RANDY WESTON – Four Classic Albums (2 CDS) AVID

AVID Jazz presents four classic Randy Weston albums, including original liner notes on a finely re-mastered and low priced double CD.
“Cole Porter In A Modern Mood”; “Trio & Solo” “Get Happy” and “Jazz A La Bohemia”.
Our first selection presents a 28 year old, 6’7″ pianist from Brooklyn named Randy Weston on his first session as leader, in a tribute to the legendary great American songwriter Cole Porter, “Cole Porter in a Modern Mood”. Influenced primarily by Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, the Monk influence is very much to the fore in this drummer-less tribute where Weston is joined only by bassist Sam Gill. It is an impressive beginning to Mr Weston’s career as a leader. For “Trio & Solo” we have an album of two halves, as the football pundits might say. Five tracks are performed solo and five with a trio. For the trio selections Weston is joined again by Sam Gill on bass and Art Blakey on drums. The influence of Monk is again hovering over proceedings but Weston is definitely finding his own style with the approach and flexibility of his playing. From the opening track of “Get Happy” Randy Weston and his band do just that, here’s a quote from the original liner notes…..”As this album demonstrates, he has a keen ear for the humor in a piece of music and, even more often, for the beauty………….it’s a good deal of fun to listen to Randy Weston”. The band in question is Sam Gill on bass and Wilbert Hogan on drums. An attempt to reproduce the sound from a live gig is featured on our final selection “Jazz A La Bohemia”. The club in question, being the Café Bohemia in New York’s Greenwich Village where recording equipment was unloaded in the fall of 1956 to witness the show by the Randy Weston Quartet. The band was a strong one, featuring boyhood chum Cecil Payne on baritone sax, Ahmed Abdul Malik on bass and Al Dreares on drums. This was a band more than capable of giving the producers what they wanted, a sense of how jazz can sound in a truly live setting, where there are no limitations or timing constraints. Where the two main soloists, Weston on piano and Payne on the sax could “interweave with skill and originality”. A quote from the original liner notes suggests that the producers did get what they wanted! “We feel that this recording captures the feel of live in the club performance on a good night-that by bringing the studio to the club in this instance we have been able to preserve on disc something of the best of two technically very different corners of the jazz world”.
All four albums plus have been digitally re-mastered.

CD1
1-8: ‘Cole Porter In A Modern Mood’
1. Get Out Of Town
2. I Get A Kick Out Of You
3. I Love You
4. In The Still Of The Night
5. Just One Of Those Things
6. Night And Day
7. What Is This Thing Called Love
8. I’ve Got You Under My Skin
9-18: ‘Trio & Solo’
9. Sweet Sue
10. Pam’s Waltz
11. Solemn Meditation
12. Again
13. Zulu
14. Little Girl Blue
15. We’ll Be Together Again
16. Softness
17. Lover
18. If You Could See Me Now
19: ‘Get Happy’
19. Get Happy

CD2
1-9: ‘Get Happy’
1. Fire Down There
2. Where Are You?
3. Under Blunder
4. Dark Eyes
5. Summertime
6. Bass Knows
7. C-Jam Blues
8. A Ballad
9. Twelfth Street Rag
10-17: ‘Jazz A La Bohemia’
10. Theme: Solemn Meditation
11. Just A Riff
12. You Go To My Head
13. Once In A While
14. Hold ‘Em Joe
15. It’s All Right With Me
16. Chessman’s Delight
17. Theme: Solemn Meditation