Dizzy Gillespie

The titles of World Statesman (1956) and Dizzy In Greece (1957) are not travel whimsy. Gillespie's big band was the first jazz orchestra the US State Department sent abroad as cultural diplomacy, in 1956, and both records are by-products of that assignment — the place names are an itinerary, not a mood.

Percy Heath is remembered as the bassist anchoring the Modern Jazz Quartet, but before he ever picked up an instrument he trained as a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. The war ended before he saw combat; back home, urged by his brothers, he picked up the bass instead — the same hands heard here on the 1954 session for Roses Of Picardy.

In 1941 the room where the new rhythm was being assembled was not being documented by any record company — the discs were cut by a customer who carried his own portable recorder into Minton's. That is the only reason we can hear Kenny Clarke, the house drummer, as he played then: the amateur recordings surfaced sixteen years later as Jazz Immortal - After Hours Monroe's Harlem Mintons (1957).

In 1958, the same year Coleman Hawkins cut his own showcase album The Genius of Coleman Hawkins, he also backed a blues record titled after the hit Broadway character from South Pacific — a founding father of jazz tenor sax turning up on session work far outside his usual world.

The 1958 second volume of Ella Fitzgerald's Duke Ellington Song Book ends with "Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald," a four-part piece written for her rather than drawn from the existing catalogue. It is an instrumental: the orchestra plays it, and the singer whose name is on the cover sits it out.