American Hot Bands Of The 1930s - Bouncing / Var

It is often supposed that good jazz ground to a halt with the Wall Street crash of October 29th 1929; but while it is true that public taste veered a way from the virile styles of dance music that had characterized the preceding decade, that is not to say that the jazz idiom withered and died with the leaves that fell that autumn. It simply went underground, so to speak, awaiting the time when it would once more be welcome with the public generally. The twenty tracks in this album show what was being done in the name of jazz during those rather bleak years when the biggest popular songs stressed the grim reality of life. There is none of this in the selection presented here though; instead, a cross-section of some of the finest examples of jazz or dance music strongly jazz-orientated, from big bands that were playing "swing" quite a while before the name became a fad, to small bands that were creating works of art in the way such bands always had. They are still fresh after decades of time. The list of musicians' on this CD are to long to list here, but needless to say it features a whole roster of names that will be familiar to anyone with the slightest interest in jazz.