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Georgie Auld was a tenor saxophonist of French-Canadian extraction, born in 1919, whose family moved from Toronto to New York in 1929, by which time he had already started learning to play the saxophone - first an alto and then a tenor. He started working in swing bands in the late ‘30s, notably those of Bunny Berigan and Artie Shaw, and then in the early ‘40s with Benny Goodman, proving a stylish and versatile soloist. The bands he led during the mid-1940s are seen as excellent transitional units between swing and bop. This 50-track 2-CD collection comprises recordings leading his own bands on the Apollo, Guild, Musicraft, Discovery and Roost labels during these years, before he joined Count Basie’s Octet and then started making albums for Coral in the ‘50s. It includes selected titles featuring vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Lynne Stevens. There are performances with Charlie Shavers, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Butterfield, Al Cohn, Manny Albam, Erroll Garner, Shadow Wilson, Neal Hefti, and Gerry Mulligan as band members. Comprising a mixture of standards and original compositions, it’s a style of jazz that does not challenge musical boundaries, but is designed to be entertaining and accessible, and those are objectives he readily achieves.
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