Decameron Nights 1953

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…

Dizzy Gillespie albums are sometimes criticized for being silly, never for lacking stamina. Pleyel Jazz Concert 1953 is no exception to this rule, though it would certainly be understandable if it were. The live recording, issued and repackaged at least three times since the late '90s, dates from a period when Gillespie was in Paris and as busy as God, as musicians like to say in reference to the deity, not the European noise music band. If datebooks kept by people nicknamed Dizzy are to be trusted, the bebop kingpin had during a previous 48-hour period cut albums for two different competing firms, one involving a string orchestra. About ten collections have been published involving this material. Meanwhile, his rhythm section cut an album on the same day of the Pleyel Concert Hall event, also reissued at least three times and representing the sole effort by pianist Wade Legge as a leader…