Distilling the prolific output of a musician as long-lived as Kid Ory down to 44 tracks is an unenviable task. If you have no examples of the trombonist's work, then this is a reasonable starting point, but bear in mind – for instance – that of the 116 tracks he recorded for Verve in the 1950s, only four are included here.

So some cherry-picking has gone on, and inevitably a few favourites are missing. A good example is that while we have some glimpses of Ory's own Columbia sessions from 12 and 21 October 1946, the sheer genius of his reunion on Victor with Louis Armstrong from the session in between, on 17 October, is missing. This is a shame as we miss out on Ory's fine playing on ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’ and his name check from Satch on ‘Where the Blues Were Born’.

That said, this two-CD set gives us a whistlestop tour of Ory's work, from Louis’ Hot Five to the King Oliver Dixie Syncopators, and from the New Orleans Wanderers to Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Although there's no track celebrating his 1940s work with Jimmie Noone, there's a good cross section from 1944-6 with clarinetists Omer Simeon and Barney Bigard, especially Barney's dazzling solo on ‘Bill Bailey’ that clearly marked his post-Ellington direction. Other later highlights include the sparkling piano of Don Ewell on ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, Alvin Alcorn's laid-back trumpet lead on ‘Careless Love’ and Red Allen's surprising muted contribution to ‘Christopher Columbus’, though this has been treated to an unnatural amount of reverb, compared to the more elegant Mosaic remaster. Ory buffs might regret the lack of ‘Peoria’, which is arguably the highlight of that 1959 session. The bonus track comes from Ory's earliest Nordskog recordings in California, though the compilers stick to the traditional date of 1922, despite the body of recent research re-dating it to 1921.

So, a good foundation for discovering Ory, but venturing into the several issues in the Upbeat catalogue might offer a different perspective.