Victor Young

A young Gene Ammons asserted his formidable ability to play the tenor saxophone in Chicago from 1948 to 1952. These sessions from the Chess label (reissued when the GRP label bought the masters) represent this coming of age in jazz contexts ranging from bop and blues to many ballads and hints of the big-band sound. While his sound is typically robust and gutsy, there's also quite a bit of evidence that Ammons was capable of playing tender and sweet, but at the base of all this music is the blues. ~ AllMusic

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…