ReDiscoveries

Most of the 1950s Contemporary Records catalog is the bullseye of "West Coast Jazz," a smoother, more laid-back flavor than the hard bop and soul jazz styles percolating back east. Set in that context, tenor saxman Harold Land's The Fox stands out for its aggressive speed and punch. Its style would seem more at home on Blue Note or Prestige.

Read the back notes on the beautifully packaged new reissue from Craft Recordings and Acoustic Sounds and clarity emerges. The Fox wasn't born in Contemporary's studio/shipping room. Instead, it was laid to tape at Radio Recorders, Studio B, Los Angeles, in August 1959. It was the first record produced by David Axelrod, who would become a fixture at Capitol Records. It was released by short-lived label Hifijazz. Contemporary reissued it in 1969, and it has rarely been out of print since.

No jazz-centric visit to New York City is complete without a trek out to Queens. At 46th Street in Sunnyside stands the apartment building where famed cornetist Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke's alcoholism finally killed him in 1931. Farther out, in Corona, is the newly enlarged and expanded Louis Armstrong House Museum. The actual house Armstrong bought in 1943 and lived in until his death in 1971 is just the way it was when his fourth wife, Lucille, died there in 1983. The long white couches, bright blue kitchen cabinets, and wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape decks behind his desk in the upstairs den remain, all extraordinarily well-preserved. Just north of there, in Flushing Cemetery, you can visit Armstrong's grave.

Pops, as he was affectionately known by friends and fans, was an inveterate maker of scrapbooks and tapes of his music. By spring 1969, he had a pair of Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder/players up and running. One of his then-new treasures was a set of tapes made by the BBC from television broadcasts recorded the preceding summer. Music from those tapes—13 tracks in all, four for the first time ever—has just been released on CD, LP, and streaming, as Louis in London.

In less than 11 years, guitarist Emily Remler went from rising star to shooting star, from her first major exposure—an invitation from Herb Ellis to perform as part of "Guitar Explosion" at the Concord Jazz Festival on July 21, 1978—to her final concert on May 3, 1990, at the Hotel Richmond in Adelaide, Australia, where she was found dead from a heart attack the next day. She was 32 years old.

The recent Resonance Records triple-LP/double-CD set Cookin' at the Queens: Live in Las Vegas (1984 & 1988) is a welcome reminder of her prowess and a sad marker of what she might have accomplished if she hadn't died so young.