Welcome!

Hello everyone my name is Matthew Robinson,

I want to welcome everyone to this blog about one of my favorite bandleaders Woody Herman. Woody Herman was a great clarinet player and also saxophone player and he led many bands through the big-band jazz era of the 30s and 40s and continued playing and recording with young bands up until the 80s. My fascination with Woody Herman started years ago when my uncle sent me a CD, Verve Jazz Masters 54. I'm not really sure because my memory is not that great but I think he sent it to me because I was playing clarinet in my middle school band at the time. I wasn't very good and later switched to percussion but I listened to that CD not thinking much about it and later on something about the name Woody Herman stuck with me enough to go back and listen again. The verve CD is mainly a compilation of the tracks Woody recorded for the Phillips label in the 60s with his Swingin' Herd. All of this Phillips recordings are now distributed by Verve and they have been released in two formats, one is a rather pricey set by Mosaic called "Mosaic Select Woody Herman" and also a digital download on iTunes called "The Phillips Recordings". I chose to download the latter on iTunes and it's definitely my favorite of all the Woody Herman recordings.

My hope with this Blong is to educate more people about Woody Herman and to show how important he was to jazz music. I also run a Woody Herman fan channel on YouTube that has several rare live videos recorded by myself from stuff that I own and I hope that you will check that out as well. I'll be doing more posts in the future reviewing specific albums and talking about all things related to Woody. There is another wonderful blog called "The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong" and this blog is meant to be for Woody Herman what that blog was to Louis Armstrong. Thanks for reading and I hope you'll continue to read about Woody and his great life and career.

Here is my YouTube channel link: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkhaB93Gczby2L-4NFfbUOw