George Davis: alto saxophone, tenor saxophone

Editor's info:
Saxophonist George Davis is an enigmatic figure in postwar jazz. He’s best known for leading the band in which Jackie & Roy met – young singer Jackie Cain encountered pianist Roy Krall in the mid-1940s, playing together under Davis in a club on the south side of Chicago called Jump Town. They cut two 78-rpm records for Aristocrat as the George Davis Quartet; these sides followed Davis into obscurity. In 1948/49, Jackie & Roy went on to work with Charlie Ventura. At the same time, Davis cut a very unusual set of acetates with an unidentified band (bass, drums, piano, trumpet, guitar, Davis on alto and tenor sax), playing some standards and a selection of compositions identified as original but which turn out to have been pilfered from the Fats Navarro songbook. The unique 78-rpm records, which were rediscovered in a record shop in Chicago a few years ago, had not been previously issued. Awkwardly announced by Davis, who pretends that there is an audience though it is clear that they’re being waxed in solitude, these privately recorded bop and r&b tracks are pure Chicago jazz, hot, swinging, and bristling with attitude. Another lovely missive from the dustbin of music history.