Vic Dickenson - Nice Work: His 34 Finest 1930-1961

After albums celebrating the jazz trombone artistry of Jack Teagarden, Wilbur De Paris, George Chisholm and Abe Lincoln, Retrospective presents a new double album devoted to one of the most distinctive and innovative trombonists of them all: Vic Dickenson. The 34 tracks, all definitive examples of his art, give a career summary from his first recording in 1930 (as a singer!) through to the 1961 solo, Vic’s Spot. In between Vic plays with many of the jazz greats of the 40s and 50s: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Sidney De Paris, Bobby Hackett, Pee Wee Russell, Eddie Condon and so on. There is a generous helping from Vic Dickenson’s immortal 1953/4 Septet sessions with Ruby Braff and Edmond Hall that more or less created the form of “mainstream” jazz. As note-writer Digby Fairweather says: “It could easily be claimed that, of all the trombonists of his era who forged a definitive musical signature of their own, Dickenson was the most technically-equipped, the most consistently musical, the most regularly humorous and arguably the most original of any of them.”