c. Hibbler

In the summer of 1956, the famed Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell arranged for Dizzy Gillespie to embark on a worldwide goodwill-ambassador tour sponsored by the State Department. Gillespie and an all-star big band featuring trumpeter Quincy Jones, the late trombonist Melba Liston, alto saxophonist Phil Woods, and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson performed in Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil to frenzied, beret-wearing fans. Recordings were made but they weren't commercially available and were played only for a select group of musicians before Gillespie's death in 1993. Now the sides have been released, showcasing Dizzy at his bebopping best.

As different as can be from the Luis Russell recordings of the 1920s and early '30s, most of this material is heavily larded with male vocalists who use up lots of oxygen emulating Billy Eckstine. This was a stylistic trend during the years immediately following World War II, as entire big bands were yoked into subservience behind the all-important Big-Named Singer. As this development made Frank Sinatra and Perry Como into household words - and caused Nat Cole to practically abandon the piano - it paved the way for a morbid emphasis on the pop vocalist as cash cow core of the music business. This is a malady from which the industry has yet to recover. None of the singers heard on these Manor and Apollo sides enjoyed popular success, and neither did Russell's short-lived modernized big band…

The 29th in Classics' reissuance of Duke Ellington's recordings as a leader (which unfortunately skips most alternate takes) features his orchestra shortly after the recording ban of 1942-44 had finally ended. In addition to several vocal numbers for Joya Sherrill (including the hit "I'm Beginning to See the Light"), Al Hibbler and Kay Davis, there are features for trombonist Lawrence Brown ("Blue Cellophane") and altoist Johnny Hodges ("Mood to Be Wooed"), the original four-part studio version of "Black, Brown and Beige" (which totals 18 minutes), a four-song session headed by drummer Sonny Greer that features altoist Otto Hardwick, trumpeter Taft Jordan and clarinetist Barney Bigard (despite what it says in the liner notes, the pianist is the obscure Duke Brooks and not Duke Ellington) and the early V-disc version of "The Perfume Suite." Excellent music from an underrated edition of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

After starting off with a few valuable V-disc performances (including 13 minutes of the "Black, Brown and Beige" suite), this CD features some of Duke Ellington's studio recordings of April-May 1945. Although this particular band was not rated as high as their 1939-1942 counterpart, they still ranked near the top of their field. Among the gems are "The Kissing Bug," "Harlem Air Shaft," quite a few fine remakes (this version of "It Don't Mean a Thing" with singers Al Hibbler, Joya Sherrill, Kay Davis, and Marie Ellington is a classic), and a pair of unusual numbers. "Tonight I Shall Sleep" has trombonist Tommy Dorsey guesting with Duke Ellington's orchestra, while on "The Minor Goes Muggin'," Ellington sits in with Dorsey's band. Overall, there is a lot of rather interesting music to be heard on this CD from this underrated version of the Ellington big band.

By his own admission, Frank Sinatra owed a lot to Billy Eckstine and Al Hibbler, radically stylized singers with deep, honeyed voices. While some prefer Hibbler's more eccentric approach, Eckstine was the archetypal romantic postwar crooner, widely imitated during a period when the recording industry and the record-buying public became increasingly obsessed with star vocalists. Dozens of likely suspects, most famously Perry Como, Sinatra, and Eckstine, were soon able to cash in on this trend. In the case of Eckstine, who had earlier courted bankruptcy leading an exciting band fortified with such innovative jazz musicians as Fats Navarro, Gene Ammons, and Art Blakey, the commercial undertow eventually drew him off into a fluffy netherworld of increasingly jazzless pop music…

Budget sampler featuring Ellington performances with Ben Webster, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Hodges, and Al Hibbler, among others, taken from various periods. A good starter set for those who haven't taken the full plunge.

In 1975, when Bluebird brought out a double-LP reissue of vintage Earl Hines big-band recordings, the producers included a chain of beefy instrumentals from 1941. The Classics Chronological series zeroed in and fleshed out an important part of the picture by compiling all of Hines' 1941 material onto one CD 16 years later. What you get are eight terrific instrumentals interspersed with ten vocal tracks and a pair of fine piano solos. Since the vocal performances were aimed at the general record-buying public, they deviate noticeably from the powerhouse home base of big-band swing infused with intimations of the approaching bebop revolution. Eight instrumentals, then, form the backbone of this volume in the complete recordings of Earl Hines…