She Shall Have Music

Jack Hylton was among the most popular and successful dance band leaders in all of Great Britain during the 1920s and '30s. Sampling a time line between December 1925 and May 1939, Living Era's She Shall Have Music may serve as a good introduction to the Hylton sound. Inspired at first by the original Dixieland Jazz Band and then by Paul Whiteman, Hylton began making phonograph records in 1921. The standard starting point for collections of early Hylton material seems to be 1925, the year that HMV began using the newfangled electrical recording process. The roster of vocalists heard on this compilation is sizable -- it includes Hylton himself -- but the real star crooner for this band and several others was Sam Browne, heard at his best on pleasant numbers like "I Won't Dance," "Singin' in the Rain" and "If I Had a Talking Picture of You." Jazz-wise, Jack Hylton is best remembered as the bandleader who in 1934 received a telegram from North American tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins (addressed simply to "Jack Hylton, London, England") which read "I am interested in coming to London." Hawkins spent five years abroad, performing briefly with Hylton at the beginning and the end of his Anglo-European adventure. Three delicious instrumentals form the jazz nucleus of this album; tenor saxophonist Billy Ternent is featured on his own "Black and Blue Rhythm," and the great Coleman Hawkins is featured on "My Melancholy Baby" and "The Darktown Strutters' Ball"; The Hawkins sides are without a doubt the best swing records ever made by Jack Hylton and his Orchestra.