Gene Krupa Plays

Terry Gibbs and His Big Band - Swing Is Here! (1960) {Verve Originals rel 2009}
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© 1960, 2009 Verve / Universal | Verve Originals Series | 0602517967137
Jazz / Bop / Big Band / Vibes

The title Swing Is Here would have been more appropriate for the 1930s instead of 1960 when this album was originally issued, and the big-band era had long since waned. Yet vibraphonist Terry Gibbs kept the home fires burning out in California with this exceptional orchestra of cool jazz giants playing a stack of standards and modern compositions by Bill Holman or Gibbs, and one look back with an Artie Shaw number. What is most interesting about these arrangements is that they are always different in emphasizing the fleet, dampened sound of Gibbs in contrast, apart from, or in tandem with the woodwinds and brass instruments.

The Benny Goodman Story - by Valentine Davies (1956)

Bio of swing band leader 'Benny Goodman' from age 10 (1919) to his landmark Carnegie Hall band concert in 1938. Not exactly historically accurate, but great music. Also, guest appearances by many great musicians of the time.

Diana Ross plays the magnificent, tragic song stylist Billie Holiday, who while writhing in a strait jacket in a prison cell, awaiting sentencing on drug charges, reflects on her turbulent life. Raped in her youth by a drunk (Adolph Caesar), then compelled to work as a domestic in a Harlem whorehouse, Holliday is encouraged to try for a singing career by the bordello's pianist (Richard Pryor). She rises as high as it is possible to go in the white-dominated show business world of the 1930s, but can't handle the pressure and turns to narcotics. The film takes several liberties with the 44-year existence of "Lady Day." Among the Billie Holiday standards performed by Ross are "My Man," "I Cried for You," "Lover Man," "Them There Eyes," and the title song.

Bill Evans - The Complete Bill Evans On Verve (1997) {18 CD Set Verve 314 527 953-2 rec 1962-1969}
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© 1962-69, 1997 Verve / PolyGram | 314 527 953-2
Jazz / Post Bop / Modal Music / Piano

THE COMPLETE BILL EVANS ON VERVE is an 18-disc, 269-track box set featuring every track that Bill Evans recorded for Verve between 1962 and 1969, including 98 previously-unreleased tracks. It includes a 160-page, full-color book. THE COMPLETE BILL EVANS ON VERVE was nominated for a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package - Boxed and for Best Historical Album. The 18 CDs in this exhaustive set provide a comprehensive picture of Bill Evans from 1962 to 1969, a period when the pianist was both consolidating his fame and sometimes taking his music into untested waters, from unaccompanied piano to symphony orchestra. His work with multitracked solo piano, originally released as Conversations with Myself and the later Further Conversations with Myself, was the most remarkable new format for his introspective music. It gave Evans a way to be all the pianists he could be at once–combining densely chordal, harmonically oblique parts with surprising, rhythmic punctuation and darting, exploratory runs.

Kenny Clarke - Klook's The Man (2007) {4CD Box Set Properbox 120 rec 1938-1956}
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© 1938-56, 2007 Proper Records | P1577–P1580 / Properbox 120
Jazz / Bebop / Bop / Cool / Drums

Kenny Clarke was a jazz drummer and an early innovator of the BeBop style of drumming. As the house drummer at Minton's Playhouse in the early 1940s, he participated in the after hours jams that led to the birth of modern jazz. He is credited with creating the modern role of the ride cymbal as the primary timekeeper. Before, drummers kept time on the snare drum ("digging coal", Clarke called it) with heavy support from the bass drum. With Clarke time was played on the cymbal and the bass and snare were used more for punctuation. For this, "every drummer" Ed Thigpen said, "owes him a debt of gratitude." Clarke was nicknamed "Klook" or "Klook-mop" for the style he innovated.

Dan Morganstern makes an excellent point in his liner notes when he laments the tendency to refer to Roy Eldridge as a “link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.” For one thing, Diz eschewed the kind of brilliant trumpet tone that characterized the work of Eldridge and Armstrong. Considered in this light, if one starts with Armstrong’s early achievements and then looks for anything like that kind of distilled joy in all the subsequent history of the music, one gets no further than the spectacular sides the man they called “Little Jazz” made for Columbia in January 1937. There’s just no one after that to “link” to, ever…