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Not too long ago someone sent me a nasty note because I lump Jazz with Classical music CDs on this website. Well, to me Jazz, especially vintage Jazz, is a classical form of music. It cannot be classified as popular music, especially not now when today's popular music can hardly be called music. I do not care what some learned professors tell us about the significance of rap, as far as I am concerned, it not only rhymes with crap, but it is, and boring at that. Besides, in early forms of Jazz, in big or small bands, the musicians dressed like gentlemen. There were ties and jackets, not jeans hanging so low they are in danger of exposing more than one wants to see. Perhpas that is to make up for lack of content, which the Jazz age did not have to worry about.

What a nasty way, you may think, to start a review of this wonderful CD of New Orleans Jazz issued by the small German label, Profil, which is distributed in North America by Naxos. The CD's 16 tracks are obviously all digitally reconstituted from old analog records and most of the tunes date from before World War II. The sound may not always be perfect, but the end result of the CD is joyous an infectious, even when the Blues take over or melancholy creeps in.

The CD opens with Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers with a 1922 tune, Bugle Call Rag/Ole Miss. It is one of the most recognizable works on this CD, along with the final track, the traditional, When the Saints Go Marching In, here performed by Buck Johnson & his New Orleans Band. Track 3 features Basin Street Blues, again with Sidney Bechet. Louis Armstrong made this 1926 song famous with a 1928 recording.

Joseph Oliver, better known as King Oliver, wrote Canal Street Blues in 1923. On this CD the tune is performed by Richard M. Jones' Jazzmen on Track 5. Clarinetist George Lewis was born in 1900. He was just seven years old when Red Wing, by the team of Mills/Chattaway, was first published. It is a pseudo-Indian (Native American) song, but George Lewis gives it a very fine rendition. Track 7 features Jack Cooley's Don't Want To See You, recorded by Albert Ammons and his Rhythm Kings. Ammons helped to launch the Boogie craze with this song and others like it in a 1938 Carnegie Hall performance.

From what I can ascertain, Sonny Boy Williams' Stop Breakin' Down, Track 9, is the most recent song in this anthology. It made its first appearance in October 1945. It includes voice and harmonica, an instrument that gives the song a haunting effect. There are four other performances on this CD by George Lewis, including the traditional, The Old Rugged Cross, which features an unnamed banjo player who really knows how to strum that instrument.

Muggsie Spanier, unlike most of the artists mentioned here, was a white musician who became famous for playing the cornet as well as trumpet. He was the best known white Jazz artists on this instrument until the short-lived Bix Beiderbecke came along. On this CD, Muggsie Spanier and his Ragtime Band are featured twice: Relaxin' at the Touro and At the Jazz Band Ball.

Unfortunately, none of this information is in the Liner Notes. Only the titles, main performing artists and composers or lyricists are listed without further elucidation. Which is really too bad. In addition, the title of Track 1 is misspelled as BUGGLE Call Rag. Apostrophes are also missing on a couple of titles and one is badly misplaced in Jones, the notes giving us Richard M. Jone's Jazzmen rather than Jones' . . . This may be attributable to the CD's production in Germany, where the apostrophe is an uncommon punctuation mark.