Fare Thee Well

Benny Morton didn't make very many recordings as a leader. What you've got here are apparently all of them. The 1934 band contained several musicians who had worked in Don Redman's orchestra. "Fare Thee Well to Harlem" is one of many preposterous Tin Pan Alley songs depicting a "negro" who yearns to go back to the noble South, in this case because of the questionable assumption that down there people go to church instead of hanging out in bars. Note that Duke Ellington always insisted there were more churches than nightclubs in Harlem. Ellington gave the world the diametric opposite of this song when in 1941 he composed "Jump For Joy," that ode to emancipation with its opening lyric: "Fare thee well, land of cotton, fare thee well"…

This magnificent three-disc set has the first 63 recordings by Count Basie's Orchestra, all of his Deccas. The consistency is remarkable (with not more than two or three turkeys) and the music is the epitome of swing. With such soloists as Lester Young and Herschel Evans on tenors, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry "Sweets" Edison, the great blues singer Jimmy Rushing, and that brilliant rhythm section of Basie, guitarist Freddie Green, bassist Walter Page, and drummer Jo Jones, the music is timeless. It's all here: "One O'Clock Jump," "Sent for You Yesterday," "Blue and Sentimental," "Jumpin' at the Woodside," "Jive at Five," and many others. This is the first Count Basie collection to acquire and should be in every jazz collection.

This magnificent three-disc set has the first 63 recordings by Count Basie's Orchestra, all of his Deccas. The consistency is remarkable (with not more than two or three turkeys) and the music is the epitome of swing. With such soloists as Lester Young and Herschel Evans on tenors, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry "Sweets" Edison, the great blues singer Jimmy Rushing, and that brilliant rhythm section of Basie, guitarist Freddie Green, bassist Walter Page, and drummer Jo Jones, the music is timeless.