Over the past several years, I posted a series on vital Brazilian female singers who have championed the bossa nova. Unfortunately, JazzWax readers haven’t been able to access these posts because they were scattered in time. Unless you remembered their names, you were out of luck.

Now, I have assembled a handy index to the series. When I post on addition…

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Last week, I received an email from Melodi Graf McCraine. She wrote that she was the daughter of tenor saxophonist Bob Graf and that she had researched her father and created a website to honor him. I said how about an interview? She said, Sure!” [Photo above of Bob Graf courtesy of Melodi Graf McCraine]

Melodi told me that Graf was the first tenor saxophonist in the Count Basie Septet in 1950, thanks to a recommendation by trumpeter Clark Terry. He was soon recruited to join Woody Herman’s Third Herd, and Wardell Gray replaced Graf in Basie’s group. Graf also pops up in recordings with the Chet Baker Big Band, leading a quartet backing jazz vocalist Bev Kelly and with Grant Green in 1960. [Photo above of Bob Graf courtesy of Melodi Graf McCraine]

Then the trail goes cold. I interviewed Mel by email and rounded up my favorite Bob Graf clips so you could have a listen:

JazzWax: How old were you when your father, Bob Graf, died?

Melodi Graf McCraine: He died when I was 15, in 1981, at age 54. For most of my life, his jazz years felt just out of reach. I knew that music filled our house. I knew that people lit up when he walked into a room. But the full extent of his career—who he played with, where he toured and the reputation he had built up before walking away from that life—is something I’m still piecing together through research.

JW: Where was your dad born?

MGM: My father was born in St. Louis in 1927. His mother, Emily, was a telephone operator for Southwestern Bell. His father, Otto, was an executive at a tool-and-die company that held patents on airplane parts. Bob was their only child, and his mother encouraged his love of music.

JW: What inspired him at the start?

MGM: I don’t know yet. What I can tell you is that something got into him early. Just this morning, I found a photograph of him at around age 7 already holding a saxophone. [Photo above of Bob Graf at age 7 courtesy of Melodi Graf McCraine]

JW: Who was his biggest Influence?

MGM: Zoot Sims. His mother had taken him to see Zoot play when Bob was around 13. That concert changed everything but I’m not sure where it took place. What I know is that Zoot was a stylistic influence. Since my father was born in 1927 and Zoot in 1925, they were almost exactly the same age, so it was likely a peer influence from Zoot’s recordings. Their paths crossed when my father was in the Woody Herman band from 1950 to 1951.

JW: How did your dad learn to play?

MGM: His mother got him a saxophone, and he began with formal lessons and learned to read music. He practiced in the bathroom for the acoustics. He loved hearing the sound of his King saxophone bouncing off the tile walls. But his true gift was his ear, which greatly helped his improvising.

JW: What did you learn through your research?

MGM: By digging through the Smithsonian Institution’s archives in Washington, D.C., I learned who he played with and how prominent he was. As for when he began playing professionally in St. Louis and with whom, I’m still piecing that together. What I do know is that he was deeply embedded in the local scene before his first big break.

JW: What was that break?

MGM: Trumpeter Clark Terry knew my father well enough that he recommended him to Count Basie in 1950, when he was forming a small group. My dad was 23. That level of trust between musicians doesn’t happen overnight. In his Smithsonian oral history transcript, Clark recalled recommending my father to Basie when Basie was looking for a tenor saxophonist. Clark said he described my dad as “a young Caucasian kid named Bob Graf.” Basie’s response, Clark said, was “Get the kid.” Bob joined, and the septet opened at the Brass Rail in Chicago.

JW: Who else talked about your dad in the Smithsonian oral histories?

MGM: Buddy De Franco named him directly as “Bobby Graf from St. Louis,” the original tenor saxophonist in Basie’s first group before Wardell Gray.

JW: Your dad must have left Basie pretty quickly, since his first recording with Woody Herman took place on May 5, 1950.

MGM: I suppose so. My dad was recruited at the Brass Rail in Chicago, where the Basie group was playing. Carlos Gastel, Woody Herman’s manager, kept coming into the club and hired him away for Woody’s band. We know the band was on the road in Nashville by June 25, 1950 because my dad and the band recorded in a studio there. This was Woody’s Third Herd, which recorded for Capitol. The late Steve Voce, a longtime BBC jazz broadcaster who wrote for Jazz Journal International for nearly 60 years, did an extensive study of the Herman bands. He identified my dad as the featured tenor saxophone soloist who follows trombonist Bill Harris on the Capitol track Sonny Speaks. Four more sides followed for MGM Records in January 1951. On this session, Bob was teamed with fellow tenor saxophonists Phil Urso and Jack DuLong.

JW: You dad’s jazz recording discography is silent until 1956. Do you know why he left Herman and what he did in between?

MGM: Not yet. I know he worked the West Coast circuit through the mid-50s, including with the Lighthouse All-Stars at Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach. But he wasn’t working off his card to join Local 47. St. Louis was still his home. On Oct. 18 1956, he was in Los Angeles recording with the Chet Baker Big Band for Pacific Jazz. He played alongside Fred Waters on alto saxophone, Phil Urso on tenor and Bill Hood on baritone.

JW: What about his family life at this point in time?

MGM: My dad was married to his first wife, Helen. They had two sons—Bobby Jr. and Kirby, who, sadly, took his own life when he was young. Helen never recovered.

JW: What did your father do after his Chet Baker recording session?

MGM: He didn’t disappear from music. In January 1958, he performed at Westminster College and Peacock Alley in St. Louis with local musicians Ron Ruff (ts,fl), Jimmy Williams (p), Bob Maisel (b) and Al St. James (d). The gigs were recorded by Delmark Records, produced by label founder Robert Koester. His playing on Street of Dreams was singled out in the liner notes. [Photo above of Bob Graf courtesy of Melodi Graf McCraine]

JW: In November 1959, his quartet backed vocalist Bev Kelly in St. Louis for VGM records.

MGM: Yes, that recording sat unreleased for more than 20 years before surfacing on VGM the year he died.

JW: His final jazz recording was with Grant Green.

MGM: In December 1959 and February 1960, he performed alongside guitarist Grant Green, organist Sam Lazar and drummer Chauncey Williams at the Holy Barbarian Coffee House in St. Louis. In 1963, Down Beat magazine mentioned that he was leading a bossa nova quartet at a St. Louis club called the Fallen Angel. The music never left him. It simply lived in smaller rooms.

JW: When did he meet your mom, Martha?

MGM: He met her at a St. Louis gig, around 1959. She was 12 years younger and completely unimpressed by the Hollywood stories. She told him flat out there was no future if he kept traveling. He had some obligations to finish but he chose her. My older sister, Vicki, was born in 1961. To make ends meet, he started taking gigs in St. Louis but soon went into business repairing instruments full time. He had contracts with local schools covering everything from clarinets to flutes. Occasionally, he played local gigs. That was their deal. [Photo above of Bob and Martha Graf courtesy of Melodi Graf McCraine]

JW: How was your parents’ relationship?

MGM: My parents were married for a couple of decades. My mother passed away nine years ago. She never remarried. He was the love of her life. They had their struggles, but they always found their way back to each other. He died of health complications just months after their last reconciliation. He had lived hard and the years caught up with him. [Photo above of Bob Graf with Melodi, left, and Vicki, courtesy of Melodi Graf McCraine]

JW: And his first wife?

MGM: I believe Helen passed away in the early 1980s, not long after my dad died.Their divorce wasn’t related to Kirby’s death. There was a long period of estrangement between my dad and his first family. I didn’t meet my half-brothers until I was around 8 or 9.

JW: How did your mother take his death?

MGM: It was hard. She talked about him until the end. I remember being in Best Buy with her years ago and coming across a Chet Baker CD. That opened up a whole conversation about those California years. I would show her YouTube clips of his recordings and she would watch quietly and then start talking.

JW: Do you feel now that you know your father better?

MGM: For sure. In a way, my research has given me an opportunity to get to know him through articles and oral history transcripts. I’ve built a full archive of recordings, photographs, personnel lists and source citations at BobGrafMusic.com (go here). He deserves to be remembered. It just took a daughter who wouldn’t let go. I only wish he were still around. I have a zillion questions.

Tracks with Bob Graf:

Here’s Graf in May 1950 with Woody Herman’s superb reed section playing Neal Hefti’s arrangement of Pennies From Heaven, with a vocal by Herman and the Alyce King Vokettes. The band: Conte Candoli, Bernie Glow, Paul Cohen and Don Ferrara (tp); Neal Hefti (tp,arr); Eddie Bert, Bill Harris and Jerry Dorn (tb); Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl); Al Cohn, Buddy Wise and Bob Graf (ts); Marty Flax (bar); Dave McKenna (p); Red Mitchell (b); Sonny Igoe (d); Milt Jackson (vibes) and Alyce King Vokettes (vcl)…

Here’s the Herman band on June 25, 1950 playing Al Cohn’s arrangement of Sonny Speaks. The band: Doug Mettome, Conte Candoli, Don Ferrara and Rolf Ericson (tp); Herb Randel, Bill Harris and Jerry Dorn (tb); Woody Herman (cl,as); Phil Urso, Buddy Wise and Bob Graf (ts); Marty Flax (bar); Dave McKenna (p); Red Mitchell (b) and Sonny Igoe (d)…

Here’s the Chet Baker Big Band on October 19, 1956 playing Phil Urso’s arrangement of Worrying the Life Out of Me. The band: Chet Baker (tp); Bob Burgess (tb); Fred Waters (as); Phil Urso (as,ts,bs); Bob Graf (ts); Bill Hood (bs); Bobby Timmons (p); Jimmy Bond (b) and James McKean (d). The tenor solo sounds like Graf…

Here’s Street of Dreams from Bob Graf at Westminster in St. Louis on Jan. 11, 1958…

Here’s singer Bev Kelly on Nov. 29, 1959 with the Bob Graf Quartet singing Detour Ahead. The fidelity is miserable but you do catch some terrific Bob Graf and a taste of Kelly…

And finally, here’s Bob Graf (ts), Sam Lazar (org), Grant Green (g) and Chauncey Williams (d) at the Holy Barbarian in St. Louis on December 25, 1959 or February 20, 1960 playing The Holy Barbarian Blues…

While hitchhiking through Europe alone in the second half of 1979, I spent a great deal of time in pubs, especially on rainy days when rides were spare. My first stop was London and then Wales, for a month. During my journey through the Welsh countryside, I received quite an education in Jamaican rocksteady. Jukeboxes were loaded with singles.

Rocksteady was a popular home-grown Jamaican style that cropped up in 1966 and continues today. It appeared in the wake of Jamaica’s horn-dominated ska of the late 1950s and early ‘60s and before the bass-heavy reggae emerged in the late 1960s.

The lilting rocksteady merged Jamaica’s rhythms with American romantic soul capped with a beckoning Jamaican vocal. The laid-back genre was perfect for slow-dancing and a welcome alternative to the fast-paced, celebratory ska. In jazz, a parallel would be Lester Young’s tenor saxophone playing American songbook ballads.

Rocksteady was romantic, jazzy and hypnotic, music that let dancers rock to a steady beat. In many instances, the rocksteady versions of American soul were equal to the originals. Overall, the music is tranquil and locks into a seductive groove.

Yesterday, I spent the day listening to rocksteady while writing. Today, I’m sharing 10 tracks plus bonus videos that will likely make you fall in love with the music, if you aren’t already a fan.

Here’s Hopeton Lewis’s Take It Easy (1967), which is widely considered rocksteady’s first release…

Here’s Alton Ellis and the Flames’ Rock Steady (1967), the namesake of the genre…

Here are the Paragons’ The Tide Is High (1967), which was covered by Blondie in 1980…

Here’s Phillis Dean, known as the “Queen of Rocksteady,” singing Perfidia in 1967…

Here’s Alton Ellis, known as the “Godfather of Rocksteady,” singing You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, a 1970 cover of the Blood, Sweat & Tears 1969 hit…

Here’s Freddie McGregor singing Sitting in the Park in 1979, a cover of Billy Stewart’s 1965 hit…

Here’s Johnny Osborne’s 1972 cover of Ready or Not Here I Come, a 1968 Delfonics hit…

Here’s Claudia Fontaine’s 1981 cover of Bloodstone’s 1973 hit Natural High…

Here’s Alton Ellis singing his 1993 cover of the Delfonics’ 1968 hit La La Means I Love You…

And here’s Bitty McLean’s 2004 cover of David Ruffin’s 1975 hit Walk Away From Love…

Bonus: Here’s a concert by rocksteady all-stars at the 2009 Montreal International Jazz Festival…

Here’s Freddie McGregor followed by John Holt in concert in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2003…

And here’s a documentary on rocksteady…

We listen to jazz today and just assume that because the music wound up on records, everyone in the country took it seriously. That was hardly the case. Jazz was ignored for large chunks of time or viewed despairingly as the music of alcoholics, prostitutes, drug addicts and gangsters. Not until 1957 did jazz achieve a high level of respect nationwide, on par with classical, and that golden era lasted only eight years. [Photo above, from left, Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records; trumpeter Miles Davis, Columbia producer Teo Macero and pianist Dave Brubeck in the early 1960s]

Jazz was first performed in American classical concert halls as early as May 2, 1912, when James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra played New York’s Carnegie Hall. On Feb. 12 1924, George Gershwin played piano in a performance of his composition Rhapsody in Blue, while Paul Whiteman conducted his Palais Royal Orchestra at New York’s Aeolian Hall.

With the arrival of Prohibition between 1920 and 1933, jazz became the music of speakeasies, sex workers, rum-running mobsters, boozing musicians and privileged college students. In other words, jazz became exotica and music of the underworld and underground.

Big bands adapted jazz for the swing syncopation needed to fill dance halls in the 1930s. Many of the major bandleaders were formally trained on the clarinet, so the works of classical composers were familiar to them. Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Boyd Raeburn and others recorded classically inspired jazz pieces. On Jan.16, 1938, jazz was performed at Carnegie Hall when Benny Goodman was recorded there with his small group and big band before a packed house.

The big band era gave jazz a much-needed post-Prohibition rehabilitation, but it was happening mostly in New York and a few other cities. With the rise of bebop in 1946, jazz went into clubs, where it became the music of soldiers on leave, smokers, drinkers, hipsters on a first date and college students in the know.

Then three things happened in the 1950s: the affordability of home phonograph consoles housed in living rooms, the widespread popularity of rock ‘n’ roll and the acquisition of television sets.

The phonograph allowed adults to explore different types of music through mail-order record clubs like Columbia House. The music could be consumed at their leisure from their sofas. Rock ‘n’ roll was viewed by parents as corrosive to their relationship with their kids; and the television set established national standards of humor, musical enjoyment and behavior that fed advertising’s American Dream.

How did all of these trends help to boot jazz’s reputation? One could order jazz LPs that were easy for the average ear to absorb and understand at home—including records by Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis.

With the music of Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and others playing adversarial roles in households, parents began looking for music with an edge that made them feel young outside of the classical and pop realms. That was motive enough to begin acquiring a taste for jazz.

And the appearance of TV sets in more households by 1957 led to network television broadcasts that not only entertained but also educated viewers.

Such programming was driven by the wives of executives who ran TV networks, ad agencies and consumer goods companies. Many collected modern art, knew the names of famed architects, attended the opera and ballet and understood the value and excellence of high culture. When it came to the arts, these spouses had no patience for racial discrimination.

NBC aired the Nat King Cole Show (1956-‘57) and the Steve Allen Show (1956-’60), exposing a national audience to jazz and jazz-pop singers and musicians. CBS broadcast Patti Page hosting The Big Record (1957-’58), which often featured jazz-pop singers. The network also broadcast the Ed Sullivan Show, which routinely showcased jazz-pop artists.

But the TV show that allowed jazz to be universally thought of as high culture was CBS’s airing of The Sound of Jazz, the December 8, 1957 edition of the CBS television series The Seven Lively Arts. Also significant was Robert Herridge’s The Sound of Miles Davis, on April 2, 1959.

Jazz was finally invited to the high-brow table, and seeing the genius of Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie and others on TV made the greatness of these artists impossible to ignore, putting them in the same league as the symphony and chamber group musicians.

Also vital to jazz’s transition from low-culture to high culture was Leonard Bernstein, whose songs for Broadway’s West Side Story (1957) wound up on jazz albums, making those LPs more appealing. By then, Bernstein had already composed works paying homage to jazz, including Prelude, Fugue and Riffs and Symphony No. 2: The Age of Anxiety (both in 1949). He also explored jazz in his Young People's Concerts (Jazz in the Concert Hall in 1964) on CBS and his famous What Is Jazz episode.

Others vital to helping jazz become high culture were Nat Hentoff, whose album liner notes, books, album and TV show production helped develop a high-brow taste for and understanding of the music.

Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, whose score for Gypsy (1959) fine-tuned the ear for jazz. Norman Granz, whose Jazz at the Philharmonic tours brought jazz all-stars into concert halls in the U.S. and abroad.

George Wein, who in 1954 launched the Newport Jazz Festival, which created a daytime and evening space for jazz outdoors.

Columbia Records jazz head George Avakian signed Miles Davis to the label and was instrumental in helping to release major recordings by jazz artists in the 78 and 10-inch and 12-inch LP eras.

And radio DJs including “Symphony Sid” Torin, Fred Robbins, Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie and Arthur “Turntable” Pearce who supported live jazz and played jazz records on the air.

As kids exposed to jazz entered their teens in the 1960s, there was no holding them back from the pop-rock appeal of the Beatles and Rolling Stones and hard-rock lure of Led Zeppelin and the Who. Jazz-rock fusion of the 1970s appealed to college students. And those kids who had been captivated by jazz in the early ‘60s moved on to light pop, soul-jazz and even rap.

All of this left jazz without a young core audience, and the music began its slow shift toward cultural oblivion. This isn’t a jazz obit or an essay on who killed jazz. Nor is it a long attempt to point out again that the New York Times Sunday Magazine doesn’t think jazz was worthy enough to include at least Sonny Rollins or Herbie Hancock in its “30 Greatest Living American Composers” list.

Rather, it’s merely to point out that between 1957 and 1964, jazz became high-culture after winning the respect of Fifth Avenue socialites and Main Street TV-watchers. It was a golden time for jazz, when the color of a jazz musician’s skin was meaningless and integrated jazz groups proved to America that race didn’t matter at all when it came to musical excellence and exceptionalism.

I’ll leave you with this: Here’s Nat King Cole in 1957 singing Tenderly on his TV show backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Herb Ellis. What’s not to love?…

Manny Albam was a New York jazz orchestral master. Today, sadly, his name and the popularity of his standout leadership albums are fading, which is unfortunate. They swing and are superb.

The musicians who who made their living recording primarily in New York remembered Albam fondly when I interviewed them in the 2000s. Hal McCusick, Bob Brookmeyer, So…

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Today marks the 102nd birth anniversary of Shorty Rogers, who, with Gerry Mulligan, helped launch West Coast jazz in the early 1950s. The sound was airy, punchy and catchy and came to represent a new movement that captured the relaxed and idyllic lifestyle and temperate weather of Southern California.

Rogers, like Mulligan, was a master of contrapuntal composing and arranging, He also was a veteran of two superb post-war big bands—Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. Tired of cross-country tours and months away from his family, Rogers left Kenton to start his own all-star band, Shorty Rogers and His Giants, and settled in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.

Less explored by jazz writers was Rogers’s influence on the composers of TV show themes in the 1960s. All knew they had just a minute to grab and hold viewers and then send them off with the theme stuck in their heads at the end so they’d return the following week. Rogers’s swinging approach in the 1950s was the perfect model for television a decade later.

Rogers was the first to bring the jazz sound to Hollywood’s film noirs in 1953 with his arrangements of jazz themes for The Wild One, and in 1955 with the score for Man With the Golden Arm. Johnny Mandel’s score for I Want to Live wouldn’t appear until 1958 and Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn arrived that same year.

Rogers’s upbeat, tight arranging style had a big influence on Hoyt Curtin (The Flintstones, The Jetsons), Sid Ramin (The Patty Duke Show), Richard Wess (I Dream of Jeannie), Jack Keller (Bewitched, Gidget), Lionel Newman (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) and many others. All were fully aware of Rogers’s dramatic jazz style and Basie-esque approach.

Rogers is credited as providing the end theme for The Partridge Family sitcom and served as the show’s initial music director. He also was brought in as a score doctor for The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island, The Rookies, Vega$, Tabitha and Viva Valdez.

Here are clips of Rogers’s music in the 1950s, which served as a model for a generation of TV-show composers. As you listen, you can hear the essence of the style used for opening and closing themes:

Here’s Powder Puff (1953)…

Here’s Coup de Graas (1953)…

Here’s Rogers’s arrangement for The Wild One, from the film The Wild One (1953)…

Here’s Cool Sunshine from East Coast-West Coast Scene (1954)…

Here’s Isn’t It Romantic from The Swinging Mr. Rogers (1955)…

Here’s Audition from Man With the Golden Arm (1955)…

Here’s A Ship Without a Sail from Shorty Rogers Plays Richard Rodgers (1957)…

Here’s A Geophysical Ear from Portrait of Shorty (1957)…

Here’s No Such Luck from Chances Are It Swings (1958)…

And here’s If I Only Had a Brain from The Wizard of Oz and Other Harold Arlen Songs (1959)…

Bonus: Here’s Shorty Rogers and His Giants at Japan’s Aurex Jazz Festival in 1983 playing Infinity Promenade, with Shorty Rogers (flhrn), Bud Shank (as), Jimmy Giuffre (ts), Bob Cooper (ts), Bill Perkins (bs), Pete Jolly (p), Monty Budwig (b) and Shelly Manne (d)…

Thanks to Todd Selbert for the Shorty reminder.

Seventeen years ago, the BBC aired 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz. The documentary was a somewhat forced argument that jazz had changed dramatically with the release of four albums that year—the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’ Ah Um and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. While these albums were important, I’d argue that 1965 was a much bigger deal for jazz—and all popular music, for that matter.

In 1965, jazz was changing rapidly due to several significant external events. Live jazz was under pressure from television’s surging appeal with stay-at-home adults, the vitality of folk music’s socially conscious grip, and Beatlemania, which all but invented the youth culture and stimulated it. The arrival of the Beatles opened the gates in America to an influx of British folk-rock and blues-rock bands. The result was fewer domestic touring and recording opportunities for jazz musicians on both coasts as labels shifted their focus and budgets to AM-oriented pop-rock.

During the British Invasion and rise of Motown and Stax, the economic squeeze forced many top white and black jazz artists who could sight-read to relocate to Los Angeles where there was plenty of work recording for advertising agencies and TV shows and movies. Those jazz musicians who remained touring and recording focused their music on standing out through originality, political messaging and attempted hybrids with rock and soul.

In 1965 alone, an extraordinary number of exceptional jazz albums were recorded and released—not just four. In effect, 1965 was a banner year when jazz shifted to a much more individualistic expression, as musicians were given greater leeway by labels to do their own thing. Much of it was modal, abstract and exciting.

That year saw the release of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, a deeply poetic modal quintet album; Horace Silver’s Song for My Father, a jazz-funk masterpiece; John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, arguably his most significant recording; and Miles Davis’s E.S.P., the first studio LP by his second great quintet.

Jazz also saw the release of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Free for All, with two originals by Wayne Shorter, one by Freddie Hubbard and another by Clare Fischer; Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue, his first leadership album; and Grant Green’s Idle Moments, one of the guitarist’s best recordings.

In rock, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, with Like a Rolling Stone, was issued, and so were the Beatles’ Help! and transformative Rubber Soul; the Who’s My Generation; the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads, featuring early signs of a brilliant songwriting career by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger with The Last Time and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction; and the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn Turn Turn, which launched the California folk-rock movement.

In addition, Paul Butterfield Blues Band was a blues-rock milestone; the Beach Boys’ Summer Days (and Summer Nights) promoted the virtues of Southern California’s beaches as a teenage Shargri-La; the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Do You Believe in Magic was their first album and in some ways established the sunshine pop genre, with John Sebastian’s gentle love songs casting the group as the East Coast Beach Boys; Here Are the Sonics launched serious garage rock; and Introducing the Beau Brummels proved that the U.S. group’s debut album, produced by Sly Stone with 12 original songs, could Americanize the new British sound.

In soul in 1965, Motown shifted into high gear. Chart-topping LPs included More Hits by the Supremes, The Temptations Sing Smokey, and Four Tops Second Album. These LPs produced six #1 singles and ignited Motown’s massive success. Also hot were Ramsey Lewis’s The In Crowd; Otis Redding’s Otis Blue, The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling; Martha & The Vandellas’ Dance Party; Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ Going to a Go-Go; The Impressions’ People Get Ready; and James Brown and the Famous Flames’ Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, to name just a handful.

So, 1965 clearly was a breathtaking year for jazz as well as rock and soul, dwarfing 1959 or any other year for that matter. For the first time, jazz, rock and soul were going off in original directions with mass-market success, making it possible for anyone with a radio and few bucks for vinyl to enjoy them all.

A shame this world of inclusive, upbeat and intellectual music no longer exists. I can tell you that the music of 1965 was electrifying to listen to on AM radio and in record stores and it was exciting for any kid to be in the middle of that year’s cultural lurch forward. You had no clue what your favorite artists would release next but you couldn’t wait to find out.

Let’s listen to a handful of important jazz albums from 1965:

Here’s Herbie Hancock’s title track from Maiden Voyage…

Here’s Bobby Hutcherson’s Jasper from Dialogue…

Here’s Grant Green’s Jean de Fleur from Idle Moments…

Here’s the title track, by Wayne Shorter, for Miles Davis’s E.S.P….

Here’s Andrew Hill’s Refuge from Point of Departure…

And here’s Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers playing Clare Fischer’s Pensativa from Free for All…

Billie Holiday is jazz’s finest and most meaningful singer. Born 111 years ago today, she revolutionized jazz vocalizing with a style that was all her own. She embodied the sound and emotionalism of jazz, the way Armstrong did before her on the trumpet, and you know it’s her the moment you hear her voice. [Photo above of Billie Holiday and Lester Young]

Today, I thought I’d assemble five major reasons why Holiday remains significant and why her voice best exemplifies the spirit and soul of jazz:

1. Songbook pioneer—While Ella Fitzgerald is commonly referred to as the First Lady of Song and most closely identified with jazz interpretations of the American songbook, Holiday began the trend in November 1933—a year earlier than Fitzgerald’s career-launching win on Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

Age 14 at the time, Holiday recorded Your Mother’s Son-in-Law with Benny Goodman for Columbia producer John Hammond. The song was written by Alberta Nichols and her husband, Mann Holiner, and the recording was Holiday’s first. Her 78 of Love Me or Leave Me (Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson), also with Goodman, followed in December.

Here’s Holiday singing Your Mother’s Son-in-Law in 1933…

2. Courage—Billie Holiday was fearless in the face of the racial climate in the 1930s and ‘40s. Not only did she record with Goodman in the early 1930s but she also recorded with Artie Shaw and His Orchestra in July 1938, after he hired her in March as his lead female vocalist.

With Any Old Time a huge hit, the Shaw band and Holiday hit the road. She became one of the first black female vocalists to tour the South with an all-white band. Before long, Holiday left as pressure from Shaw’s nervous management team increased and Shaw himself kept her off the bandstand to avoid problems with audiences.

Here’s what Holiday told writer Dave Dexter in Down Beat magazine in 1939:

“At first, we worked together OK. Then his managers started belly-aching. Pretty soon it got so I would sing just two numbers a night. When I wasn’t singing, I had to stay backstage. Artie wouldn’t let me sit out front with the band.

“Last year [1938], when we were at the Lincoln Hotel, the hotel management told me I had to use the back door. That was all right. But I had to ride up and down in the freight elevators, and every night Artie made me stay upstairs in a little room without a radio or anything all the time.

“Finally it got so I would stay up there, all by myself, reading everything I could get my hands on, from 10 to nearly 2 in the morning, going downstairs to sing just one or two numbers. Then one night ... Artie said he couldn’t let me sing. I was always given two shots on each program.

“The real trouble was this: Shaw wanted to sign me to a five-year contract and when I refused, it burned him. He was jealous of the applause I got when I made one of my few appearances with the band each night.”

In April 1939, just months after leaving Shaw, Holiday recorded Strange Fruit for Commodore. The song protested the lynching of blacks, with lyrics likening the dead bodies to fruit hanging from the trees. Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, called the song “the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

Here’s Any Old Time (1938), featuring Billie Holiday…

3. Emotional—Holiday was jazz’s first vocal storyteller. Her singing style was so impassioned and heartfelt that the narrative’s events in songs sounded as if they had actually happened to her. The approach was so personal and touching that she caused jazz musicians to drop their machismo and deliver their music more emotionally.

Here’s Billie Holiday live in 1957 on CBS’s The Sound of Jazz singing Fine and Mellow, with solos, in order, by Ben Webster, Lester Young, Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge. They may have been on network TV reaching millions but the musicians had an audience of one—Holiday…

4. Inspiring—Generations of jazz singers and musicians have credited Holiday’s vocal phrasing and her coming in behind or ahead of the beat as being ahead of the curve.

As Frank Sinatra noted in a July 1958 essay he wrote for Ebony magazine:

“From the days of my childhood I’ve been listening to sounds and singers, both colored and white, and absorbing a little bit here and a little bit there. But it is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early 1930s, who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me. It has been a warm and wonderful influence, and I am very proud to acknowledge it.”

Singer Helen Merrill revered Holiday, particularly her depth of feeling and how she interpreted songs. The feeling was mutual. Here are Merrill and Holiday in November 1956 at a party at writer-producer-pianist Leonard Feather’s New York apartment singing a duet on You Go to My Head, with Feather on piano. Dig Merrill’s reverence for space and air…

5. Struggle—From Holiday’s battle with drug and alcohol addiction to her miserable romantic relationships and wrenching 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, written with William Dufty, she lived the music and gave it everything she had. What every jazz musician and singer respects about Holiday was her commitment and determination.

In February 1958, in one of her final recording sessions before her death on July 17, 1959, she recorded The End of a Love Affair, a song she didn’t know but managed to feel her way along. From my 2009 post on Lady in Satin:

“Billie admitted on-mic that she didn’t know The End of a Love Affair, and she needed multiple retakes. Finally, arranger-conductor Ray Ellis decided to record the orchestra alone, with Billie adding her vocal later using a headset to hear the playback. The arrangement is so powerful and so perfectly matched to Billie’s voice that the treatment breaks your heart.”

Here are composite takes 1 through 4 of The End of a Love Affair—including the orchestral take…

Here are composite takes 5 through 7 overdubbed to the orchestral recording…

And here’s the master (take 8) that appeared on the stereo LP…

In 1963, guitarist João Gilberto and his wife, Astrud, stayed with Stan Getz and his wife, Monica, in their New York apartment. It’s the same apartment where Getz would cut a tendon in his leg in 1965 when he slipped on the floor and his right foot went through a glass door. Stan and Monica wouldn’t buy their Shadowbrook estate in Irvington, N.Y., until 1966. [Photo above of Astrud Gilberto courtesy of Brazil’s Acervo UH]

The Gilbertos had been in New York since late 1962, when João appeared at the famed Brazilian Guitar/Bossa Nova concert held at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 21, 1962. The event marked the first time the laid-back Brazilian music was performed live for an American audience in the U.S.

Monica told me that while the Gilbertos were staying with the Getzs in early 1963, Astrud, João and Stan rehearsed The Girl From Ipanema using Norman Gimbel’s English-language lyrics (and Corcovado with Gene Lees’s English-language lyrics). This was in advance of their recording of Getz/Gilberto in March 1963.

Creed Taylor had asked Gimbel to come up with lyrics for Ipanema after Gimbel penned English words for Insensatez (How Insensitive), recorded by Maria Toledo on Getz’s Jazz Samba Encore! in February 1963.

So when Astrud and João joined Antônio Carlos Jobim (p), Sebastião Neto (b) and Milton Banana (d,pandeiro) at New York’s A&R Recording in March, she had already rehearsed it and was good to go. Astrud died in 2023 at 83.

Today, I have a treat for you: a bunch of new videos of Astrud on TV or in concert:

Here’s Take Me to Aruanda at the jazz festival Newport à Paris on August 11, 1968…

Here she is singing Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes’s Canto de Ossanha (Let Go) in 1970…

Here’s Marcos Valle’s So Nice (Summer Samba) at the Jazz Summit Hollabrunn in Austria on July 5, 1985…

Here’s Gilberto on the same tour, this time in Switzerland at Estival Lugano in 1985…

Here she is performing on Spanish TV’s Angel Casas Show on March 25, 1985…

Here she is for an hour in 1987 in at The Hague in the Netherlands on July 11, 1987…

And here she is in Leonberg, Germany, in 1988…

Bonus: Here’s a throwback, featuring Gilberto with Pim Jacobs (p), Wim Overgaauw (g), Ruud Jacobs (b) and Dom Um Romão (d), with Ruud Brink (ts) on Dutch TV in July 1965…

In the first part of this series, I posted about records that were gateways to jazz between 1928 and 1959. In each case, the 78s, 10-inch LPs and 12-inch LPs I selected helped turn listeners into jazz fans.

Recorded jazz has been around since 1917 and each generation was seduced differently—some by electrifying soloists, some by dance music, some by gif…

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Marion Evans, who turns 100 in May, is still one of jazz and pop’s finest big-band and orchestral jazz arrangers. Over the course of his long career, he could do it all—scoring sensitively when the recording session called for a ballad feel and ferociously when a big band was needed to kick like a swinging mule. [Photo above of Marion Evans in 2015 by J…

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People have been falling in love with jazz for the past 126 years, but for many different reasons. Over the decades, the musicians, playback technology and even the music have changed and evolved. So have the reasons why jazz seduced listeners.

People won over in 1928 were likely brought into the fold by Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong—either heard live or on 78s spinning on a phonograph. By the 1950s, the 12-inch LP had arrived, there were better record players and TV sets were surging. The most influential jazz was less about dance and more about musicianship, solos and small groups.

Today, I’m going to take a shot at creating a timeline showing highly influential recordings in different eras that attracted listeners to jazz, between 1928 and 1959. I’ll feature Part 2 on another day:

Late 1920s—Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke.

Here’s Bix Beiderbecke’s Singin’ the Blues (1927)…

Here’s trumpeter Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five’s West End Blues (1928)…

Mid-1930s—Fats Waller and Benny Goodman.

Here’s Fats Waller’s Truckin’ (1935)…

Here’s Benny Goodman’s Stompin’ at the Savoy (1936)…

Late 1930s—Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnet, Glenn Miller and Coleman Hawkins.

Here’s Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump (1937)…

Here’s Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine (1938)…

Here’s Charlie Barnet’s Cherokee (1939)…

Here’s Glenn Miller’s In the Mood (1939)…

Here’s Coleman Hawkins’s Body and Soul (1939)…

Early 1940s—Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday.

Here’s Duke Ellington’s Take the “A” Train (1941)…

Here’s Billie Holiday’s Solitude (1941)…

Mid-1940s—Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Here’s Charlie Parker’s Ko-Ko, based on the chord changes to Cherokee (1945)…

Here’s Dizzy Gillespie’s Night in Tunisia (1946)…

Late 1940s—Nat King Cole, Stan Kenton and Thelonious Monk.

Here’s the Nat King Cole Trio’s (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 (1946)…

Here’s Stan Kenton’s Intermission Riff (1946)…

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight (1947)…

Early 1950s—Charlie Parker, Horace Silver, Chet Baker and Stan Kenton.

Here’s Charlie Parker’s Just Friends with strings (1950)…

Here’s Horace Silver’s Ecaroh (1952)…

Here’s Stan Kenton’s Invention for Guitar and Trumpet (1953)…

Mid-1950s—Chet Baker, Clifford Brown and Dave Brubeck.

Here’s Chet Baker’s But Not for Me (1954)…

Here’s Clifford Brown and Max Roach’s Joy Spring (1954)…

Here’s the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s The Duke (1955)…

Late 1950s—Miles Davis, Count Basie and Henry Mancini.

Here’s Miles Davis's All of You (1957)…

Here’s Count Basie’s Cute (1958)…

And here’s Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn (1959)…

Last weekend, I went to Manhattan’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum to see the new Art of Noise exhibit. On display were music posters; an evolution of listening devices, from Thomas Edison’s wax-cylinder phonograph to iPhone earbuds; a jukebox and much more illustrating how design shaped the way we’ve experienced music over the past 125 years.

While at the museum, my wife and I ran into a friend who was there with his wife and their two grandsons. The 7-year-old is passionate about jazz. But not just loves jazz. The kid has amazing taste: Roy Eldridge, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, etc. Obviously, he’s too young to know the music’s history or what the different jazz styles are called and why, but he has an astonishing innate gravitational pull to the good stuff.

As we were talking, I looked at his grandson and said, “I know why you love jazz so much. You listen through here,” patting my chest over my heart. “Me, too.” His grandson smiled and nodded in full agreement.

In the days that passed, I thought about our chance meeting and his reply. The encounter made me realize why some people get jazz and others don’t. I also realized there is one thing that makes jazz special and connects with some but sails over the heads of others: beauty.

American popular music has a long history, dating back to the 1840s. Before the invention of the phonograph and radio, before pianos became affordable household additions and before concerts, families sat around in living rooms and sang together. Most of the songs were traditional Americana folk melodies by composers such as Stephen Foster or originated from a family’s country of origin prior to immigrating to the U.S.

The next big shift in popular music was the mass production of sheet music in the late 1800s. The proliferation of upright pianos and the printing and distribution of sheet music offered the public a greater variety of popular-music options that could be heard instantly if someone could play them. Sheet music also boosted the popularity of theatrical musicals and gave rise to Tin Pan Alley, which provided stage shows with catchy tunes and lyrics.

The mass production of the phonograph at the turn of the 20th century followed by radio’s popularity in the late 1920s allowed the public to hear professionals play and sing popular songs. Broadway surged in the 1920s, and Hollywood musicals took off in the 1930s and ‘40s with the advent of talkies and more sophisticated recording technology.

Jazz surfaced following the popularity of the blues and ragtime at the dawn of the 20th century. The first jazz 78 was recorded in New York in 1917. From the start, jazz was frantic, syncopated dance music, growing more sophisticated with the arrival of stride and boogie-woogie in the 1920s. and then swing in the 1930s.

By the end of World War II, popular music began to splinter into subcategories. These categories multiplied thanks largely to the rise of independent record labels, the use of magnetic tape and recorders in studios, and the growing use of unbreakable vinyl in record production, all in the late 1940s. The new tape technology made recording music much less expensive, so genres that would have been ignored were suddenly documented and marketed to specific audiences.

On the jazz side, bebop in the mid-1940s not only revolutionized jazz by popularizing improvisation but also radically transformed popular music. The faster jazz form made stars of spectacular players and forced audiences to listen rather than dance. Even more important, jazz was the first form of popular music to make beauty a key component. By beauty, I don’t mean catchy melodies or pretty music.

Beauty, here, is the creation of art that purposefully sets out to make listeners swoon and admire what they’re hearing. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Many people lack the emotional capacity to appreciate beauty, which isn’t a knock. Most people can’t throw a baseball with speed and accuracy, run fast for long stretches or speak off the top of their head without a written script. One either is able to feel beauty or one can’t, and learning to do so requires desire and determination.

If one has the capacity to feel beauty, then one can pick up on what jazz musicians are trying to get across. It’s my contention that all jazz musicians of any value prize beauty and want others to feel the beauty of what they are transmitting.

Starting in the 1940s, major record companies recognized that jazz, like classical, wasn’t for everyone, so they invented pop and easy listening, which weren’t as complex or demanding on the ear.

The jazz musician who first incorporated beauty into his music was Duke Ellington, in the late 1920s. Every leading jazz musician who followed made beauty a centerpiece experience. In fact, jazz is the only form of popular music where its musicians consciously make beauty an essential aspect of their compositions and improvisations.

As jazz became jump blues in the 1940s, and jump blues became R&B in the early 1950s and then rock ‘n’ roll in the second half of the decade, these back-beat forms of popular music weren’t focused on beauty but on creating a steady dance beat. Beauty wasn’t primary for Motown, the Beatles, soul, folk, pop rock, disco or hard rock—forms more concerned with chart success and raw excitement.

My feeling is it’s impossible to feel jazz unless you can hear the beauty in the music . As readers of JazzWax know well, jazz is heard through the heart. Whether it’s Dizzy Gillespie’s big bands of the 1940s, Charlie Parker’s blues, Lester Young’s relaxed tenor saxophone, Count Basie’s swing, Miles Davis’s respect for space, John Coltrane’s sheets of sound or Bill Evans’s contemplative, conversational approach, beauty is always high on the agenda. Without beauty, jazz is worthless.

One could argue that only free jazz of the 1960s and fusion of the 1970s were less about beauty and more about making a statement and showing off one’s technique. Others might insist these forms do indeed have beauty built into their expression. I suspect the latter is more accurate, though I would say that beauty in free jazz and fusion was often processed as dynamic energy.

If you’ve ever wondered why you love jazz but are puzzled that friends can’t seem to get into it, even after you play them great recordings, it’s likely because they can’t hear the beauty. This isn’t a failing or a crime. Jazz appreciation begins with feelings.

Which leaves us with a fundamental question: Can someone learn to feel beauty? The answer is yes, if it’s something they want to accomplish. As that 7-year-old proves, the key to jazz appreciation is to be in touch with your emotions and to think about what you’re feeling as the music unfolds. You also must be passionate about beauty.

Here are a few jazz tracks that require the listener to feel and appreciate beauty:

Here’s Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady in 1933…

Here’s Charlie Parker playing Another Hair-Do in 1947…

Here’s Lester Young and Teddy Wilson playing Louise in 1956…

Here’s the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Nomad in 1958…

Here’s Miles Davis playing Stella by Starlight in 1958…

Here’s John Coltrane playing Central Park West in 1964…

Before post-punk, grunge rock, new wave, punk rock, rap, disco, hard rock, British blues, the Beatles, Motown, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, R&B and vocal harmony groups of the late 1940s, there was jump blues. [Photo above of Louis Jordan]

Jump blues—the merging of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie—would become the primary influence for nearly all of the style…

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Jimmy Wyble isn’t a name familiar to most jazz fans. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, the guitarist began his career playing Western swing with Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys. After he served in the Army during World War II, Wyble continued in Western swing bands but soon gravitated to jazz in Los Angeles and eventually studio work.

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In addition to being a masterful saxophonist, Oliver Nelson was an extraordinary arranger for big bands and orchestral strings. He was so good at creating sophisticated, engaging jazz charts that he found a ton of work in Hollywood in 1967, when he moved there to write for the movies and TV. [Photo above of Oliver Nelson courtesy of Jan Persson]

After in…

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Throughout the 20th century, jazz never ran short of superb trumpeters. Miraculously, each of the greats had his own identifiable musical personality and style. In the case of Cootie Williams, his approach on the horn was most influenced by the more than 10 years he spent in Duke Ellington’s orchestra between 1929 and 1940. [Publicity still above of Cootie Williams]

He favored the “jungle style” of trumpet playing popular in Ellington’s famed Jungle Band of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Instruments were highly expressive, growling in some cases, while trumpets and trombones often used plunger mutes to create a wilder, roaring touch.

In 1940, Ellington composed and recorded Concerto for Cootie to showcase Williams’s plunger-muted, “growling” trumpet. The song highlights Williams’s evocative colorations. When lyrics were added later, the song was re-titled Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.

Cootie began leading recording sessions while still with Ellington, in 1937, using members of Duke’s band. In 1940, Williams left Ellington for Goodman, and the following year he left Goodman to start his own orchestra.

Among those who played in Cootie’s band in the 1940s before moving on to become major jazz figures were Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, George Treadwell, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Bud Powell, Pearl Bailey, Lammar Wright, Sam “the Man” Taylor, Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald.

Charles Melvin Williams was born on July 10, 1911 in Mobile, Ala. “Cootie” was a childhood nickname. His first recordings were made with James P. Johnson in 1928. After his long stay with Ellington, his jump to Goodman became a big get for the clarinetist.

In the 1950s, with the big bands on the decline, he folded his orchestra and played rhythm and blues in ensembles. With the arrival of the 12-inch LP mid-decade, Williams began to record again as a legacy artist, often teamed with cornetist Rex Stewart. In 1962, he rejoined Ellington and remained with the band until 1974.

Cootie Williams died in New York in 1985, at the age of 74, from a kidney ailment.

Let’s dive into the music:

Here’s Williams leading bands from 1941 to 1944…

Here’s Williams leading bands in 1945 and 1946…

Now let’s jump to the late 1950s and three great Cootie Williams albums:

Here’s Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart on The Big Challenge (1957). Williams is on trumpet while Stewart is on cornet. Williams’s trumpet has a bright, piercing sound, while Stewart’s cornet offers a warmer, mellower tone.

Here’s Williams’s album Cootie Williams in Hi Fi (1958), arranged by Bill Stegmeyer. It’s the full album, one track at a time…

Here’s Williams playing It Ain’t Necessarily So from Porgy & Bess Revisited…

Bonus: Here’s Williams performing during the Super Bowl IX Halftime Show in 1975, with the Duke Ellington band led by his son, Mercer Ellington. Move the time bar to 5:25…

Like you, I thought I knew all of the major jazz-pop vocal groups of the late 1950s and early ‘60s until I stumbled onto the Skip-Jacks on YouTube last week. In fact, you definitely know who they are if you watched TV in the 1960s.

The Skip-Jacks were Stella Stevens (not the actress), Estelle Mann, Morris Redding, Ron Martin and leader Bill Bronson. The…

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If you’ve read George Simon’s book The Big Bands, first published in 1967, you know there were many more big bands than the five or so that get most of the coverage today. And even if you memorized the book, which details the era that lasted roughly from 1936 to 1947, you probably still don’t know what most of those best bands sounded like during the war, when the national recording ban went into effect.

Now, for the first time in memory, we have a bountiful 10-CD box set that provides a superb survey of the war years and many of the five-star bands of the era. For someone who grew up listening to the big bands before I started listening to jazz, this box took my breath away.

The box set is Classic V-Disc Big Band Jazz Sessions, newly issued by Mosaic. If you’re a big-band fan, this is Mosaic’s finest release since its Artie Shaw: Classic Bluebird and Victor Sessions seven-CD box in 2009 and the Chick Webb box with Ella Fitzgerald in 2013. The tracks on the new V-Disc box run mostly from 1943 to 1945, with a few from 1948, but they smartly don’t appear in chronological order.

The V-Disc (Victory Disc) program was initiated by Lieutenant G. Robert Vincent (George Robert Vincent). He was a sound engineer who headed the program for the U.S. Army during World War II and beyond.

Vincent was quite a negotiator and managed to convince James Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, to allow union member artists to record for the project despite the recording ban. Since no money was changing hands, Petrillo didn’t really have much of a leg to stand on. He also had a chance to look patriotic, despite depriving the public of new music.

The U.S. government began issuing V-Discs to soliders in 1943, in the middle of World War II. The primary reasons for the program were twofold: To overcome the union recording ban that had begun in 1942 and paralyzed the American recording industry; and to build the morale of troops who had no access to the music that would remind them of friends and family back home and what they were fighting for.

With shellac in short supply due to Japanese occupation of Pacific regions where its natural ingredients were found, and to lighten the load of shipping heavy and fragile shellac 78s, the government manufactured V-Discs on vinyl. Of course, in the LP era starting in 1948, vinyl records would steadily phase out shellac entirely.

The federal program lasted from October 1943 until 1949, distributing over 8 million records to troops on bases. In essence, swing music and the bands helped the U.S. win World War II in Europe and the Pacific. The program also ensured America’s appetite for syncopation and ultimately jazz.

The newly released box is technically a sister set to Mosaic’s Classic V-Disc Small Group Jazz Sessions released in 2024. But there’s no comparison (sorry, sister). For me, the small-group V-Disc box was loaded down with flat, uninteresting and quirky recordings.

By contrast, the big-band box is an astonishing and superbly edited collection of 218 tracks free from novelty material and packed with thoroughly exciting material, thanks to producer Scott Wenzel. What’s job Scott has done. Even bands you’re familiar with will impress you with some songs they never wound up recording for their record labels once the bans (there was a second one in 1948) lifted.

The excellent 11-inch square booklet features detail-rich liner notes by big band scholar Dave Weiner. The many photos and discographical details make the box both educational and a lavishly entertaining journey back to the war years and the musical roots of American optimism.

No matter where you click, you’ll land on songs so good you can’t take off. I’m not exaggerating. I’d be the first to criticize the box if I felt it was soft in places. Believe me, I searched high and low during my three complete listens, but I couldn’t find a track that wasn’t a prime cut for big band fans.

Which makes sense given the V-Disc program’s mandate. The whole point was to excite and motivate G.I. Joes, and that meant swing of the highest order. Uptempo arrangements had to jump, and the ballads had to push soldiers to look for light at the end of the tunnel, not bum them out in misery. To quote from one of the songs by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra: Blues No More.

There are many spoken word messages by big-band leaders to servicemen listening to the discs as well as six alternate tracks that are as electrifying as the ones chosen by the V-Disc producers for master pressing.

You can order from Mosaic by going here.

Let’s dive in, and prepare to start snapping:

Here’s Neal Hefti’s arrangement of Jones Beachhead (1944) by Woody Herman and His Orchestra…

Ever hear of Mal Hallett? Most people aren’t familiar with the bandleader. Here’s After All That Gin (1944)…

Here’s Hal McIntyre and His Orchestra playin Danny Hurd’s arrangement of Rockin’ and Ridin’ (1943)…

Here’s June Christy with Stan Kenton singing Gene Roland’s arrangement of That’s the Stuff You Gotta Watch (1945)…

Here’s Buddy Rich’s orchestra playing Jimmy Giuffre’s arrangement for that band of Four Rich Brothers (1948)…

Here’s Count Basie and His Orchestra playing Buster Harding’s arrangement of Beaver Junction (1944)…

And here’s the explosive Harry James band playing Jimmy Mundy’s arrangement of 920 Special (1945)…

Note: Scott Wenzel at Mosaic assures me there are plenty of sets in stock.

He also was transparent about an issue:

When I started sending track info to Gracenote, I noticed a discrepancy on Disc V. The track listing for both the small booklet in the jewel case (V-VI) and the large booklet is missing the tune “Call Me Darling”. Dave properly mentions the tune in the liners and it is correctly listed in the discography. So the correct track listing is:

• 20. Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You

• 21. Basie Strides Again

• 22. Call Me Darling

• 23. Playhouse No. 2

• 24. K.C. Stride (alt)

Pianist Bill Evans was discovered by guitarist Mundell Lowe in the late 1940s. They first met when Lowe was discharged from the Army in New Orleans after World War II and Evans was studying at Southeastern Louisiana University. Lowe’s brother-in-law raved about Evans and dragged him off to campus to hear the pianist play. [Photo above of Bill Evans in 1956, for the cover of New Jazz Conceptions, by Henry Parker]

As Lowe told me during a 2008 interview: “I loved Bill’s sound right away. When we met, I told him that when he graduated, he had to come to New York and that we’d gig.” [Photo above of Bill Evans in 1956, on the cover of New Jazz Conceptions by Henry Parker]

Evans accepted Lowe’s offer and came to the city in the early 1950s, gigged with Lowe and recorded as a sideman with bands and ensembles into 1956. Lowe also called Riverside co-founder and producer Orrin Keepnews and told him about Evans. In 1956, Keepnews recorded Evans solo and with bass and drums, and released New Jazz Conceptions in Feb. 1957.

In June of that year, Evans performed with the Gunther Schuller Orchestra at the Brandeis Jazz Festival and was given a solo during the third movement of George Russell’s All About Rosie.

Billed as a Modern Jazz Concert, the festival’s purpose under the leadership of Schuller was to showcase Third Stream jazz, which attempted to fuse jazz and classical.

Schuller had commissioned six original pieces for the festival. Evans’s solo on Russell’s All About Rosie was fresh, fluid and alive, and astonished the musicians and audience.

When Columbia recorded the six pieces the following week in New York for an album with most of the same musicians, Evans again played a solo that knocked out listeners. Word of mouth spread quickly among leading jazz artists, and Evans was instantly in play. He recorded prolifically as a sideman over the months that followed until he was hired by Miles Davis for his quintet in the spring of 1958.

Bassist Chuck Israels attended the Brandeis concert in June 1957. I asked him for his thoughts [photo above of Chuck Israels with Bill Evans in 1965 courtesy of YouTube]:

“After enrolling at MIT in 1954, I began playing the bass in the the university orchestra. Before long, Boston’s jazz scene won me over, and my goal was to play in a trio with pianist Steve Kuhn and drummer Arnie Wise. Steve was a year younger than me and still a student at Newton High School in Massachusetts, and Arnie was a year older and a student at the Massachusetts School of Art.

“Both of these young musicians were playing at a professional level, and I was still gigging as a middling guitarist. They had landed a summer job at a resort in Chesterton, N.Y, and needed a bass player. I was eager to make music at their level.

“By 1957, we had been gigging in Boston regularly, and I’d already heard Bill Evans at a New York club called The Composer. I sensed that his music had the things I valued in Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, along with an expanded palette that included elements from my classical music background. All of that came in a natural, inclusive, unforced fusion that satisfied more of my imagined, ideal musical aesthetic than anything else I’d heard.

“Steve, Arnie and I played occasionally at Brandeis, where we were hired to accompany visiting jazz musicians Don Elliott, Stan Getz and Coleman Hawkins. By then, I was a junior music student at Brandeis, spending more attention learning to play jazz in Boston and Cambridge than to my classes.

“When Gunther Schuller’s Third Stream concert at Brandeis was held in June of 1957, I was enthralled hearing the musicians rehearse at the open-air Ullman Amphitheater, which is no longer on campus.

“I was most interested in the New York players, all of whom were familiar to me, and I was impressed with the skill they exhibited negotiating difficult new music. But most of the music for the concert—unlike Bill’s naturally evolved embrace of wide ranging elements—was a convoluted, contrived insertion of jazz elements into the musical language of classical composers unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the idiom.

“I heard those pieces as difficult and unwieldy, but I remained impressed with the skill of the players and entranced by the chance to hear them play with jazz expression. I don’t remember Jimmy Giuffre’s piece, nor much of Mingus’s difficult music. But George Russell’s All About Rosie had structural elements that were comfortably familiar to jazz players and listeners.

“So when Bill took his solo in the third movement based on the form and harmony of I’ll Remember April, a jazz standard we all knew, I had a window into understanding the extraordinary level of his playing.

“In spite of the high level of the other players, I only remember the powerful effect Bill’s playing had on me and others. He had extended solo space and took advantage of it to play with enormous energy and facility, exceeding the vocabulary of the surrounding written music.

“Much has been written and discussed in appreciation of Bill’s harmonic language, his pianistic sound and touch, and his romantic emotional range. Bill embraced and utilized it in profoundly effective ways, but none of it is entirely new. What was and remains new and unmatched was Bill’s rhythmic inventiveness.

“We’d heard Lennie Tristano demonstrate an expanded vocabulary of cross rhythms in his monumental solo piano recordings, and they’d surely paved the way for Bill. But Bill absorbed the principles and became so comfortable in juxtaposing driving music in cross relationships to a steady, dancing pulse that he took it to an unmatched level of rhythmic invention and excitement.

“That’s what I remember hearing, absorbing and appreciating Bill’s solo. It struck a sense of rhythmic excitement and variety that I was somehow already prepared to understand, embrace, and play along with in ensemble comfort and reliability.

“I don’t remember how much of that rhythmic vocabulary showed up in Bill’s playing when he sat in with Arnie Wise and me at the Student Union, when we were playing there with Steve Kuhn on one of the musicians’ meal breaks.

“But I’m sure that some of my comfort and reliability in that realm must have been felt by Bill, enough so that he thought to call me when he needed a bass player after Scott LaFaro’s tragic death in June 1961. It certainly wasn’t because of my sense of harmony—something I only developed later after intimate exposure to Bill’s musical language.”

Here’s George Russell’s All About Rosie. Bill Evans’s solo comes in the third movement…