This is the first volume in the Ellington "Alternate Takes in Chronological Order" "complementing the French [Chronogical Melodie] Classics CD series", produced by NEATWORK in Vienna, Austria.
Purchasers of this series should keep in mind that Classics does not necessarily use the same take that, say, BMG (RCA Victor) uses on its standard reissues so these "alternate" takes may well be takes you already have if you own the standard corporate product.
The first five tracks reproduce Blu-Disc, Up-to-date, Gennett and Paramount recordings:
"Deacon Jazz" and "Oh! how I love my darling" are piano accompaniments of singers Jo Trent and Ellington's drummer Sonny Greer respectively. Both are comic music hall numbers. Florence Bristol sings "How come you do me like you do?" accompanied by Duke and a surprisingly vigorous Otto Hardwick on alto. In "Everything is hotsy totsy now" Duke plays piano while Irving Mills nasally shouts "she's my totsy, I'm her hotsy etc." and belabors a kazoo in a way that's almost musical. "Jig walk" is a 40's era recording from an apparently since deceased piano roll that Ellington himself may or may not have made. The echoing piano is occasionally overpowered by a hideous drum machine. The composition descends from one he created while still a teenager in Washington and later utilized in a 1925 musical.
Tracks 6 to 12 are Vocalion, Victor or Okeh recordings which have been released elsewhere; "Blue Bubbles", however is an outstanding early Miley-Ellington classic which BMG has for some reason not released on any of its three single CD re-issues, only on the 26-disc "Centennial set", and only Victor recorded it, so many younger Ellington fans may not have heard it.
"Jubilee Stomp" and "Take it easy" are Pathe releases, "the Mooche" a Cameo release, not terribly different from their Victor and Brunswick counterparts. The "St. Louis Blues" is performed largely by Matt Malneck and his white ham orchestra, with Duke, Bubber Miley, Barney Bigard, Wellman Braud, Freddy Guy and Sonny Greer bursting in at midpoint, to this listener's great relief.
The rest of the tracks are Brunswick/Vocalion recordings available on the 3-CD set "Early Ellington".
Sound quality is comparable to that on the Chronogical Melodie Jazz Classics, i.e. generally below the level of BMG, Sony & "Decca" reissues. Small label recordings are noisier and more distorted so listeners who are bothered by these sort of things may want to stay away; hard core fans of early jazz will probably find it acceptable.

Leave it to Tim Lahaye, GOD's rep to America's Protestant right. Who else would have resurrected the unscientific gibberish of the ancient Greeks, NON-Christians by the way, to provide a fundament for their self-righteous accusation against the Infidel? Even Bin Laden relies on offers of celestial girlies to spur the faithful, real stuff that'll make the most pious parson drop his Book on the floor, rather than reaching for pagan superstition that would persuade only a TV-addled New Ager. Good Grief, read Augustine or Pascal or even Freud. This character is nothing more than a modern-day version of the mountebanks who milked revival meetings in 19th century America.

Martin Buber was one of the great humanists of the modern era and his extraction and retelling of a small part of the Hasidic corpus is a great poetic and ethical achievement. Readers should keep in mind, though, that in this book Buber was using traditional Ashkenazic pietism to represent a more cosmopolitan and higher reality. When he composed this book, there was every reason to believe that the Hasidim who survived the genocide perpetrated by National Socialism would fall prey to Communism or, more slowly, to secular education and one or another form of democracy. Hence sentimentality led Buber to transfigure Khasiduth into something as etherialized as Platonism or his ally Paul Tillich's Protestantism.
History has astonished us. Hasidic courts of one kind or another are common in America and Israel and may even be encountered in Europe. It is a reality, not just a historical memory.
This reality in its folkloric aspect may be found, at least for the Hebrewless reader, in Jerome Mintz' "Legends of the Hasidim : an introduction to Hasidic culture and oral tradition in the New World", published by the University of Chicago Press. Unlike Buber, Mintz is a professional folklorist and not only presents the tales in their veritable form but fully contextualizes them by informant, court, place and time, with other cultural information supplied as appropriate.
Readers of Mintz' book will experience Hasidic folklore in its present variety and become acquainted with the bigotry, ignorance, viciousness and pomposity found among the Hasidim just as they are in most living religions. Folklore, like religion, is not just a vehicle for a particular individual's view of the universe but an intimate part of some real sociology, lived by some real people in some real context. Mintz gives us a picture of Khasiduth which the great Buber in his goodness and humanity could not.

This package, actually two CD's, includes most of the the full orchestra recordings of the year 1938, recorded mostly by Brunswick and Vocalion. A few vocal numbers are omitted, as well as the small band recordings (the latter are available on a two-CD package "Small groups", also sold by Sony).
This music, created shortly before the arrival of Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and before Billy Strayhorn had really assimilated to the Ellington organization, doesn't quite match the individulistic flair shown in such early Thirties pieces as "Mood Indigo", "Slippery Horn" or "Saddest Tale", and certainly doesn't equal the synthesizing imagination of 1940 - 1942. Nonetheless, the performances roll through the year at a very high level, certainly outclassing the music of other big bands of the time. You might fault Duke, a little, for worrying too much about what the so-called King of Swing, Benny Goodman, was up to, when he produced such sides as "Buffet Flat" and "Hip Chic". Remember, though, that big bands were expensive and Duke didn't have the manouver room available to Miles or Mingus in the Fifties and Sixties; dance and airshot dates mandated that he compromise a bit. And of course this attentiveness to popular trend is part of the fascination of Ellington.
High points include: "the New black and tan fantasy", a two side remake of the 1926 classic, Johnny Hodges in "Gal from Joe's", Cootie Williams in "Riding on a blue note", Barney Bigard (and Duke) in the meditative and lyrical"Blue light", "Braggin' in Brass", as especially inventive permutation of "Tiger Rag", Ivie Anderson and Lawrence Brown in "Rose of the Rio Grande", Harry Carney's baritone performance in "Slap Happy" (no slapping here) and Rex Stewart's half-valving in the "freak song" "Boy meets horn", also known as "Twits and Twerps". The liner notes were written by Nat Hentoff.
This release fails to get the five star rating because of muffled sound, due to heavy noise reduction and maybe multiple tape/lp transfer. The liner notes say "digitally remastered from the original analog tapes" which is of course nonsense in this context. It appears to derive from one of a group of four packages released on LP in the late Seventies (see Eddie Lambert's book on Duke). We can hope that Columbia//Sony//Sony/BMG will follow their recent re-releases of "Masterpieces", "Uptown", and "Festival Suite" with a box set of the great Brunswick, Vocalion, Master & Columbia orchestral masterpieces which they've buried all these years, forcing us to resort to Australian and European re-issues of this unique music. Listeners who have heard Sony's 1999 3-CD commemorative set "the Duke" know that a few of these great sides at least have been re-mastered. Why not all?

John Drury, of the long defunct Chicago Daily News, published Old Illinois Houses in 1941.The sixty to seventy five houses included, from all over the state, represent not just architectural styles but all imaginable aspects of Illinois' rich history. The author brings this history entertainingly to the fore. The book will interest even those who are completely blind to the beauty of domestic architecture. Each portrait of three or four pages includes a black and white photo.

For too long, Columbia (Sony, or now Sony/BMG?) has been satisfied to keep only the original all-too-brief "Uptown" available on CD. Finally we have the peculiar "Controversial Suite" back in the package, as well as the attractive "Liberia Suite" from 1948. To my knowledge, this suite has latterly only been available through Melodie Chronogical [sic] Classics, the French bootleg re-issue label.
There is a very beautiful alternate version of the 1st movement of the "Liberia Suite" in which Harry Carney's unique baritone sax replaces the somewhat banal vocal by Al Hibbler. Who knows why this was not included. Five stars for this release if it were.
My equipment and ears don't notice any significant improvement in the sound quality which could be attributed to re-mastering. This music includes some of Duke & Strayhorn's most elaborate scoring and there still seem to be some "balance" problems. I still seem to hear strings in "Perdido" at one juncture, though I think they're reeds, and some of the heavy piano accents in "the Mooche" (by Duke, I believe) are just barely audible.
The original liner notes and layout have been reproduced along with additional notes, very informative, by Patricia Willard.

"How horrible to have lived in the 20th century and never to have heard King Oliver", as the fine English poet Philip Larkin said, quoted in the excellent liner notes to the great Australian re-masterer Robert Parker's 2-CD collection of Kingoliveriana.
King Oliver fascinates jazz fans, I think, because he comes somewhere between Buddy Bolden, who never recorded and whose sound therefore can only be imagined (see the book "In search of Buddy Bolden" by Donald Marquis)and the stupendous youngster Louis Armstrong, whose genius is very nearly fully attested, and in fine sound, thanks to the Okeh label (and John R.T. Davies' superlative remastering of those 78's in his 4-CD set on the JSP label "Hot Fives and Hot Sevens"). King Oliver seems to have reached his artistic height sometime before he first recorded in Chicago in 1923. These first recordings are among the first of authentic African American jazz ensemble, with sound tolerable only to those of us who are accustomed to very old records. Unfortunately, as recording technology improved, Joe Oliver's chops wobbled, and his breath weakened. Was he really the King? Yes, and we have the sonic evidence to prove it. But it is proof by combination, conclusion, sympathy, and imagination.
Robert Parker does his usual job of finding the best preserved 78's, judicious use of noise reduction and other tricks, and addition of reverb to produce a surprising presence and oomph from archival recordings. The early tracks definitely outclass the sound of the Jazz Heritage and GRP (i.e. Decca) recordings I have. It's easy to imagine being a kid just arrived in Chicago from Nebraska or Mississippi, braving your way into a Rush Street or Bronzeville dive, and hearing and seeing these great musicians shaking the walls and cutting every cheap dance orchestra to shreds, and above the pack the magisterial presence of King Oliver.
My criticism of this package would be the inclusion, in the second disc, of some sides where Joe Oliver may not have played (at least one where he definitely did not) and some sides that are really nothing more than generic late New Orleans style stomps. I would, I say, criticise Parker's collection for this reason if I were not also a member of the King Oliver cult, who appreciates every piece of evidence which helps us to establish the nature of this great artist in his setting. How horrible that Joe Oliver's fall is so much better documented than his rise.

This is the first in the "Chronogical [sic] Classics" series (Melodie Jazz Classics, operating in France) for Duke Ellington.
The first ten tracks are not currently available on CD elsewhere, to my knowledge; the first volume in the "Masters of Jazz" series (also French) for Ellington included these as well as some other early (i.e. pre "East St. Louis Toodle-O") recordings, but that CD is hard to find and indeed the "Masters of Jazz" series appears to have become defunct.
Tracks 11 to 23 are available elsewhere: the Columbia recordings (there are three of them) on the Columbia 2-CD set "the Okeh Ellington", and the Brunswick and Vocalion numbers (the rest) on the 3-CD Decca/MCA set "Early Ellington". The Decca set includes alternate takes, and the sound on both the Columbia and Decca sets is slightly better than that afforded by Classics.
Because these major label sets are easy to find, most Ellington fans considering this CD will focus on the first ten tracks, which were recorded for the Blu Disc, Pathe, and Gennett labels between 1924 and June 1926 (after Sidney Bechet's brief and non-extant stay with the band in the summer of 1924). These recordings have frequently been disparaged but they are not really that bad, and they will certainly be enjoyable to Ellington enthusiasts. They might be described as pop music with a distinct jazz and blues flavor. All of these arrangements are in the New York style, with no attempt to imitate New Orleans polyphony. Choo-Choo and Rainy Nights feature a small combo including Duke, Otto Hardwick on various reeds, Bubber Miley on trumpet, Charlie Irvis on trombone, Freddy Guy on banjo, and Sonny Greer on the scarcely audible drums. The later ensembles are somewhat larger. Blu Disc & Gennett seem to have preserved the best sound quality, and the sequential solos already have the somewhat operatic quality that would become characteristic of Duke's orchestra, with a fair degree of individualism though not yet of technical prowess. Bubber Miley stands out among these soloists. Unfortunately, Miley didn't make the recording sessions for several of the other numbers, performed by considerably augmented ensembles, and was frequently replaced by less distinctive trumpeters. Don Redman appears on two of the numbers, and "Wanna go back again blues" and "Can't hold the man you love" feature the great trombonist Jimmy Harrison (usually associated with Fletcher Henderson), who sings on these sides as well. Of these recordings, "Choo choo", "Rainy nights" and "Lil Farina" are probably the best realized.
Other early Ellington recordings, mostly featuring novelty numbers with singers (among them Sonny Greer), are available on the 1924-1929 "Alternate Takes" volume, part of a series coordinated with the Chronogical Classics.
Four stars rather than five, as this is not the most vital Ellington and sound quality is not of the best. But those who pursue all Ellingtonia might be tempted to add a star.

This product, by a prolific re-issue label operating in the UK, offers the best selection of the great drummer and bandleader's studio recordings available on a single CD. Webb's band was one of the most acclaimed dance orchestras to arise in Harlem and had a fine array of soloists such as Taft Jordan (trumpet and vocal), Edgar Sampson (reeds)and, late in the decade, Ella Fitzgerald. Webb himself, however, was second to none and may have been the best pre-Jo Jones drummer in jazz. As the decade and recording practice progressed (this CD runs up to Webb's untimely death in 1939)his abilities became more and more audible to posterity.
I might specially recommend Chick Webb to those whose acquaintance with big band jazz is so far limited to Duke Ellington, as there was a good working relationship between the two bandleaders. Duke assisted Webb in his early career, and many of Webb's soloists (Jordan, tenor sax player Elmer Williams, and alto player Russell Procope among them) would later play for Duke. Moreover, Webb's arrangers such as Edgar Sampson vied with Duke for coloratura orchestration.
This CD covers Webb's peak period in the early and mid thirties (e.g. "Stomping at the Savoy" and "Blue Minor", both Edgar Sampson arrangements) as well as some of the Ella Fitzgerald hits later in the decade, such as "A tisket a tasket". It includes, speaking of Ellington, Duke's own arrangement of his "Azure", which he himself never recorded, to my knowledge.
My only reservation would be some odd distortion which occurs in some, not all, of the tracks. This is a rather "watery" sound (heard also on the Decca re-issues of the same pieces) which may be easily explicable to those better versed in recording and transfer technology than I, but I have to say that I found it distracting, and I am not a hi-fi fanatic. Otherwise what the musicians were doing is audible enough.

Uriel Weinreich was one of the top scholars of the Yiddish language, and to a lesser degree, of Yiddishkeit. He was nonetheless overshadowed by his father, the great Max Weinreich, who wrote a four volume history of the language (in Yiddish, with a one-volume English abridgement) and who started the massive Yiddish-Yiddish dictionary (under the aegis of Columbia University, I think) which is still "under construction".
There aren't many good Yiddish-English dictionaries out there. Uriel Weinreich's is one of the two I'm familiar with, the other being Alexander Harkavy's Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary.
Weinreich gives good grammatical information in his entries, such as verb aspect and case of verb object, along with unpredictable forms such as the past participle. Both alphabets are very clear and distinct, and big enough to be readable for those past the bloom of youth. The English-Yiddish section is valuable for those using the book in Yiddish classes and for those who would like to speak, as well as read, Yiddish. Of course, it decreases the overall size of the dictionary, so a lot of the words you encounter won't show up in it.
The big drawback is the work's prescriptive nature, meaning that this is how Weinreich thought Yiddish should be spoken and written, not how it was spoken and written. Critics such as Solomon Birnbaum have even claimed that Weinreich made words up, if he didn't find them ready to hand. True, new words are formed or borrowed all the time, but that's the job of writers, subject specialists, members of subcultures, teenagers, and grannies, not lexicographers.
Further, if your goal is to read classic Yiddish literature (Perets, Sholom Aleichem, Yitskhak Manger etc.), this is not the book for you. I would recommend Harkavy's dictionary, if you can find it. He doesn't give the noun genders, there is little grammatical guidance and the print is hard to read, but the word you're looking for is likely to be there. And the book's very age (1920? or somewhere along there) is a plus, for this purpose. Of course, any serious student of Yiddish needs to keep good Polish, Hebrew and other dictionaries on hand, otherwise many words will remain a mystery, whatever Yiddish dictionary is used.