Granting a long-held wish of many record collectors, Sony Classical is issuing the complete monaural American Columbia discography of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a vast box set of 120 CDs, all in new remasterings. Almost all of this material will be appearing for the first time on CD on Sony Classical. Indeed, 152 of these recordings have never been released at all on CD before now.
Charlie Parker's historic Dial sessions have been reissued in a variety of ways over the years. This is especially true since the advent of the compact disc. These sessions not only capture Parker's alto brillance but highlight his interaction with such jazz stalwarts as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Max Roach, Erroll Garner, Howard McGhee and Dodo Marmarosa. This four-disc set is broken up into Hollywood Sessions 1: Moose the Mooche, Hollywood Sessions 2: Relaxin' at Camarillo, New York Sessions 1: Scrapple from the Apple, and New York Sessions 2: Drifting on a Reed. It's fortunate that these slices of jazz history are available allowing the listener to hear several takes of classics like "Moose the Mooch," "Relaxin at Camarillo," "Scrapple from the Apple," and "Ornithology" take shape. Sound quality on these Stash discs is good for the most part, fair but not great on others.
Jethro Tull was a unique phenomenon in popular music history. Their mix of hard rock; folk melodies; blues licks; surreal, impossibly dense lyrics; and overall profundity defied easy analysis, but that didn't dissuade fans from giving them 11 gold and five platinum albums…
The mainstream came to know this remarkable tenor sax player via bossa nova – his unforgettable, breathy solo on "The Girl from Ipanema" propelled the song to number five in 1964 and to continued popularity to this very day, every bit as much as Astrud Gilberto's equally stunning, spare voice. But Stan Getz's involvement in this populist '60s craze actually displeased many a serious jazz enthusiast who'd admired his work in that field for more than two decades. After all, this 17-time winner of the Down Beat poll for top tenor saxophonist had already staked out a remarkable reputation, playing in the bands of such vaunted names as Stan Kenton, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Woody Herman from 1944-1949, and then leading his own bands thereafter. This three-CD box, then, finds Getz in top form as a jazz soloist and bandleader.