Lunceford Special: 1939-1940

Artist: Jimme Lunceford
Label: Sony
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Original recording remastered
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 074646564721
EAN: 0074646564721
ASIN: B00005LNAX

Release Date: 2001-06-26

Related Categories:

General

| Jazz | Styles | Music

Swing General

| Swing Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music

General

| Pop | Styles | Music

Classic Big Band

| Swing Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music

Contemporary Big Band

| Swing Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music

Listmania:

Best Lindy Hop Swing/Jazz Albums

Tracks:

Tain't What You Do (It's The Way You Do It)
Le Jazz Hot
Baby, Won't You Please Come Home
The Lonesome Road
Shoemaker's Holiday
Blue Blazes
Mandy, Make Up Your Mind
Ain't She Sweet
White Heat
Well Alright Then
I Want The Water (With The Water)
Rock It For Me
Wham (Re-Bop-Boom-Bam)
Uptown Blues
Lunceford Special
Blues In The Groove
It's Time To Jump And Shout
What's Your Story, Morning Glory
Dinah, Part 1
Dinah, Part 2
Monotony In Four Flats
Swingin' In C

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Customer Reviews:

On top with the Duke and the Count, Jimmie the King!.......2005-03-01

This was the hot, sweet, but sophisticated, party music of the Swing Era. No one was more popular among Black youth who needed music to party than Lunsford. No one out performed them in their stage show. They were decisive to the shape of big band music with their arrangers setting the pace for many other swing bands for decades after Lunsfords death in the mid 1940s.

When I saw the series that was purported to tell the story of Jazz on PBS a couple years ago, I thought I had missed an episode because there was not a full program about Lunsford, or continual mention of the great band and its decisive influence on Jazz. Then I went to my friend who is one of the planet's major jazz lovers and who videotapes anything broadcast with jazz or good music and asked him about the missing episode. He said there wasn't one. I couldn't believe it, just couldn't.

Jimmie Lunsford's orchestra was one of the great Jazz Bands along with Basie, Ellington, and Chick Webb. In many ways, they were the popular royalty of swing, because they presented a higher level of entertainment and were probably more popular among African Americans than Ellington, and were longer lasting than Basie.

Listen to this music. It's smooth, cool, fun, nothing but danceable. The vocals are clean and cool and when the band sings it isn't the usual hoarse half-shout---which I still ador whenever a swing band shouts back--but an organized choir. This is music that must have been what the coolest of the cool guys and gals of the time listened to and above all partied to at the height of the depression.

While they may not have had the kind of impact on Jazz as an art as Ellington's excellent arrangements and compositions or the way Basie's rhythmn section made four beat swing unconquerable and provided a platform for the greatness of Lester Young and, Lunceford had a deeper influence on the white swing bands on post-swing "big band" music. The tight but swinging sound of the Lunsford orchestra, the way the horn sections alternated, the way the voicings were so clear and un mistakeable became the pattern for most of the popular swing bands. The great arrangers within the Lunsford Orchestra like Eddie Durham (Basie actually made a deal with Lunsford to borrow Durham for two years!!), Sy Oliver, and Gerald Wilson were hired by all the big white Swing bands of the 1940s like Glenn Miller who is forever identified with Eddie Durham's arrangement of "In the Mood." Oliver and Wilson outlasted the Swing era either as arrangers and leaders of recording and movie score orchestras into the 1970s.

It wasn't just dance and party music, smooth performanced, choreographed stage shows, Lunsford even had and pulled off great arrangements of light classical pieces.

Unfortunately, while Hampton, Ellington, and Basie lived on and kept their flames going, Jimmie Lunsford died in an auto accident in the forties. So, a lot people don't realize he belongs there with Basie and Ellington in the pantheon of Swing.

Swinging At The Apex.......2002-04-13

By most standards, the Swing Era reached its apex in the years 1939-1940. This disk contains most - but not all - of the best records by the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra during those years. Recorded between January, 1939, and May, 1940, these records were made during the same period as Count Basie's "Taxi War Dance" and Duke Ellington's "Ko-Ko" and "Jack The Bear."

The Lunceford band was perhaps a notch below Basie and Ellington, but that is not faint praise by any calculation. Lunceford's chief soloists were Eddie Tomkins and Snooky Young (trumpet), Trummy Young (trombone and vocal), Willie Smith (alto sax and vocal), and Joe Thomas (tenor sax and vocal). His arrangers were Sy Oliver, Eddie Durham, and Billy Moore, Jr. Lunceford's rhythm section was second only to Basie's.

Sy Oliver's arrangements were distinctive. They were humorous, with a two-beat feel that was both light and solid. At his best, Oliver was a peer of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Strayhorn. This set includes great Oliver charts on "Tain't What You Do," "Le Jazz Hot," and "Well Alright Then." Oliver was also adept at reviving and updating older tunes, like "Ain't She Sweet" and "Dinah." Among the non-Oliver standouts are Eddie Durham's score of "Lunceford Special," Billy Moore's blues outing, "What's Your Story, Morning Glory," and the exceptional head arrangement of "Uptown Blues," containing Willie Smith's finest recorded solo.

Sy Oliver left the band in 1939, and it began to lose its distinctiveness. Duke Ellington was saying publicly at the time that swing had become stagnant, and the criticism quickly attached to the Lunceford band. By the time we reach "Monotony In Four Flats," we are hearing homogenized swing played by a band that sounded like a dozen others. Better to savor the magic of the band a few months earlier, when it was still at the apex.

The Best Sound Around--1939-1940.......2001-08-06

"The Lunceford Special" showcases Jimmie Lunceford's Band, the "Twelve Talented Tennesseans," with 22 cuts from 1939 and 1940 recorded for Columbia. As Bob Waldman states on the liner notes, this CD contains blues, novelties, standards, Latin-style instrumentals, flagwavers, dixieland and a precursor of bop in the opening of "Dinah, Part 2." The band's success was in the quality of the musicians as well as in the often avant-garde quality of Sy Oliver's arrangements. Alas, Sy Oliver left the band to become Tommy Dorsey's arranger in 1939, but the band's sound, at what many critics maintain was at its best, is preserved on this CD. Rumors of a possible re-uniting of the band persist to this day, and the reasons for them can be found on these cuts.

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