condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (light foxing on back)

Insert and obi included.

Two of the biggest tenor sounds of the thirties, collected from the Commodore sessions that Milt Gabler ran out of his record shop on 42nd Street. Coleman Hawkins is the founder; Leon "Chu" Berry is the disciple who might have equalled him had he not died in a car crash in 1941 at thirty-one. Hearing them together makes the lineage obvious and the loss sharper: same enormous vibrato, same harmonic appetite, but Berry pushed the tempos harder and swung with a kind of headlong joy. Gabler recorded them properly and gave them room, which nobody else in that decade bothered to do.

Japanese Commodore pressing. Swing-era tenor playing at the highest level, from the first serious independent jazz label in America.