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BENNIE MOTEN & his Kansas City Orchestra MOTEN SWING LIVING ERA CD AJA 5578 25 original Mono Recordings 1923 - 1932

 

1. Moten Swing
2. Elephant’s Wobble
3. Thick Lip Stomp
4. Kansas City Shuffle
5. Midnight Mama
6. Missouri Wobble
7. The New Tulsa Blues
8. Ding-Dong Blues
9. Moten Stomp
10. Kansas City Breakdown
11. South
12. Let’s Get It
13. Moten Blues
14. Jones Law Blues
15. Band Box Shuffle
16. Small Black
17. New Vine St Blues
18. That Too, Do
19. Somebody Stole My Gal
20. Toby
21. The Blue Room
22. New Orleans
23. Milenberg Joys
24. Lafayette
25. Prince of Wails

Without Louis Armstrong there would have been no Dizzy Gillespie and without the Bennie Moten Band, there would have been no Count Basie Band. On most of these tracks, particularly the latter ones The Count is on piano, but on the demise of Bennie Moten at the age of 39, Basie started to lead various outfits prior to the emergence of his Big Band. The style of these recordings is a long way from that of Basie; the band plays in a very spirited way, but now sounds very dated. Even the presence of Ben Webster on the latter tracks makes little difference; Ben had not developed his ’breathalyser’ at that stage! There is some fine trumpet solos from Hot Lips Page.

Records of this type are obviously targetted at those people with a particular love of the bands of the 20’s and early 30’d. People in this group will delight in the vast increase in listenability of this CD as against the previous 78rpm records. The Living Era team have again excelled themselves in that respect.

Don Mather

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