Shorty Rogers, The West Coast Giants

Featuring: Shelly Manne, Jimmy Giuffre

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert and obi included.

The Aurex Jazz Festival ran in Japan through the early eighties on a very simple principle: fly in the surviving greats, put them on stage in themed packages, record everything properly. This edition assembled Shorty Rogers with a group billed as the West Coast Giants, revisiting the cool-school arrangements that had defined Los Angeles jazz thirty years earlier. Rogers had spent the intervening decades writing for television and film and had largely stopped playing; the Japanese festivals were what brought him back. Relaxed, expertly played, and captured with the engineering standards the Japanese market expected.

Japanese Eastworld pressing. The Aurex recordings are consistently well-made and consistently overlooked.