1.Barrelhouse
2.Rhythm, Rhythm (I Got Rhythm)
3.Take Me To The Land Of Jazz
4.Rose Of Washington Square
5.Got Rhythm
6.Blue Room
7.Carnegie Jump
8.Darktown Strutters' Ball
9.Madhouse
10.Roll 'Em
11.Big John Special
12.Opus ¾
13.Vultee Special
14.Ec-Stacy
15.Spain
16.Down To Steamboat Tennessee
17.Daybreak Serenade
18.It's Only A Paper Moon
19.In A Mist
20.Candlelights
21.In The Dark/ Flashes
22.I Ain't Got Nobody
23.Blue Fives
24.Ridin' Easy
25.Sing, Sing, Sing (excerpt)
Jess Stacy (piano ) with personnel
including Bob Crosby, Benny Goodman,
Lionel Hampton, Lee Wiley, Muggsy Spanier,
The Bud Freeman Trio, Pee Wee Russell’s
Hot Four Eddie Condon and the Windy
City Seven, George Wettling and the
Chicago Rhythm Kings
Versatile and subtle,
Stacy was a perfect band pianist and
a soloist of discretion and, when needed,
old fashioned power. His fusion of Beiderbeckian
lyricism and stomping boogie is one
that has always appealed to those versed
as much in the poetic strain in jazz
as the more drenched shirt school –
a dash of Keats and a tankard of sweat.
He’s being well served by the French
Classics label and their chronological
survey but here we have a decade’s worth
of Stacy from ASV starting in 1935.
That Beiderbecke influence,
itself a Macdowell-Delius compound,
was fleshed out with a lineage straight
from the Teddy Wilson-Fats Waller axis.
So we start with Barrelhouse,
a stomper with the adamantine bass playing
of Israel Crosby prominent, and take
in such unexpected sounds as the remarkably
aggressive alto playing of the normally
imperturbable Johnny Hodges in Rhythm,
rhythm. The sidemen are stellar
- Pee Wee Russell and Spanier to the
fore, and Stacy’s association with Goodman
and Bob Crosby is covered as is Stacy’s
own brief excursion into band leading
on Daybreak Serenade. As an example
of sophistication and modernity, though,
the vivacious Goodman/Hampton composition
Opus ¾ sounds as pertinent and
infectious as the day in 1939 that it
was penned.
From homages to Beiderbecke,
via Chicago speakeasies, up-tempo boogie
and that famous moment of coruscating
intimacy, extracted from the live 1938
Sing, Sing, Sing at Carnegie Hall in
which he turned a flag waver into three
minutes of pastel shaded beauty, Stacy
is here in all his multi-faceted versatility
and panache in well engineered transfers
and enthusiastic notes.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
ASV CD AJA 5172 [78.26] 
