Fifteen Great Recordings (February/March 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 1)

Fifteen Great Recordings

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February/March 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 1


1. “Dippermouth Blues” (1923)

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, R 001). The Creole Jazz Band sides, of which “Dippermouth” is the most famous, constitute the first important black jazz recordings. New Orleans jazz was a thoroughly settled idiom, and Oliver a primeval piece of the true cross. In these acoustic, toylike ensembles, however, you can hear the sound of Louis Armstrong demanding to be born.

2. “Tight Like This” (1928)

Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces/Louis Armstrong, Vol. 4 CK 45142). Every great artist creates an occasional microcosm of every strength he possesses and by extension implies everything else he will ever play. Here Armstrong gives jazz a dramatist’s sense of emotional pacing. From a brooding stillness he stirs tentatively, takes hold, and climbs toward a cathartic release of operatic grandeur.

3. “The Blue Room” (1932)

Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra ( Basie Beginnings , RCA/Bluebird 97682-RB). By 1932 Duke Ellington had moved big-band jazz well on its way to expressive artistry, but in the meanest winter of the Great Depression, it reached a kind of critical mass with Bennie Moten and a band of cold and hungry Kansas City players a thousand miles from home. In “Blue Room” scraps of melody swim on a rising tide of riffs that ultimately swallow up everything in one of the hottest bigband performances ever recorded.

4. “Oh, Lady Be Good” (1936)

Jones-Smith Inc. ( The Essential Count Basie, Vol. 1 , Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CK 40608). Everything you need to know about Count Basie is here: the spacious piano, in which sound and silence are partners; the soft-spoken zephyr of a rhythm section that petted the beat and made it purr; and the saxophonist Lester Young, making the most fully formed record debut in history.

5. “Crazy Rhythm” (1937)

Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter (TK DRG/Swing Records SW 8403 Prestige 7633). The first defining figures of tenor and alto saxophone, Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter spent the late thirties in France and England, where they did not go unappreciated by European musicians trying to crack the codes of American jazz. With Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli they made lightning strike on “Crazy Rhythm” and left no doubt that the codes were still safe in American hands.

6. “Heckler’s Hop” (1937)

Roy Eldridge Orchestra ( Little Jazz , Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CK 45275). Like Armstrong, Eldridge knew how to lay the dramatic basis for trumpet high notes. However, unlike Armstrong’s ascents, which were formal and stately, Eldridge’s came unexpectedly, in the midst of dizzying whirlpools. He used them as hand grenades.

7. “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1943)

Mel Powell ( Complete Commodore Jazz Recordings, Vol. 1 , Mosaic MR 23 123). One of the lesser-known hot masterpieces