Lunceford ran the highly popular big band that big band fans seem to have forgotten about. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that many of its stylistic qualities were incorporated by even more popular white bands such as Glenn Miller, early Kenton and Tommy Dorsey, who hired its key writer Sy Oliver to re-do ‘Swanee River’ and many others in the same vein. Their contemporaries often wrote off the band as being too concerned with showmanship, but the frequently outstanding records they left behind have survived on their musicality. One of the distinguishing features, particularly in their early work, was the carefully controlled dynamics that beguiled the dancing public (rather than hitting them over the head) and that make many textural effects so telling. The legendary precision of the section-playing, now less special than back in the 1930s, also applies to some of the vocal-group contributions which, like almost of the arrangements, came from within the band personnel. Another widely copied innovation was the sparing use of high-note trumpet, first by Stevenson and then Webster and, despite lacking the highest-ranking individual soloists, there's good work by Young, Thomas and Smith (whose chorus on ‘Margie’ was admired by Coltrane). What we have here is nearly all their most important recordings, but missing is the 1939–41 period when, after money disputes, they moved to what became Columbia before moving back to Decca. By then, despite Snooky Young and Gerald Wilson having joined, big band competition seemed to banish some of the former subtlety, but there's still much to admire. Typifying the unbeatable earlier period, ‘Shake Your Hand’ has a restrained “shout chorus” embodying the tension of the rhythm section's two-beat lightness against the horns charging away — quietly.