Baritone singer Johnny Holiday performed with some big bands in the 1940s (including a brief stint filling in for Johnny Desmond in the 1945 edition of the Glenn Miller Orchestra) and went on to release several albums in the 1950s, two of them made with West Coast jazz musicians, that received good notices but failed to sell well. Holiday spent the next few…
In the mid-1950s Art Pepper had already served two prison terms on narcotics charges and was struggling to re-ignite the promising solo career he’d started several years earlier after leaving Stan Kenton’s orchestra. 1956 was a spectacular year for Pepper, and the recordings he did for the Aladdin label, featuring West Coast greats such as…