Jaki Byard, The Apollo Stompers

Phantasies II is the second album by Jaki Byard with The Apollo Stompers, his big band, following Phantasies, recorded for Soul Note in September 1984. It was taped in New York in August 1988 and issued in 1991. The programme sets Byard's own pieces, two of them dedicated to B.B. King and Count Basie and a two-part Concerto Grosso, against standards from Manhattan to Send In The Clowns.

The sessions took place on August 23 and 24, 1988 at Sound Ideas Studios in New York City. Byard leads a band of four trumpets, four trombones and five saxophones, with guitar, bass and drums: among them the trumpeter Graham Haynes, the trombonist Steve Swell and the guitarist Peter Leitch, and two singers, Diane Byard and Vincent Lewis. BJC Blues is the King tribute, and Up Jumps One, which closes side one, is the one for Basie. The Concerto Grosso opens with Mellow Septet and closes with There Are Many Words, as the LP labels it. Around them the record moves between New York Is A Lonely Town, June Night and Bright Moments, most of the ten tracks kept between two and five minutes.

This is the Soul Note LP 121 175-1, which CAM Jazz describes as a copy of the original 1991 pressing on 140 gram vinyl, found again in the label's vaults; it was mastered at PhonoComp in Milan.