The Cool One CD combines Jimmy Giuffre's first two albums under his own name, Four Brothers and Tangents in Jazz, into one disc. Four Brothers, cut at three separate sessions between early 1954 and early 1955, is certainly the more conventionally bop-formatted of the pair, though it does vary in its approach, the lineup changing in size between a quintet, a septet, and a quartet. The earliest of the sessions is fairly standard, solid cool jazz, though the seven-piece shows signs of winging off into more daring directions with the fluttering melodics of "Four Brothers" and the choppy irregular beats and circling-round-each-other horns of "Sultana." While Giuffre scaled back to a quartet for the final Four Brothers recordings, a piece such as "Iranic" uses playfully lyrical horn lines and sporadic rhythm punctuations that similarly peeled away from expected jazz progressions. Tangents in Jazz, entirely recorded with a quartet (also featuring Jack Sheldon on trumpet, Ralph Pena on bass, and Art Anton on drums), is aptly named as it too goes into tangents from mid-'50s cool bop tunes, the rhythm section used to comment and insert rather than provide a straightforward pulse. Though certainly not devoid of appeal to straight-ahead jazz fans with its pleasantly good-natured riffs and sparse arrangements that can be either playful or (in tracks like "Scintilla 1" and "Rhetoric") meditative, or slightly melancholy, one can nonetheless hear the seeds of jazz moving from swing-based bop to more of an art music. Roy Carr's liner notes supply succinct details about these particular sessions and Giuffre's general background. ~ Richie Unterberger

One of the most underrated pianists in jazz, this was McKenna's second release as a leader and his first in the trio format. This recording is one of two studio sessions making it all the more valauable . Lone Hill. 2006.