The first appearance on CD of two Winding LPs from his period at Verve in the early 1960s, these were both produced by Creed Taylor and show the best and worst aspects of his craft. The quartet (occasionally quintet, with guitarist Dick Garcia) album Solo works quite well, showing Winding's mellifluous technique on the ballads and his impressive attack on the more uptempo fare. Yet, it's somewhat samey, and the range of material, including two nods (that would now be regarded politically incorrect) to Hugh Hefner in ‘Playboy's Theme' and ‘I’m Your Bunny Bossa Nova' doesn't really stretch Kai broadly enough. That's not to say Winding isn't mightily impressive on a ballad such as ‘You’ve Changed', but he gets rather chug-gish on the medium swing pieces like ‘I Believe In You’, whereas J.J. Johnson might have been more fluent and inventive. Moments of fun come in ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra?’, where Winding can't help adding a bassline behind the piano solo, despite Russell George's best efforts, and in the trombone/guitar duetting on ‘Capricious’. Despite three studio sessions, one gets the impression Taylor was just marking time with a regular working group and not really shaping the results with the flair he brought to his work at Impulse! or CTI. By contrast, Kai Olé is a sparkling big band specially assembled to record, but here (another Taylor hallmark) the variability of the charts makes it very uneven. So there are dazzlers like ‘Manteca’ and ‘Surrey with The Fringe on Top’ (with Clark Terry contributing a great solo, and Winding's trademark trombone ‘choir’) and a ballad vehicle for the leader on ‘Autumn Leaves’, but there are also some leaden duds, which the ever more desperate and prominent percussion can do nothing to lift. So, all in all, great to have these sessions available, but you'd need to be a Winding completist to want everything they contain.