Lionel Hampton Rag Mop

We continue our highly popular and successful America’s Greatest Hits series as we work back through the 1950s, now reaching the point at the turn of the decade, this time with an expanded 4-CD edition to sit alongside the existing single CD 1950 edition (ACRCD176) originally released in 2006 before we introduced the 4-CD format in recent years. This great-value 104-track collection comprises every record which charted in the Top 15 of the Billboard Best Sellers and Honor Roll Of Hits and the Top 10 in the Cash Box chart during 1951. It omits certain records which peaked in 1951and which have already appeared in our America’s Greatest Hits 1951 collection and some which were big hits in 1949, and had already peaked, so will appear in that collection. As with all these collections it features all the biggest hits of the year and all the biggest names in American pop of that era, at a time when the USA was emerging from post-war austerity into a more optimistic decade but was about to become embroiled in the Korean War, and it very much captures the spirit of the times. It also includes a number of lesser known records which are not heard very often and which have not been readily available on CD. As always, it includes a substantial 15,000-word booklet with a commentary on every track, and it’s a must for collectors of our completist chart-based anthologies.

Charles Melvin Cootie Williams was a jazz trumpeter, born in Mobile Alabama in 1911, who enjoyed a lengthy career as a sideman and bandleader, and was especially renowned for his associations with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. This collection takes its title Concerto For Cootie from a tune Duke Ellington composed in his honour.

Bruno Blum, himself part of the Punk movement in London in the late Seventies, here returns to the original forms of subversion contained in Rock. As hedonists looking for ways to overtake their own selves as well as their social status, Artists — and particularly Musicians — seemed to be the only ones who could free themselves of society’s rigorous norms.
From Charlie Parker to Bo Diddley via Artie Shaw or Richard Berry, the irreverence and arrogance later celebrated in the Punk Rock of Iggy Pop, The Clash or The Ramones has roots in the frenzied tempos of Bop and the contorted melodies of Free Jazz, with branches as far as the sexual allusions of the Blues and the wild solos of Rockabilly.