condition (record/cover): NM / NM
Insert and obi included.
1938, and one of the most perfect small-group sessions ever recorded. Milt Gabler took a handful of Basie men into a studio - Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Eddie Durham, Freddie Green, Walter Page, Jo Jones - and simply let them play. Young is at the absolute height of his powers here, that light, floating, behind-the-beat tenor sound that made every subsequent saxophonist rethink what the instrument was for, and on several tracks he plays clarinet, which he almost never recorded and which is unbearably beautiful. Nothing is hurried. Everything swings.
Commodore pressing. One of the handful of genuinely perfect records in the whole of jazz.