SwingDJs

trev wrote:Nice that Billie and Basie signatures are together, presumably signed during her short stint with the Basie Band.

Also Billie and Artie together. Did he see her singing with both bands? Some guys have all the luck.

"The Grabtown Grapple" by Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five with Roy Eldridge on trumpet, recorded in 1945. It's an original tune, named for Ava Gardner's birthplace.

Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets
Lookin' for soul food and a place to eat
Went to the Apollo
You should have seen him go go go

...oh, wrong tune. Sorry. Carry on.

It's Limehouse Blues - an early 1920's song that became a jazz standard. There are many great versions of it (notably by Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Django Reinhardt), most of them a bit faster than this.

Sure. Just A-Sittin' And A-Rockin' by Duke Ellington, from 1941. Ben Webster plays the creamy tenor.

anton wrote:"If you like [...] Mr Sun TO warm your bones all day" makes more sense to me.

Of course. That's it.

Don't mention it, we geeks love this sort of thing! You're looking at the right stuff - it could be from there, it could be from somewhere else; at that price it's certainly ripped off from somewhere, but I guess it's better than downloading. Don't expect too much of the sound quality, either - ther...

Okay, so I checked, and it looks like tracks 1-124 are pretty much the complete big band recordings starting somewhat arbitrarily in April 1938 and going chronologically through 1942, with one small group session (as by "Johnny Hodges and his Orchestra", tracks 19-22) thrown in. After that...

Hi Sara, welcome to the board! Oooh, that's a lovely Ellington set! No idea about the quality of the sound restoration and remastering, but the music is top notch. At a glimpse it looks to be a more or less complete, chronological collection of Ellington's 1938-1946 recordings, both big band and sma...

I have this set, but it's been a long time since I DJ'd anything from it. We kind of overdosed on 1950s Basie in the early 2000s, especially slow stuff like "Splanky" and "Shiny Stockings", and I really think we needed to get away from that groove. But maybe I should give it a tr...

If you don't mind some old school, there's a fine 1929 version by Louis Armstrong at 200 bpm and not changing tempo. (Unfortunately it's not one of the songs he did with Luis Russell's orchestra at the time. Those were hard-swinging!)

It's funny - I have a friend who DJs at a club for electronic music. She uses CDs, as do most of the DJs at that place. Some DJ from vinyl too. You'd imagine that those futuristic types would be way ahead of us retrophiles technologically, but no.

I'm pretty sure that's Benny Goodman's Big John Special, but it's not the 1938 studio version and certainly not the one from Carnegie Hall. Probably a radio transcription or something.

Of course they won't get caught. But will they know which year any given track was recorded, which musicians are on it, or what they looked like?

Then again, maybe things like that don't matter, as long as you keep the dancers happy.

Much great scat singing was done by Cab Calloway (check out his 1935 version of Nagasaki). Also vocal groups Mills Brothers (their '30s stuff), the Cats & the Fiddle, the Spirits of Rhythm and their lead singer Leo Watson, who did some fine work with Artie Shaw.