Love Victor

This is an attractive eight-CD set (+ Bonus CD), whose discs are also available as eight separate releases, that could have been a great reissue but settled for being merely quite good. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first jazz recording, RCA released a disc apiece covering each of the past eight decades. In listening to the music straight through, one becomes aware of RCA's strengths and weaknesses as a jazz label. Victor was one of the most important jazz labels during the 1920s, '30s and '40s, catching on to bebop a little late (1946) but still documenting many classic recordings. By the 1950s, the label's attention was wandering elsewhere; it missed free jazz almost completely in the '60s, and in the last three decades has only had a few significant artists, mostly Young Lions whose output sounds conservative compared to the earlier masters…

This 24-CD box, which dwarfs even most Bear Family sets in scope, is essentially everything Ellington cut for RCA-Victor over a 46-year period. There are gaps, especially after 1946 when he jumped to Columbia, but otherwise, this is all of it. One quickly discovers that, by virtue of its leader's taste, combined with the good sense of RCA-Victor's recording managers, this was a band that did little, if any, wrong on record…

"SWORD AND STONE" and "WORDS AND TONES" by Victor Wooten, who has been heralded as “the Michael Jordan of the bass” and “one of the most fearless musicians on the planet”. In 2011, Rolling Stone Magazine voted Victor one of the Top Ten Bassist of ALL TIME. “Words and Tones” is a collection of original music featuring female vocalists. “Sword and Stone” is an instrumental version of many of the same songs from the CD "Words and Tones" and includes different interpretations, musicians, and performances, which showcase different sides of Wooten’s approach to music, performance, and songwriting.