Canzone di Cole Porter, Con L’accompagnamento Del Dave Brubeck Quartet. Un Assolo al Sassofono di Paul Desmond

During Albinoni’s lifetime (1671-1751) four separate collections of sonatas with violin were published under his name, though only the Trattenimenti armonici Op.6 were prepared by their composer. The works in Op.6 have accordingly dominated the record catalogues and obscured the virtues of the others, which Federico Guglielmo presents here with his customary flair and feeling for the Italian Baroque which has previously yielded the much-praised Brilliant Classics collection of Vivaldi’s Opp 1-12 (95200) as well as the Op.1 Trio Sonatas (94789) by Albinoni himself.

Once in a while, an album comes along to take your breath away. That is certainly the case with this boxed set, which contains no fewer than 25 CDs tracing the history of jazz piano from early 1899 to the end of 1958. Several years ago, the same record company issued a set ten CDs covering some of the same ground, but this expanded version is even more amazing.

In the 1950s and '60s, few American jazz artists were as influential, and fewer still were as popular, as Dave Brubeck. At a time when the cooler sounds of West Coast jazz began to dominate the public face of the music, Brubeck proved there was an audience for the style far beyond the confines of the in-crowd, and with his emphasis on unusual time signatures and adventurous tonalities, Brubeck showed that ambitious and challenging music could still be accessible.

The title of this two-CD compilation of the earliest commercial Dave Brubeck recordings does in fact document some of the early concepts that Brubeck was employing as a young artist in search of his own voice. The well-annotated information included by producer Joop Visser, using much of Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz as a reference, follows the progress of Brubeck’s artistic development, as indicated by the chronological recordings. And the liner notes include some little-known information, such as the poor prognosis, and possible paralysis, for Brubeck after a swimming accident in 1951, leading indirectly to the addition of Paul Desmond (then named "Paul Breitenfeld") to the group - which remained intact, becoming one of the legendary quartets in jazzdom, until 1967…