The bulk of Shaw's great sessions were recorded for independent labels (Muse & Contemporary,) ensuring them widespread critical evaluation but little audience except with the hardcore faithful. Things seemed about to change in the late '70s when Miles Davis suggested to Columbia that they record Shaw's group. They actually took his suggestion and signed Shaw. He issued a string of remarkable but low-selling records, and Columbia cut him loose after four years and four albums. They compounded the crime by deleting the records shortly after Shaw departed. Mosaic has corrected that slight with another of their marvelously produced and comprehensively notated and packaged box sets. This three-disc collection covers Shaw's Columbia sessions. While it is sad that Shaw's stay at Columbia was not more personally beneficial, it was quite musically productive.

Many Bear Family releases seem like overkill, but this one is easy to justify. This triple CD is a truly wonderful collection, including every one of the 64 sides that Rex Griffin recorded between 1935 and 1946, and also 16 songs recorded as demos by his brother Buddy between 1948 and 1955. The repertory runs the gamut from Jimmie Rodgers-style yodel pieces to highly effective white blues ("I'm Ready to Reform"), and even the future rock & roll standard "Everybody's Tryin' to Be My Baby." Griffin only had six series recording sessions in his whole career, none lasting more than a day or two, and he recorded as many as ten songs at a time, in effect creating an album's worth of songs, more than 90 percent of it original material. The strange thing is that, despite the fact that each of these sessions pretty much meant using the same backgrounds on each song, they would work as albums -- the material is so strong that it didn't have to be trickled out as singles. The other thing that one notices about these sides is that, along with the quality of the material, the playing is also first-rate. The 1944 sides, radio transcription discs recorded with a band that may have included Red Foley on guitar, intended for broadcast, capture some of the excitement of a Griffin stage performance with his own early-'40s band. These are brisk, rippling, immediate live-in-the-studio honky tonk-style renditions of "Everybody's Tryin' to Be My Baby," "An Old Faded Photograph," "Mean Woman Blues," and other 1930s vintage songs, as well as newer material. The set is worth the investment, even if that means saving up for it.

Remarkably, whether he's playing an impressionistic ballad, a hard bop classic or a free original, Denny Zeitlin sounds like no other. He has the technique and harmonic knowledge to execute anything his fertile imagination conjures up. His music resonates with joy and honesty. Denny Zeitlin's first album, Cathexis, recorded in 1964 with Cecil McBee and Freddie Waits was an instant critical and commercial success with Zeitlin hailed as a new and original voice of the piano. Later in 1964, Denny assembled another amazing trio with Charlie Haden and Jerry Granelli and released the album Carnival. Zeitgeist was recorded over 1966 and '67 and documented the end of the trio with Haden and Granelli and the beginning of one with Joe Halpin and Oliver Johnson, two brilliant musicians who died young.

This outstanding release features the complete collection of recordings made by John Coltrane with the trumpeter and fluegelhornist Wilbur Harden, a mysterious figure in jazz history, who was forced to retire at the age of 35 due to ill health. Featuring some of the finest jazzmen of the era -Tommy Flanagan, Curtis Fuller, Louis Hayes and Art Taylor-, this music leaves no doubt that Trane remains a jazz innovator of epochal dimensions.

Miles once said, "All my inspiration today comes from Ahmad Jamal."
These recordings are the reason why.

Garnished with a fistful of alternate takes, the 2007 release of Mosaic's 107-track Complete Lionel Hampton Victor Sessions 1937-1941 is a welcome and long overdue CD realization of The Complete Lionel Hampton 1937-1941, a six-LP box set released during the 1970s by the Bluebird label. Only Teddy Wilson came close to achieving what Hamp did in the late 1930s and early '40s, by bringing together the greatest soloists on the scene for a staggeringly productive and inspired series of recordings that essentially defined the state of jazz during the years immediately preceding the Second World War.

U.K. two CD collection featuring Spann's recordings for the Blue Horizon label. 28 tracks total, including previously unreleased recordings, alternate takes and false starts. Also features the original versions of 'Can't Do Me No Good', 'Bloddy Murder', 'Someday Soon Baby' and 'Hungry Country Girl'. Sony/BMG. 2006.

In a way, Brown was the Wynton Marsalis of his time; like Marsalis, Brown came on the jazz scene following a period of significant stylistic change. However, unlike Marsalis (who rejected the free jazz made famous by the generation just preceding his own), Brown chose to embrace the innovations of his immediate elders. In the process, Brown became one of the great post-Gillespie trumpeters, developing a voice that spoke the language of bebop with a distinct, personal inflection. In September 1953 -- having just recorded his first dates as a leader for Blue Note -- Brown went to Europe with Lionel Hampton.

A superb vocalist even at the age of 13, Helen Humes rarely left that peak of performance, appearing in front of some of the most swinging jump tunes as well as the most affecting jazz ballads during her long career. Like Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, Humes was an early resonator with the blues, which allowed her the intensity of feeling to carry across any type of material with conviction and passion. Jazz Factory, the superb Spanish reissue label, obliged fans of Humes and vocal music alike with a three-disc collection of recordings from the first quarter-century of her career. While still a teenager, she sounded very mature (artistically and otherwise) for a series of ten 1927 risque blues titles like "If Papa Has Outside Lovin'" and "Do What You Did Last Night." Off record for ten years but apparently still growing as a singer, Humes reappeared in 1937 on two Harry James sessions with a sublime gloss on up-tempo swinging blues reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. She recorded three dozen excellent sides during the mid-'40s in front of bands led by Bill Doggett and Buck Clayton, and recorded the hit "Be-Baba-Leba" (which came from her own pen) with Doggett in 1945. Another title from the same year, "Voo-It," illustrates that Humes was an excellent scatter and also one of those musician vocalists who loved nothing more than hearing a great solo from one of her sidemen -- in this case, it's the crying trumpet of Snooky Young. She revisited the double entendre several times during 1947, and foreshadowed the direction of her '50s recordings with solid torch songs like "Time Out for Tears" and "Sad Feeling." An authoritative collection of Humes' early recordings, Complete 1927-1950 Recordings includes a wealth of enjoyable sides, though less-invested listeners will find much of what they want courtesy of the Best of Jazz compilation Her Best Recordings: 1927-1947 or Classics volumes like 1927-1945 and 1945-1947.

Recorded between 1944 & 1948. Through the miracle of high-resolution digital transfer and mastering technology, Bird enthusiasts can now get an earful of the shape of Charlie Parker's musical accomplishments for Savoy and Dial in the 1940s. Available as a three-disc box set, the alto saxophonist is recorded in various configurations as performer and bandleader with such mainstream jazz greats as trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, pianists Bud Powell and Erroll Garner, drummer Max Roach, trombonist J.J. Johnson, and bassist Ray Brown, to name but a few. Charlie Parker draws on his pungent roots and rhythms of the Kansas City jazz scene on "Parker's Mood" and makes a deep statement of the existence of the blues in the jazz tradition. His freedom and rapid-fire sax lines on "Yardbird Suite" serve to confirm his excellence in crafting polished improvisations and solos. One of Parker's strongest compositions, "Orinithology," is pure, unadulterated bebop, and the unique sound of Parker's alto saxophone is clearly articulated through smoothly executed phrasings and cutting, focused energy. Parker picks up the tenor saxophone with the Miles Davis All-Stars on such great songs as "Milestones" and "Sippin' at Bell's." Overall, Bird audiophiles, jazz educators, and historians should be prepared to be impressed. This collection is arguably Bird's most important recording studio work. All tracks have been digitally remastered.

If you didn't know these were cover tunes, they could have passed as a new tesla cd. Tesla did not just rip these songs off to make quick cash, they actually took the time to learn them and do a decent job. It flat out rocks. One of the best songs done during these sessions on a bonus CD from a major retailer is War Pigs, just an excellent rendition, great guitar resonance, and timing. Done only as tesla could have. Other good tracks are Space Trucking, Honky Tonk Women, and Ball of Confusion.