Singers and Soloists of the Swing Bands.

Singers and Soloists of the Swing Bands

For "moldy figs" like myself, Hodes, and Wellstood, the small band is the best and purest voice of jazz. But the swing era, with its big bands, provided its own excitement and much that was more than merely notable. Now Martin Williams, perhaps the most perceptive of jazz anthologists, has put together, with impeccable taste and historic sense, a box of six LPs for the Smithsonian Institution--Singers and Soloists of the Swing Bands, with excellent annotation by Mark Tucker. Here, in one package, you will find the music that America danced to, listened to, and enthused over from 1929 until the early 1950s.

It is a measure of this collection that the first cut is the Paul Whiteman "After You've Gone," vintage 1929, with Bing Crosby--the jazz singer, not the crooner--doing the vocal and Andy Secrest (a trumpet player who buried his talents in hollywood studio bands) soloing in an arrangement by William Grant Still--clean, jazz-bound, and without the arabesques and pretensions of Ferde Grofe, Bill Challis, and other Whiteman arrangers. Here, too, in this compendium are some of the best post--Hot Seven Louis Armstrong sides; that dazzling Bunny Berigan recording of "I Can't Get Started"; and, as they say in the commercials, much more. For example: the tenors Chew Berry and Coleman Hawkins in their prime; Benny Goodman's star vocalists in a series of great hits; bands we tend to forget, like Cab Calloway's and Jimmy Lunceford's; Tommy Dorsey with the old (or rather, young) Frank Sinatra; a bevy of Ellingtons featuring his superlative sidemen; Jack Teagarden and his perfect "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues"; etc., etc. Here and there I may disagree with what is included--for instance, Larry Clinton and Bea Wain on "At Long Last Love," instead of that combination's "My heart Belongs to Daddy." There is Irving Fazola with Bob Crosby's band doing "My Inspiration"--applause, applause--but not the forgotten Fazola solo on "Song of the Islands."

I wait hopefully for the Smithsonian to issue the unexpurgated Library of Congress musical and spoken autobiography of Jelly Roll Morton. And a selection of the small-band jazz of the Thirties and Forties would make a needed companion to the Smithsonian's Big Band Jazz and this album. I understand that the Jelly Roll Morton is being considered, but I would gladly cooperate in the preparation of a small-band, 52nd Street collection.