Willie "The Lion" Smith was a jazz and stride pianist, rivalling James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Clarence Williams in the latter style, who was nicknamed "The Lion" because of his bravery serving in the US Army in France in WWI. By 1910 he was already playing in New York clubs and played on his first recording session in 1920.

Cab Calloway was a jazz singer, bandleader, songwriter, dancer and actor who came to fame as a regular performer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, where he blended jazz and vaudeville to establish a niche that stood him in good stead as an entertainer across seven decades, with one of his most famous roles in later years coming in the 1980 "Blues Brothers" movie. He developed a personal style of scat singing, and was able to deliver novelty-flavoured material with swinging jazz credibility, assembling a band that over the years included jazz luminaries like Ben Webster, Milt Hinton, Doc Cheatham, Chu Berry, Cozy Cole, Dizzy Gillespie and others. This excellent-value 48-track 2-CD set features the releases from this era on the Brunswick, Victor, Variety, Vocalion, Okeh, Columbia and ABC-Paramount labels which were credited with chart positions, plus a few bonus tracks. Those 45 hits include the No. 1 "Minnie The Moocher" and the Top 5 hits "Kickin' The Gong Around", "St. James Infirmary", "Tickeration", "Minnie The Moocher's Wedding Day", "Chinese Rhythm", "Moonglow", "Angels With Dirty Faces", "The Jumpin' Jive", "Blues In The Night" and "The Honey Dripper". He was a unique personality, and these recordings underline his skill and versatility in performing fine swinging jazz while giving it a highly individual comedic twist, and we hope this collection of his best sellers from the era provides an entertaining showcase for his distinctive talents.

Coleman Hawkins was a hugely influential exponent of the tenor saxophone in jazz, being widely regarded as the first artist to establish the instrument as an essential component of the genre's sound. Beginning his career in the early days of jazz in the late '20s, he became a major figure during the swing and big band eras spanning WWII, but also made a significant contribution to the bebop scene into the 1950s. His distinctive but highly adaptable style and sound enabled him to perform over the years in small bands and large orchestras alike both as sideman, leader and featured soloist, and this collection draws on examples of all those elements of his career, from his early recordings with Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra in 1927 through to bebop sessions alongside lush recordings with strings in the mid-'50s. It's a great value 48-track 2-CD, and along the way, there are contributions from many great names of the genre, too numerous to list here, but including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, Cozy Cole, J.J. Johnson, Charlie Christian, Benny Carter, and many more. It's a worthy addition to the Fabulous label's Jazz Legends series. It does not duplicate any tracks included on our existing Fabulous label Coleman Hawkins CD 'Bean Soup' (FABCD 136).

SINGLES COLLECTION VOL. 2 1951-62

Art Farmer - The Art Of Farmer: Classic Albums 1953-55 / Comprising mainly original material, but with a sprinkling of standards. - Art Farmer was a jazz trumpeter, born in 1928, who came to the fore in the post-war bebop era, and recorded and performed continuously and prolifically in the USA and Europe through the latter half of the 20th century until shortly before his death in 1999. His reputation was enhanced by his recording of "Farmer's Market" in 1952, shortly after which he embarked on the sessions featured here for the Prestige label during the middle years of the decade, which were along his first as a band leader. Those sessions were mixed and matched across several 10" and 12" LPs over the next few years, and this 42-track 2-CD collection comprises the complete contents of the Prestige albums Work Of Art", "Art Farmer Quintet", "Art Farmer Plays", "The Art Farmer Septet", "Early Art", "When Farmer Met Gryce" and "Evening in Casablanca". His bands on these sessions featured a number of noted musicians of the day, including Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke, Wynton Kelly, Gigi Gryce, Philly Joe Jones and others. Comprising mainly original material, but with a sprinkling of standards, it captures Farmer at a key moment of his career as he blossomed into one of the most respected trumpeters of the era.

28 examples of the scorching guitar work of Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown ' one of the most influential guitarists from the Texas school, influenced himself by T-Bone Walker. These, his earliest recordings spanning 1947 through 1953 were equally influential of the next generation of guitarists. Albert Collins, Johnny Winter, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan were all influenced by these seminal recordings.

Without Bernard Herrmann's accompanying score, you could argue that Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1960 movie starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, would not be celebrated as one of the greatest chillers of all time today

This is one of the last recordings made by the late Charles Mingus. The session was recorded in New York during November of 1977 under the auspices of Lionel Hampton and amongst the 10 strong line-up of musicians were Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax, Woody Shaw, trumpet and long time Mingus collaborators, Ricky Ford, tenor sax and Dannie Richmond, drums.

The title speaks for itself. Piano solos by the legendary Erroll Garner recorded in the early stages of his distinguished career. These rare recordings predate his Bop credentials by a few months prior to his jam sessions with Charlie Parker and other pioneers. Although best known for his trio works throughout the Fifties these classic recordings illustrate his technique and depth of expression beautifully.

Alberta Hunter was one of the most prominent jazz and blues singers of the early inter-war years, working with many of the major names of the period, as well as being a noted song writer. This great-value 94-track 4-CD set covers the two decades which comprised the greater part of her core recording career - she recorded only a couple of times after 1940 while she was travelling to entertain troops, and retired from the business to take up nursing when her mother died in 1957, returning to singing in her 70s after she was obliged to retire from nursing. Her style spanned the blues and jazz genres, in that while her accompaniment was often jazz-flavoured, the songs were very much in the blues idiom. She worked with solo or small band accompaniment, collaborating with many luminaries of early jazz, such as Eubie Blake, Fletcher Henderson, Clarence Williams, Fats Waller, Lovie Austin, Tommy Ladnier and Perry Bradford, with the likes of Louis Armstrong Lil Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Buster Bailey featuring in the groups she worked with. Also included are recordings she made in London in 1934 with the Jack Jackson Orchestra. This anthology comprises a very high proportion of the recordings she made during the period, and is a thorough overview of her work, so provides a comprehensive showcase for her unique talent.

Trumpeter and bandleader Harry James was one of the most important, successful and influential personalities of the swing and big band era, his unmistakeable bravura trumpet style providing an inspiration and benchmark for trumpeters across the jazz and orchestral genres. He was hugely popular on radio, as a 'live' attraction and on record with his music not only appealing to cutting edge jazz and big band enthusiasts, but also, through his recordings of "sweeter" orchestral material, featuring the many male and female vocalists who launched their careers with his bands, capturing a wider audience to achieve a remarkable string of big-selling hits from his debut as a bandleader in the late '30s right through into the 1950's just before the dawn of the rock 'n' roll era. This great-value 71-track 3-CD set comprises just about all his records which featured in one form or another of the charts during his career, including the few that were listed as being Top 10 hits before the launch of the record sales charts in Billboard in 1940, and those which featured thereafter in one or other of the published Billboard charts or related listings. It naturally includes his No. 1 hits "Sleepy Lagoon", "I Had The Craziest Dream", "I've Heard That Song Before", "I'll Get By", "I'm Beginning to See the Light" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time". Among the featured vocalists are Frank Sinatra, Dick Haymes, Helen Forrest, Kitty Kallen, Johnny McAfee, Buddy DeVito, Betty Grable, Willie Smith, Ginnie Powell, Marion Morgan, Art Lund and Dick Williams, and it also includes Harry's 1950s hits with Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney. It's a hugely entertaining overview of the commercially successful output of one of the great stylists and innovators of the big band era.

Jimmy Reed was a hugely influential figure of the blues and R&B scene during the 1950s and early '60s, not only for the fact that he brought his distinctive style of electric blues to mainstream audiences, but also because in the process he inspired many aspiring talents on both sides of the Atlantic, notably The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Jerry Garcia, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Van Morrison, who all recorded versions of various Jimmy Reed R&B hits. He came to prominence in the early '50s when he was one of the first artists to sign to VeeJay, and over the years scored around twenty Top 20 R&B hits, with a dozen or more pop chart entries as well, underlining his importance as a crossover artist. Among them were memorable classics, which have been much covered over the years, such as "Ain't That Loving You Baby", "Honest I Do", "Little Rain", "Baby What You Want Me To Do" and "Bright Lights, Big City", all of which are included in this great value 54-track 2-CD collection, which comprised every A and B side he released from his debut in 1953 through to the first months

In 1958, the first issue of a new magazine named Jazz Review contained an essay by musicologist Gunther Schuller, titled "Sonny Rollins and Thematic Improvisation". The piece's premise was simple - to examine a single Rollins' solo on a recording called Blue 7 (heard on the saxophonist's iconic 1956 LP Saxophone Colossus), whose title gave away the basic structure of the performance - that of the back-bone of jazz, the twelve bar blues. Rollins was already one of the most talked-of jazzmen of his generation, seen by many as a genuine heir to Bebop's founding father Charlie Parker, but Schuller's painstaking analysis elevated him further still, to the rank of innovator whose blues improvisations had a level of compositional cogency of one "who spends days or weeks writing a given passage". Rollins, Schuller believed, had provided a defining example of the art of jazz. Yet, like all good critics, he was aware that such a performance didn't come out of nowhere. Although Blue 7 was undoubtedly a high spot, it was a peak that dominated a landscape littered with other such achievements. Indeed, it was just the latest in a series of classic blues solos Rollins had been setting down on record with his own groups and those led by others since the early 1950s. This new collection collates a selection of those great performances - the first ever issue to concentrate solely on Rollins; blues specialist. Well-regarded for his musical wit and penchant for oddball song choices, since Blue 7 remarkably little has been written about the great saxophonist's ability to wring pure invention from the most fundamental format in jazz, yet the blues (part of his artistic DNA since his days as a teenage Louis Jordan fan) has been at the back of all Rollins' stylistic shifts over a sixty year career. Packaged with period photographs and a fascinating booklet note by saxophonist Simon Spillett, this anthology charts a course through some of his greatest musical encounters - with other giants like Dizzy, Miles, Coltrane and Monk - as well as documenting his never-ending quest for the most stimulating of instrumental contexts. There are pianoless trios, a series of classy quartets and quintets and one especially memorable session, a two-piano sextet. Whatever the setting though, and whatever the tempo (which ranges from a roar through Sonnymoon For Two to the slow purr of Sumphin'), this is Sonny Rollins proving time and again that the blues is at the very core of his immense contribution to the music. Number of Discs: 2

George Shearing, who died in 2011, was one of the most illustrious jazz pianists of his era, overcoming blindness to become one of the truly distinctive keyboard stylists, equally at home as soloist, small group leader, with big bands or as an empathetic accompanist for some of the fine singers who were his contemporaries. This collection traces his recording career over a crucial 20-year period from it's very beginnings just before the outbreak of WWII through to classic albums towards the end of the 1950s, including some rare early recordings. It demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of his talent, including his adeptness on the piano accordion, and the way his unique style developed, and we hope that as well as providing thoroughly entertaining listening it is a fitting tribute to a true giant of the genre.

Charley Patton is widely regarded as perhaps the archetypal early exponent of Mississippi Delta blues. He was a true original with a distinctive slide guitar technique, and he performed a range of blues, spirituals and ballads in a powerful, intense, even primitive, fashion which uniquely captures the style and spirit of the genre. His recording career was restricted to a few sessions between 1929 and 1934, from which around thirty double-sided '78s were released, first on Paramount and latterly on Vocalion, and that was the entirety of his recorded output before his premature death from a heart disorder in 1934 aged 45. This collection comprises the entirety of that canon, including six tracks on which he played guitar, with Henry Sims and Bertha Lee erspectively performing the vocals. Anyone seriously interested in the blues and it's history needs to have heard Charley Patton, and this anthology provides a comprehensive overview of his work.