Visions of Jazz: A Musical Journey

Both beginning and ending with tracks uniting Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Visions of Jazz: A Musical Journey is a two-disc set tracing the evolution of jazz. It hits most of the major artists -- Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane -- and even some major jazz vocalists, including Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Cassandra Wilson. Though not all the tracks are necessarily of the best caliber by each artist, this is a good general introduction to America's most important musical form of the 20th century.