Word: deccas
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...meant to review that Chicago Style Album that Decca put out a few weeks ago and it's just as well I've let it run a few weeks before attempting it, because the records are definitely poorer after listening to them forty or fifty times. In fact they are strictly mediocre. Next week this column will discuss the individual records in the Album and the Chicago style in general...
...Lover's Lullaby (Glenn Gray, Decca). Smoothy-of-the-month...
This column wants to go on record, along with all the other critics, as saying that the Decca album of the Chicago Jazz Style released today is the greatest series of collected jazz over done. And that the individual records rank with almost anything that has heretofore been recorded...
Downbeat critic George Avakian (of Yale) picked the tunes and the musicians, supervised the recording and wrote the notes for the album. In short, thanks to Avakian, the musicians themselves, the Chicago tradition, and the courage of Decca in producing what many thought at first to be saleable only to a small group of enthusiasts, the public can get an album of playing in the true Chicago tradition. More than that, it can get a sense of jazz as it is really played at late-of-night sessions in out of the way bistros and honky-tonks. This is great...
Woody Herman has continued to do good discs, "East Side Kick" being one of his best numbers done lately. Get a load of "Blue Prelude" with Wood's vocal chorus and then get the old Isham Jones version of the same, done for Decca when most of the Herman Herd were with Jones . . . One of Louis Armstrong's best numbers in a great while is "Poor Old Joe." Main reason is that it has the life and pep that the old Louis discs used to have and that none of them have had lately . . . Bing Crosby's "If I Knew...