Customer Reviews

King Of Boogie Woogie

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3 star:		(1)
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Albert's Blue Note recordings start this out with 5 cuts from 1939, the 1st Blue Note recordings, one with Meade Lux Lewis, then it jumps forward to his Mercury issues from 1945-1949. The mercury stuff is flat out great, starting with 2 recordings with Sippie Wallace and Lonnie Johnson,then things start cooking with Ike Perkins on Guitar. The 1947 recordings feature Albert's son, Gene Adams, (22 years old) on some seriously swinging stuff. This issue is well paced on the 2 disks starting out with solo piano Boogie Woogie, (rather standard stuff) then jumping into the polished work of a very tight combo. The latter half of CD 1 and CD 2 will appeal to anyone who likes swinging R&B. This is not 2 CDs of repetitive boogie music but Ammons here is at the top of his game.King of the Boogie Woogie? Yea Baby! Note: Since the French Chronological Classics are ridiculously expensive now you can get those same recordings on this issue. (Chronological 1939-1946 most all is here, and 1946-1948, all here on this release) So get this one while you can as it is now deleted too. (Sad that 2 of the premier re-issue labels Classics and Acrobat are no more)

I'm listening right now and C. Whitby has it right -- this is quite a collection. Don't let yourself be confused by Amazon's track listing. This is really a 2 CD collection with 19 and 18 tracks, respectively. Songs are pulled from a variety of Blue Note and Mercury issues.

I've also looked at the French issues (chronological classics) and also was struck by their super high prices. I'd start here instead to build an Ammons collection.

FYI: Windows Media Player will lookup a single CD version so you'll have to do a bit of typing of song titles.

These are the best Albert Ammons CD releases yet apart from "The Boogie Woogie Boys" that featured his piano duals with Pete Johnson. What I liked best about the "King of Boogie Woogie" collection is that it concentrates on his recordings from the 1940s when his style had peaked and recording technology had much improved relative to the 1930s. Previous releases had wasted too much time on his 1930 recordings that, with a few exceptions, were not up to the quality of those from the 1940s.

How do you review something like this? On the one hand, Ammons was clearly a hugely skilled pianist out of the barrelhouse school, and when the tunes veer in that direction, they're enormously satisfying. But the boogie woogie beat -- reaching back to the blues while looking forward to rock'n'roll (Jerry Lee Lewis, anyone?) -- becomes rather tiresome after two or three songs. It's as limiting as a jazz or blues form as disco would be as a form of pop music. Ammons ultimately seems wasted.....