An Enduring Winner
When this first came out over a decade ago from RCA Victor/BMG it was an instant winner among those Big Band fans starving for some CD material presenting the music of that era in quality AAD sound. Unlike many releases at that time, it even has three paragraphs in the insert describing the usual reception for these renowned groups when their buses rolled into town, along with a re-listing of the generous (for the time) 19 tracks showing recording dates and locations.

With so much to choose from in terms of material, I have to agree with those who assigned 5 stars to the tracks presented here, each in its own way representative of the music so popular from 1933 to 1940 (the span covered here). And yes, even to the inclusion of Fletcher Henderson's Mary Had A Little Lamb, a 1936 recording featuring a brief vocal by Teddy Lewis, but some of the best instrumental solos ever put to disc. Really, the title and the lyrics are incidental.

The same reviewer who lamented that selection, also had disparaging remarks for the "whitebread" Casa Loma Stomp, only the first of 64 hits for Glen Gray & His Casa Loma Orchestra (named after a famed Toronto nightclub which the band called home for a spell) which hit # 15 in January 1931 (this is a 1933 re-recording), as well as Bunny Berigan's rendition of All God's Chillun Got Rhythm (with vocal by Ruth Bradley). Yes, trying to do that in today's society would go over like a lead balloon - but this was 1937 and that year both Duke Ellington (# 14 instrumental) and Artie Shaw (# 15 with vocal by Tony Pastor) had hits with it.

Their inclusion in this historical volume is just fine, thank you very much. As the blurb says on the reverse "Foot-tappin' favorites & jumpin' jitterbugs from the Fabulous Swing Era! Over 64 minutes of the swingin'est singles ever!" And at a pretty decent price I might add.

Single Time Swing
This is jitterbug. The title SWING is confusing. There is East Coast swing, West Coast swing, etc. This is big band swing. Only for limited use in teaching swing.

Best I've Heard
I purchased several swing collections previously and they all had poor quality audio - they had not been cleaned up from the original recordings. This CD is MUCH cleaner and makes for an enjoyable experience.

Entertaining, but some tracks don't belong here
The main problem with this CD is the coupling of great tracks with fairly awful ones.

On the great side, you have Benny Goodman's rollicking "Don't Be That Way" and a song destined to kill live in "Sing Sing Sing." Tommy Dorsey's beautiful "Opus One" and lively "Boogie Woogie." Duke Ellington's signature "Take The 'A' Train." Artie Shaw's bouncing "Back Bay Shuffle." Glenn Miller's theme for jitterbuggers, "In The Mood."

Then there are the disappointments. The whitebread "Casa Loma Stomp" by Glen Grey. The cringe-inducing "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" by Bunny Berigan. The extremely silly "Mary Had A Little Lamb" by Fletcher Henderson, which is especially disillusioning to hear when one considers that Henderson supplied a good many of Benny Goodman's hard swinging band arrangements!

We can at least be thankful that Kay Keiser and Hal Kemp didn't show up on this disc.

Swing Revival Met "Fabulous"-ly On RCA Big Band Set
RCA's "Fabulous Swing Collection" was released to exploit a national big band revival craze, led by groups like Cherry Poppin' Daddies and Brian Setzer's Orchestra and in full swing (pardon the pun) in 1998. That revival has cooled but this generous (19 songs, 65 minutes) set remains among the era's better one-disc compilations (all songs from RCA family labels) for now third-generation fans.

It may not have been all the classics revivalists danced to; two swingin' Louises (Prima and Jordan) recorded their jump, jive and wailin' big band tunes for Capitol and Decca Records, respectively. But many of the era's signature tunes are represented, sounding surprisingly warm in analog sound: Glenn Miller's anthemic "In The Mood," "String of Pearls," and "American Patrol," Benny Goodman's hard, wild swinging "Sing, Sing, Sing" (heard recently and famously in a cookie commercial but better in Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert), Cab Calloway's 1933 "Minnie The Moocher," which he performed nearly a half-century later in the first "Blues Brothers" film and here does in full-throated youthful yodel.

You also get seminal sides from Charlie Barnet ("Cherokee"), Tommy Dorsey ("Marie," "Opus One"), and Duke Ellington ("Take The 'A' Train," "Cotton Tail"). While these songs swing sweeter than 1998's martini-and-cigar crowd might have liked, "Fabulous" may well be among the few big band CDs a new fan would need. Longtime fans have these classics on the artists' original LPs (or more studious sets like Columbia's "16 Most Requested Big Band Themes") and can probably swing past it.