Live at Club Hangover, San Francisco 1953

This is the latest in Acrobat’s continuing series of releases of material from the Ackerman Collection, an archive of largely unreleased jazz recordings held at Stanford University, which has already spawned a number of highly collectable gems. This collection comprises the four previously unreleased complete half-hour radio broadcasts made in 1953 by the great cornettist, trumpeter and bandleader Red Nichols during his four-week season at Doc Dougherty’s Club Hangover in San Francisco, which was a hotbed of the New Orleans revival in the city at that time. Every Saturday, radio KCBS in San Francisco took a live feed from the Club, and the tapes were retained by the programme’s announcer. The shows also include unique intermission piano performances by the legendary Meade Lux Lewis and his trio, making this a very special package. The recording quality is excellent, admirably capturing the uninhibited nature of the performances by Nichols and his finely-honed band. Red Nichols was a legend of the Dixieland era of the ‘20s when he recorded prolifically, but his career stalled with the advent of the swing era. However, after WWII he re-formed the Five Pennies and rode the wave of the New Orleans revival, his career being commemorated in the 1959 Danny Kaye film “The Five Pennies”.