[Dixielandjazz] Some Interesting Christmas Gift CD sets.

[Steve barbone]

Just in case you are looking for a Christmas Present to be given to a music
lover. The Times was heavy on "Jazz" this year and included these reviews
out of 18 total music reviews.

Cheers,
Steve


The Good, the Rare and the Nostalgic in Boxed Sets

THE NEW YORK TIMES - November 25, 2005

In past pop eras, a disc was an album: a limited group of tracks presented
in a certain order. Not anymore. The digital era has made the disc an
information archive: audio, video, perhaps something interactive. Boxed sets
released this year reflect that change. Along with the musical hits, misses,
outtakes and second thoughts, more boxes include DVD's with something to
watch: a vintage television appearance, a concert, studio moments, home
movies. As storage capacity grows, it is easy to extrapolate the ultimate
boxed set: one that holds every minute of a musician's career, and takes
another lifetime to hear and see. For the moment, boxed sets still make
choices - luckily.  JON PARELES



Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax
Rounder. Eight CD's. $115

In 1938, the New Orleans pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton talked and
sang into a microphone for about a month and a half, in an oral history
project conducted by Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress. He knew keenly,
at that point, how powerful jazz had become - the music that in his old days
wasn't even called jazz - and how much fame he had been denied.

What came out was the richest tumble of American culture. There was valuable
information about musical life in New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago in the
first part of the century. (It includes his disquisition on how "the Spanish
tinge," or the habanera rhythm, influenced the blues.)

There is hero-story rhetoric about pimping, gambling and gang life, down to
particular details of clothes and card games and violence, always implying
more than what's there; and several dozen imposing, almost mournful
performances of songs, some that were just in the air and some that were
Morton's own, carefully composed with classical influences. He spoke
handsomely while tickling blues progressions, as if reading from a script.
The monologues are deceptively casual, sometimes scurrilous, and there have
always been doubts about their veracity. Still, they remain an incredible
achievement, as if Mark Twain happened to also be a masterful pianist.

Eventually, there was a successful first-person book, "Mister Jelly Roll"
(1950), massaged into life by Lomax from the interview transcripts. The
recordings themselves have had a much bumpier life: many partial or botched
editions, and mostly concentrating just on the music.

In eight discs, this is the first full edition of everything available from
Lomax's tapes - all the songs, all the talking. It includes a disc of 1949
interviews and songs from others who knew him in the old days, including the
guitarist Johnny St. Cyr and the clarinetist Alphonse Picou, and also a
reissued paperback copy of "Mister Jelly Roll." BEN RATLIFF


Ray Charles - The Complete Atlantic Recordings, 1952-1959

"I believe I done did some of everything, man, just about," Ray Charles
tells Ahmet Ertegun in a formerly unreleased bit of studio dialogue from
this set. Charles's pioneering 1950's recordings forged soul music from
blues, jazz, country, gospel, pop and mambo. At Atlantic, the young Charles
grew up fast, trading the suavity of Nat King Cole for something rawer and
bluer, more cantankerous and more jubilant. He soaked up regional ideas from
every place he visited; he touched down regularly in jazz and transformed
any song he chose, finding sorrow and redemption. Unreleased material
includes Charles toying with songs on solo piano - it's all he needs - and a
low-fi DVD of a 1960 Newport Jazz Festival set that moves from swing-band
elegance to full-tilt, house-rocking soul. Rhino. Seven CD's, one DVD.
$149.98. JON PARELES


Columbia Small Group Swing Sessions, 1953-62

It was the high period for jazz in New York, and a time when practically
everyone who had ever played the music was still alive. Columbia Records was
in a privileged position to record it, and around its bigger artists - Louis
Armstrong, Miles Davis and so on - the producers John Hammond and George
Avakian set up one session after another with other first-rate soloists of
the swing era, from Ruby Braff to Buck Clayton to Illinois Jacquet, along
with face-offs between Coleman Hawkins and Clark Terry, as well as Ben
Webster and Sweets Edison. Twenty-two of these sessions are represented
here, and many are sharply turned out, not particularly inspired evidence of
the working life of jazz in the 50's. Some sessions stand out, though: a
couple of Braff's, and the superb pairing of the gruff, feral Webster and
the concise, gentle Edison. Available only from Mosaic: mosaicrecords.com or
(203) 327-7111. Four CD's. $136. BEN RATLIFF



Tommy Dorsey - The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing: Centennial Collection

History remembers Tommy Dorsey more for the starchy professionalism of his
orchestra than for the measured croon of his trombone playing, although the
two things are more or less inextricable. This compilation takes aim at that
small injustice, devoting the first of its three discs to Dorsey's sideman
work with the likes of Paul Whiteman, Ethel Waters and the Boswell Sisters.
The parade of early performances is often intriguing, but it inevitably
pales next to the Dorsey Orchestra material that follows. The band sounds
especially vital on the third disc, an assortment of radio air checks that
benefits greatly from the sterling contribution of Frank Sinatra. (Legacy
has also recently issued a strong two-disc compilation, "The Essential Frank
Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey.") Another contributor, Elvis Presley, sits in with
"Heartbreak Hotel" - the only inclusion from the 1950's, and a mismatch that
closes the set on a note of mild embarrassment. Bluebird/Legacy. Three CD's.
$39.98. NATE CHINEN


Jazz in Paris
Champs-Élysées/Montmartre/Saint-Germain-des-Prés/Rive Gauche, Rive Droite

Universal France has combed through its archives to lay out a selected
history of a recorded jazz in France up to the early 1960's. Francophiles
will be interested in the subject tout court - the music as well as the
pictures and booklet commentary (in English and French) put some documentary
truth behind the legends of an urbane, foreign Eden for jazz culture. The
recordings go back to Josephine Baker, Jean Cocteau reading poetry over Dan
Parrish's jazz orchestra in 1929, and Django Reinhardt, extending all the
way up to the early 60's with the Algerian-born pianists Errol Parker and
Martial Solal. But Americans abroad are more than equally represented: Benny
Carter, Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, Miles Davis and Chet Baker among them,
playing with the cream of the French musicians. Gitanes/Verve. Four boxed
volumes of three CD's each. $30 per volume. BEN RATLIFF


Progressions - 100 Years of Jazz Guitar

Spanning a full century of recordings, this survey puts forth almost a
century-long chronology of jazz guitar, and with it an appealingly skewed
take on jazz history. Its principles are canonical, but anti-purist (a
couple of Depression-era Hawaiian guitarists make the grade, as do Jimi
Hendrix and Carlos Santana), and its process strictly egalitarian: each of
the 78 guitarists included makes only one appearance, with a recording
identified as somehow emblematic. This policy creates some strange
imbalances, although there's a refreshing justice in John Scofield, one of
the set's producers, receiving the same track allotment as, say, the obscure
swing player Otto (Coco) Heimel. A glossy and informative booklet, with
several solo transcriptions, underscores the package's target audience. One
only hopes that not every guitarist who picks up the set will fall for the
title's promise of linear evolution, a notion that the music undermines
repeatedly. Columbia/Legacy. Four CD's. $49.98. NATE CHINEN