Customer Reviews

Greatest Hits

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I bought this album around 2003 or 2004 at a bargain bin in Border's. It was cheap, it had a cool cover (drawn by the great caricaturist Al Hirschfield, hope I'm spelling that right), and I was ready to experiment and hear some artists I had never heard before in jazz.

So I bought this album. And I was hooked. Right from the opening piano riffs of 'The Munson Street Breakdown,' I was a Hampton fan. This guy was, BY FAR, the best to ever touch the mallets. I mean, words simply cannot describe how good Hampton was. He recorded well into his nineties, and died in 2002 at the age of 94. Now enough with the history, let's review the product on hand.

Hampton's entry in RCA's 'Greatest Hits' series (which ran from 1996 to 2000) is a very good look at Hampton's RCA years. He recorded here in the '30s, briefly in the '40s, and returned from 1956 to 1957 and released some flamenco albums here as well. 'Greatest Hits' attempts to piece all of these aspects of Hampton's career onto a single disc. Does it work?

Yes -- somewhat. You simply cannot appreciate Lionel Hampton through this cheap budget disc alone. To fully appreciate Hampton, you must buy this as well as other compilations from different labels to appreciate him. So if you are planning on buying this and letting this be your only Hampton CD, don't. Immediately start looking for his Verve, Impulse! and Columbia albums to compliment this.

But what's here is great. 'Tenderly' is offered here in a 7+ minute version, and is perhaps the best cover of this jazz standard put to record in the 1950s. 'Dinah' is an all-star recording, featuring Hampton, saxophone giant Coleman Hawkins, and the great Benny Carter (another musician who lived well into his nineties) on trumpet, this 1939 recording is simply too good not to own. Buy 'Greatest Hits' simply for this track alone.

Overall, 'Greatest Hits' isn't really a 'Greatest Hits' album per se; Hampton recorded on far too many labels to create a greatest hits compilation successfully. What this does do, however, is offer the listener a chance to sample Hampton's RCA Victor and Bluebird years, in which Hampton created some pretty good jazz music (not to mention it was creative too).

Buy this album if you want a good intro to Hampton, but DO NOT stop here. There's so much more to Hampton than what's on this album; to fully appreciate the man, you'll need to get another few albums in addition to this one.

Recommended for the curious or new Lionel Hampton fan (who needs a good introduction), but like I've said many times in this review (and I cannot emphasize it enough), DON'T STOP HERE.