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Beat Street
Louis Armstrong: 16 Most
Requested Songs
Columbia/Sony Music
CD, Rs. 395
A couple of factors might lead one to expect this album to have rather less jazz and more pop in it than it actually turns out to have. One is the boast of "most requested" for the tracks it contains, another the period from which it originates, the later '50s with one track from 1966. For Louis Armstrong, more or less the father of scat singing and the man who invented solo improvisation in jazz with his 1928 recording of "West End Blues", had become a popular entertainer by the 1940s, acted successfully in movies and generally provoked critics into thinking he'd given up jazz.
In fact, in 1947 he returned to the traditional small group set-up on which he'd cut his teeth, with a trombone, a clarinet, drums and bass besides himself on trumpet and vocals, and was playing plenty of jazz of the kind from which his 1920s innovations flowed. This was both popular and true jazz, if a trifle old-fashioned for the time.
Or so it would have seemed in the hands or from the mouth of anyone else. From his lips, whether singing or blowing through a trumpet, one only hears the power, the beauty, the almost unbelievable range — especially the upper register — and astonishing virtuosity, to say nothing of the impeccably flowing phrasing, of the man who decided what jazz had to be with that 1928 solo intro on "West End Blues". And if he doesn't improvise on some of the tracks (of which a couple don't have solos by anyone else either), it doesn't matter, because none of them has the faintest suspicion of deviating from jazz into pop; while they're all popular, they're suffused with the spirit of jazz at the same time.
At least five tracks are taken from his 1955 album Satch Plays Fats, containing compositions by his late good friend Fats Waller. "Black and Blue", "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Honeysuckle Rose", from among these, "Mack the Knife" (from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera) and "St. Louis Blues" (from Armstrong Plays Handy, comprising music by the blues master W.C. Handy) are the pick of the album. Especially the last.
Count Basie: King of Swing
Verve/Universal Music
CD, Rs. 395
Record publishers can be tantalisingly slap-dash with what I think is the most expensive part of a CD, the inlay booklet. To the cost of the dedicated collector, who'd like to know when a jazz album was recorded and who besides the leader played on it. But in this information age, such omissions can often be quickly rectified by checking the Internet (the site www.allmusic.com of the All Music Guide, for instance). Alas, no such luck in this case, beyond confirming that the album was originally recorded around 1955, when Bill `Count' Basie was marking, as the back cover of this CD says, two decades as the leader of the most swinging big band in the history of jazz.
It's not only this lack of information but also the shortness of the album (some 34 minutes) that gives me pause before declaring that it's worth all the nearly Rs. 400 it costs. But that momentary pause passes when one considers the quality of the music one gets.
Every track is just around three to four minutes long. But in that much time the Basie band, with its brilliant soloists on trumpets and tenor saxophones plus the leader himself on piano, manages to pack in excitement, a relentless rhythm laid down by piano, bass, drums and guitar, and danceability. In fact "danceability" is a rather poor word for the ability to successfully challenge the audience's ability to resist jumping to its collective feet.
Look out especially for "You for Me", with its piano solo intro, the Count's soft and light fingers working the keys at a blistering pace. But all 10 numbers convincingly establish the claim of the title that puts a count on the throne.
JAZZEBEL
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