of varied music and performers.
AFTER HOURS is an excellent live document of the early roots of bebop, capturing this exciting music in the process of being built by its pioneering architects. Recorded live in New York City at jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House in 1941, these tapes feature young modernists Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and Don Byas as they pushed the structural materials of swing toward something new and intense.
Garnished with a fistful of alternate takes, the 2007 release of Mosaic's 107-track Complete Lionel Hampton Victor Sessions 1937-1941 is a welcome and long overdue CD realization of The Complete Lionel Hampton 1937-1941, a six-LP box set released during the 1970s by the Bluebird label. Only Teddy Wilson came close to achieving what Hamp did in the late 1930s and early '40s, by bringing together the greatest soloists on the scene for a staggeringly productive and inspired series of recordings that essentially defined the state of jazz during the years immediately preceding the Second World War.
Although the very attractive Lena Horne has never really been a jazz singer, her vocals are generally of interest to jazz listeners and she has occasionally recorded in jazz settings. This Bluebird CD is pretty definitive of the first half of her career. Horne sings a pair of ballads with Charlie Barnet's 1941 orchestra and two songs (including "Don't Take Your Love From Me") with a unique Artie Shaw-led all-star band that includes Benny Carter, Red Allen, and a string section. The remainder of the disc features Horne backed by studio orchestras, and the results are superior (if sometimes overly dramatic) renditions of standards as rendered by a top-notch cabaret singer. Highlights include "Stormy Weather," "Ill Wind," "Moanin' Low," "As Long As I Live," and "It's All Right With Me."
In the world of music, there was never anyone quite like ARTHUR 'BIG BOY' CRUDUP. Rooted in the Mississippi Delta, his style was propulsive, melodic, original, and profoundly soulful. If he wasn’t 'The Father of Rock ‘n’ Roll', as one LP proclaimed, there’s no doubt that rock ‘n’ roll owes a debt to his songs, including That’s All Right Mama, My Baby Left Me, Rock Me Mamma, So Glad You’re Mine, and Mean Ol’ Frisco Blues, as much as to his tight, swinging brand of rural blues.