The violin and guitar duo of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang pioneered the use of both instruments as vehicles for virtuosic jazz improvisation during a six-and-a-half year period that ended with Lang's sudden death in 1933. Numerous Venuti and Lang collections kept their music in circulation during the LP and CD eras, one surprisingly excellent example being an 18-track best-of edition released on the Jazz Forever label in 2001 which covers the entire duration of their collaborative friendship beginning in 1926. Aside from an endearingly stupid vocal by Tin Pan Alley songwriter Harold Arlen on "Little Girl", these are some of the best instrumental performances in the entire Venuti and Lang discography. The first four recordings are fiddle and guitar duets, after which additional instrumentalists gradually appear, beginning with pianist Arthur Schutt, then on the rather cruelly titled "Kickin' the Cat and Beatin' the Dog" and the friendlier "Cheese and Crackers," multi-instrumentalist Adrian Rollini who variously operates the bass saxophone, a sax-shaped melodica called a goofus, and a shellacked wooden tube full of holes with a clarinet mouthpiece known as the hot fountain pen. The easygoing "Penn Beach Blues" features clarinetist and baritone saxophonist Don Murray as well as composer and pianist Frank Signorelli (one of the great minds behind the Original Memphis Five) in addition to a skilled cymbalist by the name of Justin Ring. Additional participants on this delightful album include Jimmy Dorsey (who matched Rollini's facility with multiple instruments by blowing trumpet, clarinet, and several different sizes of saxophone); pianists Lennie Hayton and Rube Bloom, and string bassist Joe Tarto, regarded by posterity as a titan of the tuba. Perhaps the most dazzling performance is "Raggin' the Scale," a busy novelty taken at breakneck speed with Rollini adding piano and vibraphone to his arsenal of soundwave-generating equipment. This exhilarating dervish piece was one of the last recordings to feature Eddie Lang, whose abrupt demise after a tonsillectomy essentially derailed Venuti's career for many years until a late-in-life comeback enabled him to reinvent himself as a formidably eccentric elder statesman of jazz. The contents of this outstanding Venuti and Lang sampler constitute the ideal bite sized background for what Venuti was to achieve during the '70s with people like George Barnes, Jethro Burns, Zoot Sims, and Marian McPartland.
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