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there is a Lombardo version, taken too slowly imo, and a version by Jock McDermott which has the worst vocal imaginable, so don’t bother searching! Buried amongst my cassettes I have a quickstep instrumental version, but I don’t know whose band it was, although I suspect Whiteman. There are many dozens of cassettes, none labelled and no clues except the occasional words from Alan Dell.
i'm tempted to say, so I will, that he could have done a lot more with Summertime than he did. But that is Bechet with his obsession with those long quivering notes. They do get boring after a bit and he wasn't short on technique. So my report is "cold try harder".
There's also a lot of material at archive.org https://archive.org/details/audio?a...d[]=subject:"Popular+Music"&sort=-week&page=5
This rather complicated link should take you to a selection of the 17,000 recordings from the 20s. If you look down the left hand side of the page you should see their search filters so you can look for particular artists/dates or even titles. They do have about as much as this from the later decades and a bit from earlier.
Johnny Claes & the Clae Pidgeons was one of the first bands that Ronnie Scott ever sat in with, just two or three years after he had started to play tenor sax. Ronnie decided himself that he just hadn't got the experience to play with so good a band, and Johnny agreed. But I really like this track of Fascinatin' Rhythm from 1941
Johnny Clae was born in the UK with a Scottish mother and Belgian father and at one stage had played with the great Coleman Hawkins. In the late 1940s he moved to the Netherlands and began a short Grand Prix racing career alongside people like the late Sterling Moss, though we wasn't as good. Sadly he died at the age of only 39 from TB. Here is Stomping at the Savoy.
Just picked this one up Maurice, I have to say that it represents the area of jazz that I least appreciate, along with the very modern styles. However it’s always good to try to expand your horizons and try something new. I could have done without the announcer though!
I entirely agree about the announcer, and why they had to include that in a record mystifies me. I well remember the vocalist Benny Lee,so I looked him up on Wiki and he was certainly in all the places I expected, including Take It From Here and the various Bernard Braden shows, only dying in 1995.