Trumpet Summit

Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong on Verve (1997) {3CD Verve rec 1956-1957}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 963 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 520 Mb
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© 1956-57, 1997 Verve / PolyGram | 314 537 284-2
Jazz / Vocal Jazz / Standards / Traditional Pop

Here is an instruction manual for singers. Phrasing, intonation, breath control, taste, musicianship, restraint, humor; it's all here. What with "jazz singing" wandering all over the lot as the century staggers to a close, let's hope that The Complete (what dimensions that phrase has in this context) Ella and Louis will be used for serious course work, and not just by beginners. The package contains everything from the LPs Ella & Louis, Ella and Louis Again and Porgy and Bess, plus two tracks of Fitzgerald sitting in with Armstrong's band at the Hollywood Bowl. The contrast between her polished perfection and his rough perfection is delicious. Armstrong's trumpet playing, nearing its last full burst of glory, is as moving as his voice.The songs are by the cream of American song writers, including Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Arlen, Ronnell, Duke and Kern. They have never been sung better.

Charlie Parker Records: The Complete Collection, Vol. 30 - Charlie Parker & Lester Young - An Historical Meeting At the Summit (2012 CP Records 233193/30 rec 1949}
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© 1949, 2012 Charlie Parker Records / Membran Media / Documents | 233193 / 30
Jazz / Bop / Saxophone

Exhaustive 30 CD collection from the Jazz legend's short-lived label. Contains 44 original albums (421 tracks) plus booklet. Every record-collector has run across an album with the little sax-playing bird in it's label-logo, right next to the brand name Charlie Parker Records or CP Parker Records. Turning the sleeve over, especially if it was one of the non-Parker releases, and seeing a '60s release date under the header Stereo-pact! Was as exciting an experience as it was confusing. Was the claim Bird Lives meant more literally than previously thought?

This release contains Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ complete recordings from their first Japanese tour in 1961. These consist of two sets, one recorded live at Sankei Hall in Tokyo, and a posterior TV show performed in the same city the following week. Both sets feature an amazing lineup, with the leader on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Bobby Timmons on piano, and Jymmie Merritt on bass.

Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were (and are) two of the main stems of jazz. Any way you look at it, just about everything that's ever happened in this music leads directly – or indirectly – back to them. Both men were born on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, and each became established as a leader during the middle '20s. Although their paths had crossed from time to time over the years, nobody in the entertainment industry had ever managed to get Armstrong and Ellington into a recording studio to make an album together. On April 3, 1961, producer Bob Thiele achieved what should be regarded as one of his greatest accomplishments; he organized and supervised a seven-and-a-half-hour session at RCA Victor's Studio One on East 24th Street in Manhattan, using a sextet combining Duke Ellington with Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars. This group included ex-Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard, ex-Jimmie Lunceford swing-to-bop trombonist Trummy Young, bassist Mort Herbert, and drummer Danny Barcelona. A second session took place during the afternoon of the following day.

Part of the cultural fallout in Western Europe just after the First World War was the conviction that Romanticism had to be expunged from contemporary artistic life. Assorted ideologies, theories and techniques, often colliding with one another, were offered as tools for this purpose, and Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), then the boy wonder of German music, investigated a considerable number of them in his wildly eclectic compositions. What with atonal dabbling, nose-thumbing at bourgeois values via jazzy sitcom operas and so on, it was no wonder, when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the archmoralist Adolf Hitler declared Hindemith a cultural Bolshevist.

—Wallace Rave