[Dixielandjazz] For Western Swing Lovers

[Stephen G Barbone]

Those who like Western Swing  may be interested in this collection.

Label: Collector's Choice Music
Number of Discs: 10 - 150 songs - cost about $110
Release Date: January 27, 2009

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys

“The Tiffany Transcriptions,” about 10 hours of radio recordings of  
Bob Wills’s western swing band, have been in and out of print since  
the 1980s. But they have never been available as a single brick, as  
they are now from Collector’s Choice. It’s fantastic, and it needs  
getting. This was a western band, a jazz band, a dance band in  
general, and as good as its regular studio records could be, they  
sound compressed and uptight by comparison. When it recorded this  
rowdy, airy music in 1946 and ’47, the band seemed free and expressive  
and hungry; solo after solo, laid over driving two-step rhythm, the  
group exudes poignancy and raw energy — from the steel guitarist Herb  
Remington, the guitarist Junior Barnard, the electric mandolinist Tiny  
Moore, and the violinist Joe Holley, among others. The collected  
Tiffanys show the black-and-white breadth of the band’s repertory: joy- 
ride instrumentals like “Three Guitar Special” and “Playboy Chimes”;  
traditional folk songs including “Sally Goodin’ ” and “Red River  
Valley”; blues standards like “Trouble in Mind” and “Corrine,  
Corrina”; Kansas City jazz (Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” Bennie  
Moten’s “South”); Ellingtonia (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” “C-Jam Blues”);  
Glenn Miller(“Mission to Moscow”); and the perfect western pop songs  
written for the band by Cindy Walker. There’s a casual optimism all  
through it, and it’s a music of contrasts: the sharp crack of the  
drums versus Tommy Duncan’s lazy, macho, pragmatic singing voice.



Cheers,

Steve Barbone

www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband