So versatile that she was able to sustain a professional career for more than thirty years, jazz pianist, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams ran the gamut from Dixieland to swing, bop and avant-garde. This album is among her 1960s avant-garde works, with intimate piano combos and vocal jazz choruses; it includes her well-known cantata, The Black Christ of the Andes (also available remastered and reissued on SFW40816 as a CD, complete with extensive liner notes and historic photos).

Reissued with additional tracks and annotations in 1996 as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 40812.

Joseph Lamb (1887-1960) is considered one of the three great composers of ragtime, along with Scott Joplin and James Scott. Between 1908 and 1919, while living in Montclair, New Jersey, and working in a New York City fabric house, Joe Lamb composed some of the most brilliant ragtime tunes published in America. However, he never released a recording until this one, made in his Brooklyn living room on an upright Knabe piano only a year prior to his death. Lamb, like the other great ragtime composers, considered improvisation to be a trick of "low-class" players. He played the rags on this recording not from memory, but from the written music he had composed years earlier, to be sure of playing every note he had written. The liner notes describe Lamb's development as a ragtime composer, as well as a brief biography.

The list of musicians trumpet player Bunny Berigan and trombonist Jack Teagarden played with in the 1930s includes a vast array of jazz performers, from Tommy Dorsey to Louis Armstrong. Both musicians were equally at home with large and small ensembles, and this fine recording reflects their flexibility and musicianship.

Radio broadcasts of 1939 are the source of this extraordinary collection of tunes played by the Chick Webb Orchestra. One of the most respected bandleaders and drummers of swing, Webb is credited with an undefeated record in his Battles of the Bands at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem (including a victory over Benny Goodman in 1937) and with having discovered Ella Fitzgerald, who positively shimmers on ballads like "That Was My Heart" and "Deep in a Dream."

After rediscovering a tin box full of acetate recordings of jazz rehearsal sessions, Folkways founder Moe Asch pieced together a sequence that shows the on-the-spot creative energy musicians produce in the studio. This disc features Mary Lou Williams and her hand-picked group of session musicians, all innovators from the clubs of New York.