Complete Historical Masters, Universal Music

The recorded legacy of the jazz pioneers who transformed 20th-century music remains a scramble of compilations, collectors’ listings and expensive special-issue sets. Now Universal has tidied things up for five main artists at least by combining their master recordings, including sideman appearances, under a single budget-priced roof.

Dip in at random and the music is marvellous and the sound quality excellent. With live performances and recordings from outside the notional time frame added, these sets are the nearest thing in the jazz canon to complete collections.

Sydney Bechet

New Orleans clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sydney Bechet suffered most from piecemeal reissues, and the welcome 14 CDs of his Complete American Masters 1931-53 includes early studio dates and privately recorded live performances.

Bechet lived in London from 1919 to 1922 – when he was deported in murky circumstances for a minor offence – and in France from 1925. In between he recorded in New York under the leadership of Clarence Williams for the Okeh record label. Bechet’s fully formed heavy vibrato, surging sense of time and emotional impact are captured here; he puts a young Louis Armstrong in his place on 1924’s “Texas Moaner Blues”.

When Bechet returned to the US in 1931, Armstrong was king – his Complete Masters 1925-45 shows why – and the recording industry was sorely hit by the depression. Bechet recorded sweet-toned, somewhat jaunty dance music with the Noble Sissle Orchestra, although authentic jazz subtleties and insidious rhythms returned when he used his own band to record “Viper Mad” in 1938. From then on blues and stomps, lewd novelties and delicate chamber jazz made up Bechet’s emotional palette. His final US recording, a 10-inch LP for Blue Note in 1953, is as fresh and vigorous as his earlier work.

Bechet had moved back to France in 1950, where he stayed, feted, until his death at 62 nine years later. In contrast, when alto saxophonist Charlie Parker – whose Complete Masters 1941-54 includes live broadcasts – died in 1955 at 34, his life was a drug-wrecked mess. Yet Parker’s later recordings are stacked with fresh compositions, new settings and a logic that gave improvisation the depth of written composition. The only inkling in his music that all was not well came early, with his notoriously inept performance on “Lover Man”, recorded for Dial in 1946.

Parker’s music grew out of the swing era and matured just as another rash of small labels sprang up in the early 1940s. Parker’s first works capture a music in transition, with pianists grappling with new chords while guitarists chug along to the thump and thud of drummers locked into swing-era beats. By 1945 Parker had mustered the personnel for a pivotal moment in music, the Savoy recordings, the first documentation of unadulterated bebop.

Vocalist Billie Holiday’s life was equally messy and the ravages showed in the tonal quality of her voice. The 15-CD Complete Masters 1933-59 progress from the fresh-voiced “Your Mother’s Son-In-Law” with Benny Goodman to the slightly croaky “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home”, recorded with the strait-laced Ray Ellis Orchestra for MGM shortly before she died.

Holiday’s timing, emphasis and supple alteration of melody give run-of-the-mill lyrics profundity. The vocal sensitivity of her small group recordings of 1933-44 has never been equalled. Later, musicianship compensates when her voice is rougher or the accompaniment less sympathetic.

While Holiday was laying down small-group subtleties, Ella Fitzgerald was fronting the Chick Webb Orchestra. Her impeccable diction, pure tone and athletic technique remained intact throughout: she died in 1996 aged 79. This collection, which begins at the start of the swing era, covers the years 1936-56, when Fitzgerald mastered the intricacies of bebop and trail-blazed the art of contemporary scat by applying a jazz instrumentalist’s fluency to the human voice. In conjunction with the Holiday and Armstrong collections, the Fitzgerald set defines the parameters of jazz vocals to this day.

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