The Chronological

Alto saxophonist Pete Brown has been showing up on Keynote and Savoy reissues for years, but seldom if ever has there been an entire package devoted to recordings made under his name. The Classics Chronological series has accomplished many impressive feats, but this disc deserves special attention. Brown brought excitement and sonic ballast to nearly every band he ever sat in with. His works with John Kirby and especially Frankie Newton are satisfying, but this CD contains the very heart of Brown's artistry. It opens with "Cannon Ball," a boogie-woogie from 1942 sung by Nora Lee King. This relatively rare Decca recording features Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Hamilton, and Sammy Price, the pianist with whom Brown would make outstanding music a bit further on down the road. Similarly rare and even more captivating are two extended jams recorded in Chicago in April of 1944. Brown's quartet on this date consisted of electrically amplified guitarist Jim Daddy Walker, bassist John Levy, and drummer Eddie Nicholson.

Here is the 12th volume in the complete chronological recordings of Lionel Hampton as reissued by the Classics label. It opens with Hamp's final five recordings for the MGM label, waxed in Los Angeles on October 17, 1951. This was a 20-piece big band using charts written by Quincy Jones, and the music it made feels much different from what's to be heard in the next leg of Lionel Hampton's odyssey, a Norman Granz-produced quartet session with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Buddy Rich, recorded in New York on September 2, 1953. While the big band sides are exciting and fun, with a hip vocal by Sonny Parker on "Don't Flee the Scene Salty" and a singalong routine led by Hamp on "Oh Rock," the quartet swings cohesively, stretching out for six, seven or nearly eleven minutes, for the LP era had begun and Norman Granz encouraged extended improvisations. The combination of Oscar Peterson and Lionel Hampton, whether cooking together on "Air Mail Special" or savoring the changes of a ballad like "The Nearness of You" made spirits to soar and sparks to fly.

You know it's about time somebody took all the little records that Big Joe Turner managed to make back in the day and brought them out in sequence the way they appear in the Classics Chronological Series. Nobody in the world ever sounded quite like Joe Turner and nobody ever will. There is a magical quality that makes his blues performances feel like rituals full of clarity and grace. Each and every Joe Turner record is as beautiful as a massive stand of tiger lilies growing up through the middle of a brickyard, silent, solid, and dignified under the dew in the first light of dawn. Incredibly, despite his enormous popularity during the Second World War, by 1949 this gifted vocalist was scuffling to get recording gigs. Ten tasty sides were cut in Los Angeles for the MGM label with a solid band fairly bursting with hot horns and driven by Pete Johnson's piano. Joe Turner closed out the year by waxing two sides for Rouge Records in Baton Rouge, LA, and four for the Freedom label in Houston, TX. In April of 1950, Joe Turner made a fistful of records in New Orleans backed by Dave Bartholomew & His Orchestra with Fats Domino at the piano.

Jimmy Witherspoon was either a blues singer who worked from a jazz perspective, or a jazz singer with blues tendencies, or most accurately, a blues singer who applied jazz rhythms to a gospel delivery, which makes him, in some ways, a less propulsive version of Ray Charles. This disc of his earliest recordings, most of them released on Modern Records, shows Witherspoon predominantly as a shouter, and he sounds like a man used to years of fronting a small jazz orchestra. In time his microphone technique would improve, and he learned how to let subtle nuances into his singing, working both ends of the hard/soft dynamic into his phrasing.

Her mountainous stature matching the sheer soulful power of her massive vocal talent, Big Maybelle was one of the premier R&B chanteuses of the 1950s. Her deep, gravelly voice was as singular as her recorded output for Okeh and Savoy, which ranged from down-in-the-alley blues to pop-slanted ballads. In 1967, she even covered ? & the Mysterians' "96 Tears" (it was her final chart appearance). Alleged drug addiction leveled the mighty belter at the premature age of 47, but Maybelle packed a lot of living into her shortened lifespan.

Illness, exhaustion and a national recording ban imposed by executives heading the American Federation of Musicians forced Stan Kenton to disband and withdraw from the music scene in December 1948. The hiatus lasted until February 1950, when he resumed making records for the Capitol label (see Classics 1185, Stan Kenton & His Orchestra 1950). Classics 1255, 1950-1951, which is the seventh volume in the Classics Kenton chronology, contains all of the recordings he made with his big band between May 18 1950 and March 20 1951. By and large, Kenton's music sounded better than ever during this period.