Album Notes

The West End Jazz Band is well-known to aficionados of 1920s and 1930s jazz and dance band music the world over. In over thirty years of playing this music, the band has established a reputation second-to-none for authentically recreating music--sweet and hot--from the \"Golden Age of Jazz.\" Far from being just another Dixieland band, the West End Jazz Band draws upon period arrangements of pure jazz classics, nonsense songs, standards, obscure songs, and dance medleys that evoke the sounds of the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawks, Jelly Roll Morton\'s Red Hot Peppers, Jean Goldkette\'s Orchestra, Clarence Williams, King Oliver, and others. For this CD, the band pays homage to the great Fletcher Henderson Orchestra of the late 1920s with spirited performances in brilliant modern stereo sound. Most of the members of the West End Jazz Band are from the west side of the Chicago area, from which the band takes its name. Mike Bezin is the leader and plays cornet. Leah LaBrea, \"The Windy City Songbird,\" plays banjo and guitar. John Otto is on alto sax and clarinet. Other members are Mike Walbridge on tuba, Frank Gualtieri on trombone, and Mike Albiniak on drums. Try it, you\'ll like it! 73 minutes.