1953 Hobson's Choice

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker despite its prolific recorded output and its impact on jazz and the American public lasted for less than one year. Ensconced as the house band at The Haig in Los Angeles and able to record at is own discretion for Pacific Jazz (as well as single sessions for two other labels), this revolutionary, pianoless quartet crafted its own repertoire and arrangements and built a solid, prolific legacy.
By January of 1953, when he recorded the tentette, Mulligan felt confident that his quartet was ready to record live at their Los Angeles home The Haig. Dick Bock started bringing down his portable tape recorder to capture the band for possible record releases. One night, Lee Konitz, who was then a member of the confining, pompous, ponderous Stan Kenton Orchestra, came to the club to sit in…

This album brings back into print-one of the most stimulating sessions of contemporary New Orleans music on record. Originally released on a 10" Jazzman LP (LP 331), Ice Cream, Down by the Riverside, Burgundy Street, When the Saints Go Marching In, Doctor Jazz and A Closer Walk with Thee were recorded in 1953.
Lewis and his men generate and communicate a remarkably unselfconscious-almost ingenuous-abandon in their playing. They are, to be sure, technically limited to begin with, but there is no faulting the wholeness, intensity and honesty of their emotions. The result is that the solos, though rough-edged, are a complete extension of the man into the horn; and the collective ensembles, while raggedy from a music critic's viewpoint, are totally of a piece in so far as these musicians' feelings about playing together are concerned…

"One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (originally "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer") is a blues song written by Rudy Toombs and recorded by Amos Milburn in 1953. It is one of several drinking songs recorded by Milburn in the early 1950s that placed in the top ten of the Billboard R&B chart. Other artists released popular recordings of the song, including John Lee Hooker in 1966 and George Thorogood in 1977.