Side Man: Jazz Classics...

As a souvenir of the 1998 Broadway play, Side Man, RCA Victor licensed the recorded music heard in between the dialogue passages -- ten tracks containing playwright Warren Leight's notion of a dream team of trumpet solos. What, pray tell, are his criteria? If you go by the numbers, he definitely has a bias; eight of the ten solos were recorded between 1954 and 1957, five of the ten (and the majority of the playing time) are devoted to Clifford Brown ("Chelsea Bridge" finds Ella Fitzgerald on vocalise instead of a trumpeter). But Leight also has taste. Leight's centerpiece is the spectacular Brownie "A Night in Tunisia" where he laid down the greatest solo of his life just hours before his death. Also included are Lee Morgan's early rendering of "I Remember Clifford," and to close, Miles Davis' unceasingly affecting "It Never Entered My Mind." The two tracks Leight chose outside his slender continuum are dazzlers too -- Roy Eldridge's 1941 "Rockin' Chair" with the Gene Krupa band and Donald Byrd's 1963 hymn of hymns, "Cristo Redentor." If you've collected jazz for a good length of time, you probably have all these tracks, and jazz beginners should seek out more focused single-artist packages. So that leaves the theatre crowd as the target -- and the music is powerful enough to gather converts there. ~ Richard S. Ginell