Jaki Byard, The Apollo Stompers

CD version. Phantasies is a big band album by Jaki Byard and his orchestra, The Apollo Stompers, recorded at Vanguard Studios in New York on September 25 and 26, 1984 and released by Soul Note in 1985. Byard, the pianist of Charles Mingus's bands of the early 1960s, who had headed jazz teaching at the New England Conservatory from 1969 to 1977, had first formed the Apollo Stompers from his students in the mid-1970s and then put together a New York band under the same name.

He plays piano and conducts eighteen musicians: four trumpets, among them John Eckert, four trombones including Steve Swell plus bass trombone, a reed section of two altos, two tenors (Al Givens and Jed Levy) and baritone, with Dan Licht on guitar, Ralph Hamperian on bass and Richard Allen on drums. His daughters Denyce and Diane Byard sing. David Baker engineered the session, Giovanni Bonandrini produced and Gary Giddins wrote the notes. The programme moves across jazz history in short pieces and linked medleys. The first medley runs from Ellington's Black And Tan Fantasy through Byard's Prelude No. 29 into Prelude To A Kiss and Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me. The 5/4 Medley frames his Cinco Quatro Boogie Woogie between two passes at Take 5, and the second side opens with a run through Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman, So What, Impressions, a 25-second Olean Visit and Some Other Spring. Carole King's It's Too Late sits next to Oscar Pettiford's Tricotism and a closing Lover Man of more than five minutes. A second volume, Phantasies II, followed on the same label.

This is the Soul Note CD 121075-2, with the album first released in 1985 as SN 1075.