Best of the Big Bands, Volume 2

The music of a generation. Dance music remotes from restaurants, ballrooms, hotels, and nightspots were one of radio's most enduring formats. First heard in the early 1920s, band remotes lingered on until the early 1970s as a feature of late-night programming. The remotes were usually unsullied by commercial sponsorship, and above all, they were live, preserving the music with a fresh spontaneity that explodes past the confines of the more familiar - and often abridged - studio recordings. Some of the broadcasts in this collection come from original network transcriptions; of particular interest is a series of previously unknown broadcasts from 1951, unearthed from a private collection and heard here for the first time in over fifty years. Others are taken from the Armed Forces Radio Service 'One Night Stand' series which, from 1943 through the mid-1960s, preserved a vast cross-section of dance-band broadcasts using edited linechecks of original network broadcasts. Still other recordings are special transcr.