Gloria Lynne, Ernie Wilkins Orchestra - Day in Day Out (2016)

Gloria Lynne recorded many albums for Everest in her early days, slipped away into obscurity, and then in the 1990s made a comeback. An excellent singer whose style fell between bop, 1950s middle-of-the-road pop, and early soul, Lynne was always capable of putting on a colorful show. Her mother was a gospel singer and Lynne started out singing in church. She had five years of concert training and in 1951 won the legendary amateur competition at the Apollo Theater. Lynne sang with some vocal groups, became a solo artist, and in 1958 was discovered by Raymond Scott, who at the time was a top A&R man at Everest. During her busy period with Everest (at least ten records were cut between 1958-1963), Lynne had hits in "I Wish You Love" (a song she virtually made a standard) and "I'm Glad There Is You." She recorded with both orchestras and jazz combos, becoming quite popular for a period. However, with the rise of rock and the change in the public's musical tastes, Lynne was forgotten for a time. Only a commercial record in 1975 for ABC broke the silence. But starting in the early '80s, Lynne started working regularly again, regained some of her earlier fame, and in the early '90s recorded a couple of CDs for Muse; her initial Everest date also reappeared as an Evidence CD. Lynne remained active into the 21st century, and issued one of her strongest albums in decades, From My Heart to Yours, on the Highnote label in 2007. In October of 2013, she died of heart failure in Newark, New Jersey; Gloria Lynne was 83 years old.

Ernie Wilkins Orchestra:
A fine, slippery bop tenor sax player, and a creator of sharp-edged arrangements for bop and swing big bands who helped define the Count Basie Mk. II style of the 1950s, Ernie Wilkins had been a regular fixture on the American jazz scene until 1979, when he pulled up stakes and moved to Europe. He first learned piano and violin, then studied music at Wilberforce University before going into the Navy during the war. He caught on with the Earl Hines band in 1948 and worked around the St. Louis area before joining the Basie band in 1952. He remained in the Basie fold until 1955, but continued to freelance arrangements to the Count, as well as arrange for and perform with the Dizzy Gillespie band that toured the Middle East and South America in 1956. Also in 1956, he wrote three of the six movements of the exciting Wilkins/Manny Albam The Drum Suite (RCA Victor) -- reputedly the first time anyone had tried to integrate four drummers into one band -- and led big band albums under his own name for Savoy and Everest in the 1950s. He was the staff composer for the Harry James orchestra from 1958 to 1960 and served as musical director for albums by Nat Adderley, Sarah Vaughan, Buddy Rich, Oscar Peterson, and Dinah Washington, among others. In 1968, he joined Clark Terry's Big B-A-D Band, serving as a composer and music director, after which he assembled his own band and became head of A&R for the Mainstream label (1971-1973). He would continue to provide Basie with arrangements and toured Europe with Terry in the late '70s, ultimately settling in Copenhagen in 1979, where he formed the Almost Big Band. Most of the recorded examples of Wilkins' work on sax are as a sideman with Basie and Terry.