condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Obi included

The second volume of Prestige's memorial to Wardell Gray - the tenor who carried Lester Young's smooth flame into bebop and burned it with his own light, before dying young and mysteriously in Las Vegas in 1955, one of the era's saddest and strangest losses. These late-forties and early-fifties sides show exactly why musicians revered him: long, singing lines that made the hardest changes sound like relaxed conversation, the swing always intact inside the modernism, the tone like smoke with a light inside it. "Twisted" became a vocalese legend through Annie Ross, carrying Gray's melodic gift to audiences who never learned his name - the whole songbook here testifies to how much more there was. Postwar tenor playing at its most elegant and least dated.

US Prestige pressing of an essential historical document that also simply feels wonderful to play, which is the best kind of history. A musician's musician, awaiting your correction of the record.