Customer Reviews

Fabulous Swing Collection

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This CD is one of the best in Swing that I have heard. I like it because it is the origenal recordings of the musicians. Yes the CD might not have the same perfect quality of the modern, remastered CDs, but that classic feel is unbeatable. This is the music that my grandparents listened to on Saturday night with an antique radio. This is the music that I want to listen to as well with that same feel.

RCA's "Fabulous Swing Collection" was released to exploit a national big band revival craze, led by groups like Cherry Poppin' Daddies and Brian Setzer's Orchestra and in full swing (pardon the pun) in 1998. That revival has cooled but this generous (19 songs, 65 minutes) set remains among the era's better one-disc compilations (all songs from RCA family labels) for now third-generation fans.

It may not have been all the classics revivalists danced to; two swingin' Louises (Prima and Jordan) recorded their jump, jive and wailin' big band tunes for Capitol and Decca Records, respectively. But many of the era's signature tunes are represented, sounding surprisingly warm in analog sound: Glenn Miller's anthemic "In The Mood," "String of Pearls," and "American Patrol," Benny Goodman's hard, wild swinging "Sing, Sing, Sing" (heard recently and famously in a cookie commercial but better in Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert), Cab Calloway's 1933 "Minnie The Moocher," which he performed nearly a half-century later in the first "Blues Brothers" film and here does in full-throated youthful yodel.

You also get seminal sides from Charlie Barnet ("Cherokee"), Tommy Dorsey ("Marie," "Opus One"), and Duke Ellington ("Take The 'A' Train," "Cotton Tail"). While these songs swing sweeter than 1998's martini-and-cigar crowd might have liked, "Fabulous" may well be among the few big band CDs a new fan would need. Longtime fans have these classics on the artists' original LPs (or more studious sets like Columbia's "16 Most Requested Big Band Themes") and can probably swing past it.

I purchased several swing collections previously and they all had poor quality audio - they had not been cleaned up from the original recordings. This CD is MUCH cleaner and makes for an enjoyable experience.

The main problem with this CD is the coupling of great tracks with fairly awful ones.

On the great side, you have Benny Goodman's rollicking "Don't Be That Way" and a song destined to kill live in "Sing Sing Sing." Tommy Dorsey's beautiful "Opus One" and lively "Boogie Woogie." Duke Ellington's signature "Take The 'A' Train." Artie Shaw's bouncing "Back Bay Shuffle." Glenn Miller's theme for jitterbuggers, "In The Mood."

Then there are the disappointments. The whitebread "Casa Loma Stomp" by Glen Grey. The cringe-inducing "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" by Bunny Berigan. The extremely silly "Mary Had A Little Lamb" by Fletcher Henderson, which is especially disillusioning to hear when one considers that Henderson supplied a good many of Benny Goodman's hard swinging band arrangements!

We can at least be thankful that Kay Keiser and Hal Kemp didn't show up on this disc.

A truly magnificent collection of great sides originally waxed in the thirties and forties, this CD is indispensible for any Jazz-Swing-Big-Band enthusiast! Here we get Benny's terrific signature theme "Don't Be That Way", Shaw's own swingy composition "Non-Stop Flight", T.D.'s immortal "Boogie Woogie" (which many jazz purists deplore because of its innovative use of instrumentals -rather that solo piano work- the public obviously disagreed- recorded in 1938, it went on to sell an incredible 4 million copies!) "Take The "A" Train is Ellington's timeless record and Miller offers his "String of Pearls". "Marie" was recorded by Dorsey in early 1937; he traded 7 arrangements for this famous record (he heard the arrangement being performed by an obscure Black Band and instinctively knew the record would be a hit). "Back Bay Shuffle" offers another killer-diller instrumental from Artie Shaw's great '38 band. My only gripe is that the definitive (more swinging and less corny) version of "Casa Loma Stomp" is NOT the one we get in this otherwise excellent collection.

It has a good selection of songs but some of the songs are not performed with as much energy as I've heard on other CDs. Some of the songs are also slower versions of songs I love, like "In the Mood" and "Minnie the Moocher". Not a very good lindyhop CD.

Once again, I look to buy Big Band Era albums and I come across an album that displays NO CONTENT, no list of songs, zip, nada, niente'.. As a former Creative Director of an ad agency, I ask the primal question, How do you expect to sell an album without listing the songs? I hit a pop-up menu that indicated it would play "samples," however, a second pop-up saddled the list blocking it from view and it said, "No samples available for this album." Nor, because of the pop-up block, no content available for the album either.

When this first came out over a decade ago from RCA Victor/BMG it was an instant winner among those Big Band fans starving for some CD material presenting the music of that era in quality AAD sound. Unlike many releases at that time, it even has three paragraphs in the insert describing the usual reception for these renowned groups when their buses rolled into town, along with a re-listing of the generous (for the time) 19 tracks showing recording dates and locations.

With so much to choose from in terms of material, I have to agree with those who assigned 5 stars to the tracks presented here, each in its own way representative of the music so popular from 1933 to 1940 (the span covered here). And yes, even to the inclusion of Fletcher Henderson's Mary Had A Little Lamb, a 1936 recording featuring a brief vocal by Teddy Lewis, but some of the best instrumental solos ever put to disc. Really, the title and the lyrics are incidental.

The same reviewer who lamented that selection, also had disparaging remarks for the "whitebread" Casa Loma Stomp, only the first of 64 hits for Glen Gray & His Casa Loma Orchestra (named after a famed Toronto nightclub which the band called home for a spell) which hit # 15 in January 1931 (this is a 1933 re-recording), as well as Bunny Berigan's rendition of All God's Chillun Got Rhythm (with vocal by Ruth Bradley). Yes, trying to do that in today's society would go over like a lead balloon - but this was 1937 and that year both Duke Ellington (# 14 instrumental) and Artie Shaw (# 15 with vocal by Tony Pastor) had hits with it.

Their inclusion in this historical volume is just fine, thank you very much. As the blurb says on the reverse "Foot-tappin' favorites & jumpin' jitterbugs from the Fabulous Swing Era! Over 64 minutes of the swingin'est singles ever!" And at a pretty decent price I might add.

If you like swing, this is a must have cd. A huge fan of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, I bought this album because I wanted to hear the original artists at their best. I wasn't disappointed. From Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington to Glenn Miller, they're all here. A lot slower than BBVD and other contemporary swing bands, this cd offers up a nice change of pace and takes you back to the swing era. I will enjoy "The Fabulous Swing Collection" for many years.

Loved this one being a fan of the big band swing sound. Rate it highly.