This stereo compilation from Time-Life is the 'Holy Grail of big band music' for aficionados of the genre, (but weren't around to hear any of the original big bands' ‘live’ performances). The series has quite a history of its own …

After ceasing to record as the original Casa Loma Orchestra 1947, (the original band already disbanded in 1942), leader Glen Gray continued recording for Decca using the band’s own substantial ‘book’, (likely augmented with charts provided by some of the experienced players from other bands - who Gray hired to create his reproduction re-recordings).  Gray had obviously acquired a number of original scores from other big bands by the time recording moved over to Capitol in the late 1950’s. He either brought multi-track masters with him or re-recorded at Capitol – enough material for that label to release at least two full stereo LP’s worth of his ‘faithful-to-the-original’ big band tunes.  Gray died in 1963 after producing some other popular material at Capitol, using his crew of highly experienced musicians.

By 1970, (after creation of its Music Division in 1967), Time-Life was well underway moving its business interests from print to music – marketing nostalgia to adult consumers.  They contracted Capitol Records' Special Markets Division to record and press a set of high quality LP's to commemorate "THE SWING ERA" - to be issued as a subscription series. Luckily, the task fell to Billy May, Capitol’s lead arranger at the time, (who had played in bands led by Charlie Barnet, Les Brown and Glenn Miller and had also worked with Gray).  To augment Gray’s earlier work, the talented and prodigious Mr. May added many more arrangements from other big bands – sometimes having to manually transcribe new charts from original recordings!  May hired a group of top-notch west coast session players - many of whom, like himself, were experienced big band musicians. Each installment in Time-Life’s recreation series included 3 LP’s and a hard cover book loaded with photos and historical information, (produced with the considerable research and journalistic resources of Time-Life), about the music, musicians and history of the period covered, (e.g. “Into the 50’s”).  In 1974, an additional volume, devoted entirely to Benny Goodman – “The King In Person”, was added, which included a number of ‘live’ performances. The hugely popular series was re-issued several times, (in LP, 8 track tape and cassette formats), through to the mid 1980’s.

Although CD’s also appeared in the mid 1980’s, Time-Life didn’t (re)issue any of The Swing Era material in this format until the late 1990’s … and they botched it! An initial retail release of 2 double-CD compilation volumes, (Swingtime & Swingtime II), lifted 60 tracks from various of the original 15 LP volumes and provided only basic information about the music in the CD booklets. This ill-conceived ‘play-it-safe’ marketing turned out to be a gross under-estimation of the collection’s continuing appeal. The company quickly assembled a subscription series of 12 more double-CD volumes containing the bulk of the remaining recordings from the original LP series - also with minimal accompanying information. Incredibly, many of these CD volumes retained the original LP titles, but had different content, (tracks shuffled around to fill in the gaps where material had been lifted for the first two retail volumes).  For reasons unknown, the contents of the original ENCORE! volume were completely omitted from the CD release.

The (15) ‘2 CD’ volumes below are a true representation of the entire original LP set, (including my vinyl rip of the ENCORE! volume). Each volume includes a complete reproduction of the comprehensive “About the Music in This Volume” section from the corresponding hard cover book, (searchable .pdf), and an index of all the material.

Total Content: 440 tracks, 23:31 hours playing time. Over 250 pages of documentation