What A Wonderful World Of Jazz Singing could well be the subtitle of this collection of 21 top jazz singers and their recordings, which were recorded between 1946 and 1962. The musical spectrum is as dazzling and complex as these singer�s personalities, coming as they were from all ends of the infamous American Melting Pot and having roots in all the main ingredients of American pop music: in the blues of the Mississippi and the metropoles, the swing of the Jazz Age and the black ghettos and the New York ballrooms, the Bebop and Cool Jazz of the West Coast of California.
Louis Armstrong, the greatest Jazz star of all time, is featured with a tribute to Fats Waller, another great singer, pianist and composer. Count Basie�s singers Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams can be heard with rare albums, while Basie gives us a perfect masterpiece of his craft with the singer Billy Eckstine, in whose own big band all the greats of Bebop had found a home in the 1940s. Jimmy Witherspoon and Al Smith rejoice in and proclaim the healing powers of the Blues. With the Vocalese-masters King Pleasure and Eddie Jefferson we meet the vocal ancestors of singing trios like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and Andy and the Bey Sisters. Bey, born in 1939, is the only one among the singers on these recordings still alive and is also among the greatest of his art in the 21st century. Chet Baker, Mark Murphy, Mose Allison and Jackie Paris are individualists, who oscillate between Cool and Sophisticated Blues. Black hipsters like Slim Gaillard and Babs Gonzales lead the way to Oscar Brown Jr., who gave voice to a completely new self-confidence with his songs from the ghetto and the everyday life of the Afro-American community at the beginning of the 1960s. He became a role model for later generations such as those of Gil Scott-Heron, Terry Callier and many others.
If you should miss one of your favorite singers, please note that at least twenty other masters from this time are just asking for an encore release.
Featuring: Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Andy and the Bey Sisters, Oscar Brown Jr., Count Basie, Joe Williams, Mose Allison, Jimmy Rushing, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bill Henderson, Mark Murphy, Johnny Griffin, Little Jimmy Scott, Eddie Jefferson, Slim Gaillard, Al Hibbler
- Some of the greatest and most beautiful voices of Jazz � some very rare original albums
- The history of male Jazz singing � from Louis Amstrong via Joe Williams and Eddie Jefferson on to Mark Murphy or Oscar Brown, Jr.
