Many people who have never heard a single album by tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins know he spent two years on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge practicing. It’s one of jazz’s most romantic stories—a frustrated artist taking a commercial break to be out in the open getting to know himself better and advance his art form. But were those two years a fruitful use of Sonny’s time? [Photo above of the Williamsburg Bridge walkway by Alexandra Charian]

Read more

René Urtreger, a French jazz pianist who, as an adolescent, was hidden from the Nazis during the German occupation of Paris and went on to become one of the country’s most accomplished players, died on July 16 at age 92. [Photo above of René Urtreger]

Read more

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Tony Bennett’s birth, on Aug. 3, 1926. The pop-jazz singer died on July 21, 2023, following a seven-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. [Photo of Tony Bennett in Central Park]

I interviewed Tony five times for the Wall Street Journal, four times in his art studio on Central Park South and once by phone. Tony, of course, was a huge admirer of jazz, viewing it as America’s most pure form of music.

About 10 years ago, Tony asked me to give a talk at Frank Sinatra High School, which he founded in Astoria, Queens in 2001. I gladly obliged and had a fun time.

Tony also could be very funny, adding a touch of street if he had to. When I told him some years ago that in 2010 I had sung I Left My Heart in San Francisco in the Venetian Room of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where he had first sung the song in 1961, he was momentarily puzzled.

I told him the space was about to be renovated, the lights were off and no one was in there when I slipped in and got up on the purple-lit stage and sang the introduction (“The loveliness of Paris…”). Tony flashed that smile and said, “How’d that go for you?” I told him I got a “sanding ovation,” that there was a sander among the construction equipment in the back. He had a good laugh.

A couple of years before the pandemic, he asked me to interview him at the Village Vanguard one winter afternoon for a Dutch documentary; I was off-camera facing him on a director’s chair. I don’t know whatever happened to that project, but when Tony tried to pay me, I waved him off. He sent me a signed print of his painting of the Golden Gate Bridge as a thanks.

What made Tony special was his powerful street-singer voice, his enthusiasm for performing, his ability to reduce a massive concert hall to a club, his admiration of jazz and improvisation at the highest levels and his signature endings on ballads that built to a crescendo. And his kindness.

So today, in celebration of Tony’s 100th, I’ve selected 11 of my favorite performances that are sure to move you:

Here’s Tony at 25, singing Because of You on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1951…

Here’s Tony in June 1958 on the Steve Allen Show singing Pennies From Heaven (move the time bar to 1:47) in a rare outdoor shoot….

Here’s Tony in 1963 recording So Long, Big Time in the studio, with Harold Arlen, the composer, conducting…

Here’s Tony at his absolute peak singing If I Ruled the World on the Ed Sullivan Show in March 1965, with the Woody Herman Orchestra featuring Bobby Hackett on cornet…

From the same show, here’s Who Can I Turn To…

Here’s Tony singing The Shadow of Your Smile on TV’s 38th Academy Awards presentation in 1966 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles, honoring songs released in 1965. It won an Oscar for best original song…

Here’s For Once in My Life on the Ed Sullivan Show in November 1967...

Here’s Yesterday I Heard the Rain, with music by Armando Manzanero and English lyrics by Gene Lees, from the album of the same name arranged by Torrie Zito in 1968…

Here’s Tony in London singing The End of a Love Affair, arranged by Robert Farnon for the album The Good Things in Life, in 1972, with John Bunch on piano…

Here’s Tony in the studio in 1986, with Henry Mancini conducting Life in a Looking Glass from the 1987 film That’s Life!, with the great Chuck Findley on flugelhorn…

And finally, here’s Tony singing The Way You Look Tonight, accompanied by the magnificent Bill Charlap on piano, in 2015…

JazzWax was born exactly 19 years ago. A month before its launch, I was urged to start blogging when the late Terry Teachout, a dear friend and critic, gave me a shove. Since 1996, Terry and I had been listening to jazz at each other’s apartments once each quarter for a few hours on Saturday mornings. We’d choose 10 tracks each and the goal was to blow each other’s minds, point out interesting things going on in the music and just relax. We were both rabid jazz fans.

At the time, I was a financial writer and marketing consultant. My company counted New York’s major real estate corporations, accounting companies and risk advisory firms as clients.

Terry was breathtakingly brilliant, and freelancing for The Wall Street Journal as well as The New York Times, Commentary and many other publications. He hadn’t been named the WSJ’s theater critic yet or arts essayist, nor had he written his regal biographies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (though he had already published a bunch of books).

Listening to jazz was our way of kicking back by re-connecting with our college selves, when students sat around staring at two speakers and talked about what they heard. During our July 2007 session at my apartment, Terry presented a challenge that was more like a friendly command.

“You have to start a jazz blog. You know too much and need to be writing about it,” he said.

“Terry, I’m massively busy,” I pleaded.

“No one is busier than I am, and I found time. It’s a necessity. Deep down, you’re a journalist. You started as a journalist and that never leaves you. You need to be doing that, not what you’re doing now.”

“Fine,” I said, “In two weeks I’ll launch a blog.” I recalled that a few months earlier, Mena and Ben Trott of Six Apart had asked me to lunch. They had just started Typepad, a blogging platform, and were looking for writers to sign up. I decided to launch my blog there.

But what would I call it? After playing around with names that were easy to remember, I settled on JazzWax—jazz, for obvious reasons, and wax, because it was a double entendre. “Wax” was shorthand for recording and records in entertainment trade publications of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. Like this one from Billboard in 1944: “Billy Eckstine Waxes Blues for DeLuxe Records.” Wax also meant to write in an emotional style.

I went to GoDaddy, typed in the URL and found it was available. All that remained was to start writing, which I did on August 3, 2007. As Terry predicted, the journalist in me returned (I had started at The New York Times in 1976 while in college, when the paper was still hot type and pages were set in lead in the composing room).

To stand out among all other blogs, I decided to post six days a week. Most others at the time were weekly. I also decided to interview jazz legends who popped up on favorite albums but were largely overlooked. My first JazzWax phone interview was with Danny Bank, published on August 30, 2007.

The rest, as they say, is history. Over the past 19 years, I never missed a day except once, when Typepad had a technical issue and the site was down. In 2010, Terry felt I had to be writing for the WSJ and introduced me to his editor. That began my career there.

Nat Hentoff, who had become a vocal JazzWax fan and called weekly, urged me to write a book and told his editor at the University of California that I’d be calling. The result was Why Jazz Happened (2012). Ira Gitler sent emails frequently filling me in with eyewitness reports on subjects I wrote about.

In 2013, Terry thought I should be writing more books and introduced me to his literary agent and attorney. Three books followed. Terry was clever and knew what he was doing. His timing was perfect; I was prepared for each opportunity he presented.

Our workloads increased when the WSJ introduced new sections in 2012 with increased assignments. In addition to his books, Terry wrote a play and an opera in addition to criticism and reviews for the WSJ and other publications. Too much, in fact. He died in his sleep on January 13, 2022 at age 65.

So as JazzWax turns 19, a special thanks to Terry Teachout, Nat Hentoff and Hank O’Neal as well as Michael O’Daniel, Todd Selbert, Bill Kirchner, Carl Woideck, Bret Primack, Stuart Anello, Gilles D’Elia and so many others who have been there for JazzWax and me over the years. And thank you, to my many paying subscribers as well as readers who haven’t yet decided to convert to paid.

PS: Whenever Terry or I would playfully gripe to each other by email about a piece we just finished writing that was an especially heavy lift, the other would send along a YouTube featuring fish in a tank with Joe Mooney singing Nina Never Knew, backed by the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in 1952. It always generated an instant laugh and sent stress packing.

Sadly, that video has disappeared from YouTube. So here’s the recording that became for us a metaphoric and sympathetic cold bottle of soda pulled out out of an ice-filled cooler after a hot day in the writing fields. Terry was a strategic mentor and always right. I miss him…

The start of August this weekend marks the start of summer’s second half, when thoughts start turning to fall. I already miss not rising with the sun. I’m usually up between 5 and 5:30 a.m. In July, the sun rises at about that time. I love being awakened by the sun. Over the past two weeks, the sun has been rising closer to 6 a.m. [Photos above and below of New York by Marc Myers]

Read more

It turns out there were two Modern Jazz Quartets. The first was the one we know well and have long loved. It was formed in 1952 and featured pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Percy Heath and drummer Kenny Clarke, who was replaced by Connie Kay in 1955. They played what became known as chamber jazz—a refined style with group interplay typically found in classical music.

Read more

The passing of Joe Melson last week made me revisit Roy Orbison, one of pop’s most fascinating songwriters who also had one of the most beautiful singing voices of the 1960s. His music style blended rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, doo-wop and country, and Melson was Orbison’s songwriting partner on many hits. In all, they wrote more than 200 songs together—both of them weighing in on the words and music. Today, a deep dive into Orbison and 10 video clips. [Photo above of Joe Melson and Roy Orbison, courtesy of RoyOrbison.com]

Read more

Marion Evans, one of the finest post-war, big-band arrangers based in New York whose work always aimed to astonish the listener without overwhelming the orchestra or the singer, died July 22. He was 100. [Photo above of Marion Evans in 2015 by Jack Firneno]

Read more

Another month has passed, with dozens of new CDs pouring in. Here are six that stand out:

Randy Ingram—Sound Within (Chill Tone). Pianist Randy Ingram has a lovely, sensitive keyboard touch, as evidenced on this moving tribute to pianist Bill Evans. Backing Randy are Rufus Reid on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums. Both Joe and Rufus played with Evans—Joe as a member of the final Bill Evans Trio and Reid during a run at Boston’s Jazz Workshop, where I saw them play in 1978. Each track here is more touching than the previous one. Most rewarding is that Randy didn’t make the mistake of trying to mirror Evans but instead has his feel and grace but weaves the songs his way. One of the very finest Bill Evans tribute albums. The Evans tracks: Turn Out the Stars, My Foolish Heart, Ezz-thetic, Letter to Evan, For All We Know and Mother of Earl. Randy included three of his own: Aloft, Sound Within and Remembrance. To buy, go here.

Here’s Ezz-thetic…

Various—Honoring Pat Martino Vol. 2 (High Note). The late guitarist Pat Martino left a mark on all contemporary jazz guitarists. An intensive, swinging player in the late 1960s and ‘70s, he suffered a hemorrhaged arteriovenous malformation that caused a near-fatal seizure in 1980. As a result, he had to relearn the guitar and made a formidable comeback. He died in 2021 at age 77. On this 10-track album, 18 guitarists pay homage to Martino (their names are listed on the cover above) by choosing songs associated with him. If you dig Pat Martino, you’ll love this album. To buy, go here.

Here’s Howard Paul playing Lean Years…

And here’s Dave Stryker and Paul Bollenback playing A Portrait of Diana…

Ronni Ben-Hur—Abriendo Puerta (Dot Time). This is the second of Ronni’s Cuban Notes project, and it’s terrific. Ronni’s guitar is backed by Alejandro Falcón on piano, Pedro Pablo Gutiérrez on bass, Ruy López-Nussa on drums, Octavio Rodríguez Rivera on percussion with Emir Santa Cruz on tenor saxophone (tracks 1, 4, 5 and 7) and Osdalgia Lesmes on vocal (tracks 3 and 5). Recorded at DBega Studios in Havana in November, the album features powerful, authentic Cuban rhythms and music, with Ronni on top with his beautiful guitar. From boleros to son, the album is a sensual, high-energy tribute to cultural cooperation and collaboration. To buy, go here.

Here’s Mi Mejor Canción…

Fathers—Fathers (Blue Note). Fathers is a jazz groove group featuring keyboardist Kiefer Shackelford, bassist Ben Carr, drummer Nate Smith and producer Kenneth Blume. The result is a beat-forward chill album with jazz smarts and cutting-edge atmospheric instrumentals. Think of this as an updating of Pat Metheny meets Roy Ayers and Deodato. Whatever you choose to call this genre, the music sounds like Champagne. I last posted on Kiefer in June here. To buy, go here.

Here’s Pearl…

Rebecca Rafla—Fundamentally Unfinished (self-released). Rebecca Rafla’s voice has a breezy, joyous sound infused with jazz sensibility and phrasing. An Indianapolis native, Rafla also plays flute. There are six originals here centered on love along with four smartly chosen standards. She’s backed by the great Steve Allee on piano, Patrick Wright on guitar. Jesse Wittman on bass, Kenny Phelps and Richard “Sleepy” Floyd on drums, Rob Dixon on saxophone, John Raymond on trumpet, Brian Pattison on trombone and Kathryn Hershberger, Yoonhae Swanson, Anna Czerniak and Rachel Patrick on strings. To buy, go here.

Here’s Roberto Menescal’s Little Boat…

Antonio Adolfo—Balaios (AAM Music). Pianist, composer and arranger Antonio Adolfo has recorded more than 24 albums over 60 years. He grew up in a musical family in Rio de Janeiro—his mother was a violinist in the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra—and he began studying music at the age 7. By age 17, he was already playing professionally. His teachers included Eumir Deodato and, in Paris, Nadia Boulanger. On this one, he pays tribute to his early years. Translated into English, balaios means large straw or wicker baskets, which in this case carry fond memories. This album is relentlessly pretty, song after song after song. He has much in common with Joao Donato in that regard. To buy, go here.

Here’s Claudia…

And here’s Journey to the Interior…

By the time pianist Bobby Timmons recorded This Here Is Bobby Timmons in January 1960 for Riverside, his first studio album as a sole leader, he had been recording and touring as a sideman for four years.

Among his sideman-LP winners were Kenny Dorham’s ‘Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia (1956), Chet Baker’s live concert at Los Angeles’s Forum Theatre (1956), Anthony Ortega’s Jazz for Young Moderns (1957), Hank Mobley’s Hank (1957), Curtis Fuller’s The Opener (1957), Maynard Ferguson’s Boy With Lots of Brass (1957, Lee Morgan’s The Cooker (1957), Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Moanin’ (1958)—at which point he recorded and toured with Blakey—and The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco (1959), when he was a member of that group, too.

Now, Craft Recordings has released This Here Is Bobby Timmons on 180-gram vinyl, with lacquers cut from the original tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, and tip-on jackets, replicating the original artwork. The album will also be released digitally in 192/24 hi-res audio. The trio featured Timmons (p), Sam Jones (b) and Jimmy Cobb (d).

In many ways, this LP is one of the first soul-jazz releases, setting the stage for an entire genre in the 1960s. It also shows off Timmons’s gospel-jazz feel that would be mirrored by many other players. Timmons was known for his energy and earthy grace on the keyboard, and his contribution remains overlooked and under-celebrated. The deterioration of his health and his early death were a tragedy.

Timmons was born in Philadelphia in 1935. His uncle, Robert, played piano and taught Timmons at age 6 in 1941 before also taking on pianist McCoy Tyner. Timmons began playing in front of an audience at the church where his grandfather was a minister.

After graduating from high school, Timmons received a scholarship to study at the Philadelphia Musical Academy. When his studies were completed in 1954, he moved to New York. His first significant showcase album was Moanin’. He had written the title track. When I interviewed Benny Golson in 2008, who had been a member of the Jazz Messengers at the same time, I asked him about Timmons and his composition. Here’s what Golson said:

JW: Bobby Timmons’s Moanin’ was on the same album. What role did you play in that song’s creation?
BG: I just pushed Bobby to take it seriously. Bobby used to have a lick he liked to play every time we finished a tune. He’d play what would become Moanin’s theme. Then he’d stop and laugh, and say, “Ah, that sure is funky.” That went on for a few weeks. By the time we got to Marty’s, a club in Columbus, Ohio, he had the first eight bars, the second eight and the last eight. All he needed was a bridge.

JW: How did the bridge come about?
BG: I called a rehearsal. Everyone wanted to know why we were rehearsing, since we had the band’s book down. I said we were going to do something new. At the club, I told Bobby we were going to put a bridge on the song he always played in between tunes. He said, “That thing? Oh that’s nothing. That’s just an old lick.” I said, “No Bobby, I hear a tune there. We’re all going to sit down here, and you’re going to go up on the bandstand and write a bridge to the tune. He didn’t want to do it. I said, “Trust me, this is the making of a great tune. Write a bridge.”

JW: What did he do?
BG: We went and sat down. After about a half hour, Bobby said, “Come see what you think of this.” I came up and he played it. I said, “No, no Bobby, it misses the point. You don’t have the same groove as the other melody.” He says, “Well you write it then.” I said, “No, this has to be you, Bobby. Come on, try again.” I sat back down, and about 15 minutes later, Bobby said, “Here it is.” I listened and said, “That’s it!” We learned the tune, played it that night and got everyone in the audience up dancing.

In addition to Moanin’, Timmons’s trio album featured two of his other best-known songs—This Here and Dat Dere, which later was given lyrics by Oscar brown Jr. and recorded on his album Sin & Soul, released in 1960. Two years later, vocalist Sheila Jordan recorded it on her debut album Portrait of Sheila.

Like a number of jazz musicians during this period, Timmons became addicted to drugs and alcohol, which greatly compromised his career by the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, touring became difficult due to unreliability. In 1974, he collapsed while on tour. He would die a month or so later of cirrhosis of the liver in New York in March 1974. He was 38.

You can read my interview with Benny Golson here.

To buy the vinyl, go here. To buy the download, go here.

Here’s Moanin’. Listen for Timmons’s brilliant locked-hands passage, and dig the tag he added of Peggy Lee’s Why Don’t You Do Right, recorded with Benny Goodman in 1942…

Here’s Peggy Lee’s hit (dig Louie Bellson’s stick twirls in the background at the opening, that’s a bass sax on the left and Dave Barbour, who would become Lee’s husband, is on guitar)…

Here’s This Here…

Here’s Dat Dere…

Here’s Oscar Brown Jr.’s cover of Dat Dere with his lyrics…

Here’s Sheila Jordan…

And here’s Brown on the Ed Sullivan Show in April 1961. Brown missed the first lyric line to be sure the child was off the slide before he recovers flawlessly on the second line…

Bonus: Here’s Timmons with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers playing Moanin’ live in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, in 1958, with Art Blakey (d), Lee Morgan (tp), Benny Golson (ts), Bobby Timmons (p) and Jymie Merritt (b). An astonishing Timmons solo…

New York downshifted into the low 80s last week (26.7-29 celsius), a relief from the crushing 90s and 100+ temps of previous weeks. We’re now in what’s known as the “dog days of summer.” This period is named for Sirius, the bright “Dog Star,” because our Northern Hemisphere ancestors believed that the star’s alignment this time of year with the Sun caused extra heat to be beamed down. [Photo of Central Park’s 79th St. Transverse above and photos below by Marc Myers]

Read more

“A year before Sire Records founder Seymour Stein coined the term “new wave” to describe the pop-flavored punk bands emerging in 1977, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers had already launched the movement. When the band’s self-titled first album came out 50 years ago this month, its approach was considerably less strident than that of most punk group…

Read more

Lydia Corbett, 91, is a French-English painter and sculptor who, in 1954, sat for Pablo Picasso and was the subject of about 60 works, turning her hair style into a sensation. Her upcoming Redfern Gallery exhibit in London opens on Nov. 4. She spoke with Marc Myers. [Photo above of Sylvette David, 19, later known as Lydia Corbett, on a hillside overlook…

Read more

Regina Hall is an actress known for the films Scary Movie and four of its sequels, Support the Girls and One Battle After Another. She co-stars in “The Five Star Weekend” miniseries on Peacock. She spoke with Marc Myers. [Photo above of Regina Hall in Savannah, Ga., in 2025 by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images]

“Acting was the furthest thing from my mind as a …

Read more

Mary-Louise Parker is a Tony- and Emmy-winning actor known for TV’s “Weeds,” “The West Wing” and “Angels in America.” She co-stars in the film “Young Washington.” She spoke with Marc Myers. [Photo above of Mary-Louise Parker]

“I was born overly sensitive. This is a tricky thing to say because sometimes it can sound as if you’re paying yourself a complime…

Read more

Millie Bobby Brown is a British actress known for TV’s Stranger Things and the films Damsel, The Electric State and the Enola Holmes franchise. She stars in Netflix’s Enola Holmes 3. [Millie Bobby Brown in New York in 2023 by Katie McCurdy]

“I was born with partial hearing loss in my left ear. My first surgery to fix the problem came when I was less tha…

Read more

Oliver Jones, a beloved Canadian arranger, organist, educator and jazz pianist with a pronounced, fleet keyboard style akin to Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and Hank Jones, died on July 22 He was 91. [Photo above of Oliver Jones, courtesy of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame]

Read more

Remarkable is the only way to describe Oscar Peterson in December 1974. The jazz pianist was at the top of his playing prowess, which was always the case when Peterson performed. But on the BBC One’s Omnibus TV series, when André Previn interviewed him, the pianist exceeded even his own dazzling reputation.

Read more

In 1957, big-band singer David Allyn walked out of the Clinton Prison in Dannemora, N.Y., after serving two years for forging drug prescriptions. He had no job, no money and zero prospects. On the outside, time had passed him by. His last recording before his incarceration had taken place in 1949, backed by pianist Paul Smith’s quartet. Then came his drug habit to self-treat PTSD after Army service in North Africa during World War II.

Read more

Classic American sounds include a Harley-Davidson peeling out, the top of a nickel-plated Zippo lighter opening and closing, the squeals of riders on amusement-park rides at dusk, a jukebox changing 45s, chords played on a Fender Telecaster, a college marching band, the engine of a muscle car being revved, sleigh bells in December, a lawnmower on a Saturday, a bat connecting with a hardball, the swoosh of a hoop’s net as a basketball passes through without touching the rim, and French fries sizzling in oil.

Add to the list the Oscar Peterson Trio, featuring Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. The sound of these three playing together was sublime, swinging and tastefully in the pocket. This claim takes nothing away from other favorite piano trios, just that this one moved with extraordinary grace and purpose.

Now Mosaic has released The Classic Oscar Peterson Trio Studio Sessions, an eight-CD set featuring 125 tracks by Peterson, Brown and Thigpen. The material here appeared on the Verve, Limelight and Germany’s MPS labels, spanning from 1959 to 1965.

Newly remastered from original source tapes, the box corrals 14 LPs: A Jazz Portrait of Frank Sinatra, The Jazz Soul of Oscar Peterson, Porgy and Bess, Fiorello!, West Side Story, Affinity, Night Train, The Oscar Peterson Trio Plays, Canadiana Suite, We Get Requests, I/We Had a Ball, Action, The Lost Tapes and The Greatest Name in Jazz. Material pulled from three CDs are Night Train, Collectors’ Disc and Exclusively for My Friends.

This is the Oscar PetersonTrio at its peak, during the years when jazz at this level was universally respected and viewed nationally as fine art. This trio regularly sold out on tours and concerts, and Peterson became a household name as his records sold well, largely because buyers knew they were going to get accomplished playing and interpretations.

On a personal level, what’s glorious about this box is it unites all of the albums I bought as a kid and treasured and then sold off years later in the shift to CDs and then downsizing my analog gear. Best of all, the Peterson Trio on the box sounds better than ever. Why? Here’s Mosaic’s explanation:

“Due to dramatic improvements in analog-to-digital converters and our mastering process, we believe this set will be viewed as the most sonically faithful presentation of Peterson’s extraordinary musical output of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Our goal was to highlight the fine details, beauty, and unique sound inherent in his extraordinary output. This mastering process utilized hi-res 24-bit/192 kHz transfers from the original analog master tapes. The only exception is the MPS recordings, The Lost Tapes where the analog tapes were never found.”

What was left off this box were the nine American songbook composer albums recorded in the summer of 1959. Which, for me, is a sigh of relief, since those should be handled as a separate set rather than dramatically inflating the number of tracks and the price of this box. And frankly, I like this material better than the same old same old songs.

So why was the music produced by this trio special? That’s a tough call, since the Oscar Peterson Duo of 1950 and ‘51, and the trios and quartet that recorded subsequently on the Clef label in the 1950s were hardly chopped liver. The same goes for the trios of the 1970s and beyond. This trio featured Peterson with an especially sparkling dance quality thanks to his lighter touch on the keyboard and a commanding attack that didn’t go overboard.. As with most things classic, the seductions comes with knowing when the experience is just enough.

Most of all, Brown and Thigpen were one of the tightest bassist-drummer duos in the business, providing Peterson with impeccable time and a conversational backdrop. Brown was tasteful and solid straight-ahead bassist, and listening to his contrapuntal lines as Peterson plays is a joy in and of itself. Thigpen was equally juicy, keeping the tempos and execution breezy and light—but with a subtle element of intensity and drama. He played brushes so well you didn't miss the drumsticks.

For those who grew into jazz in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, listening to this Mosaic box will be like reconnecting with old friends. That was true for me of the Frank Sinatra album, West Side Story, We Get Requests and tracks like Shiny Stockings, Satin Doll, This Could Be the Start of Something Big, People, A Foggy Day, L’il Darlin, The Girl From Ipanema, Coney Island U.S.A. and so many others.

Listening over the weekend, I still remember dragging my thumb nail through the Peterson records’ taut cellophane at the opening of the album covers to liberate the LPs. My initial hope was that the record wasn’t warped, which would create a “wow” distortion in the sound. The excitement of these records was the expectation that they would be great. Every song Peterson took on was turned into gold.

What I especially love about this box is that all of the tracks are studio recordings. This trio tended to play a few ticks too fast in concert, largely a result of Peterson kicking off songs in a semi-sprint. In the studio, they were more relaxed and in a sensual zone.

I do hope Mosaic eventually gets around to releasing The Classic Oscar Peterson MPS Studio Sessions 1968-1971. I’d love to hear Girl Talk, Motions and Emotions, Tristeza on Piano, In Tune and the others remastered.

Bob Blumenthal’s liner notes are superb, and the 12-inch, 20-page booklet is loaded with exciting images.

To buy The Classic Oscar Peterson Trio Studio Sessions (Mosaic), go here.

From the box, here’s Shiny Stockings…

Here’s Satin Doll…

And here’s My One and Only Love…

Bonus: Here’s the trio in Holland in 1965 playing Maria…