Trad Parade

Although trad jazz producer Denis Preston is most frequently associated with the Pye label, several of the artists with whom he worked were contracted elsewhere -- Ken Colyer recorded for Decca, Terry Lightfoot for Columbia, and so on. All these archives, however, have been opened up during Lake Records' continuing excavation of the Preston/Record Supervision Ltd catalog, with Trad Parade the second CD to visit Lightfoot's output for the EMI subsidiary. Covering Terry Lightfoot's New Orleans Jazzmen's output across the turn of the decades, from September 1959 to July 1960, Trad Parade is, of course, dominated by the album of that same name -- and it will come as something of a surprise to anybody accustomed to the original LP. The original intention, back in June and July of 1960, was to record a live album. For whatever reason, this particular plan never got off the ground; instead, the band's latest studio recordings were crudely overdubbed with an obviously appreciative audience, and it was only at the very last minute that the record's title was changed from the proposed "Live at the Lansdowne" -- a misleading name that was nevertheless accurate within the strictest sense of the word -- after all, it didn't say which Lansdowne they were live at -- the studio where the album was recorded, and or the jazz nightspot that then ranked among London's most respected venues! It was a fun album to listen to, but sharp ears quickly began to pick out a lot of discrepancies between the band's playing and the audience's reaction to it -- "why are they cheering there, but silent here?" one wonders, and such questions suck a lot of the joy from the album itself. For the remastering, however, the canned crowd has been altogether removed, and the results are astonishing. As usual with Lake, the original album is supplemented by some equally exciting bonus material, in the form of the two four-song EPs that the Jazzmen released during 1960, Trad Again and Still Trad. Lined up alongside the unmolested Trad Parade, they represent one of the most enjoyable albums in the entire Lake collection. ~ Dave Thompson|