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November 11, 2011

New Bing Crosby Archive Releases Featuring Newly Discovered Christmas Recording

Bing Crosby

Bing in Dixieland
This new 23-song collection features Bing Crosby with a series of small Dixieland combos. The core of the album is a 14-song session from 1956 with Buddy Cole and His Dixieland Orchestra, recorded for Bing’s daily CBS radio show. These tracks were part of the acclaimed 160-song 2009 Mosaic Records limited edition collection, The Bing Crosby CBS Radio Recordings 1954 – 56. (“These are a master’s lucid readings of the American songbook.” – TIME magazine) Here they’re augmented by two previously unissued selections from that daily radio show featuring Buddy Cole and His Trio. Seven additional bonus tracks, mostly recorded for Bing’s 1950s radio shows for Chesterfield and General Electric, feature Bing accompanied by The Firehouse Five Plus Two and John Scott Trotter’s Dixieland Group. Ella Fitzgerald makes a guest appearance on “Memphis Blues” and another very special bonus track features Bing with Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars. Bing and Satchmo’s legendary performance of Cole Porter’s “Now You Has Jazz” from the 1957 Edsel television special has been transferred from a newly discovered audio master reel for inclusion in this collection.

Bing in Dixieland includes classic Dixieland favorites as well as a few standards done in the Dixieland style: “At the Jazz Band Ball”, “Sometimes I’m Happy”, “Muskrat Ramble”, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans”, “Strike Up the Band”, “That’s A-Plenty”, “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain”, “Smiles”, “Just Around the Corner”, “The Banjo’s Back in Town”, “When My Baby Smiles at Me”, “The Object of My Affection”, “I Got Rhythm”, “Margie”, “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby”, “Oh, How I Laugh When I Think How I Cried About You”, “Everybody Loves My Baby”, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue”, “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me”, “Memphis Blues” and “Now You Has Jazz”. The digital version of the album, available on iTunes, includes the video of “Now You Has Jazz.”

Jazz critic Will Friedwald, reviewing the Mosaic collection in The Wall Street Journal, said of the Dixieland session, “Crosby is totally in his element here, doing songs from the jazz age – his impetuous youth… He’s never sounded more loose, buoyant and, particularly on “Sometimes I’m Happy,” full of contagiously good spirits.”

The Night Before Christmas
Considering that he’s known all over the world as the “Voice of Christmas,” it has remained a curiosity that Bing Crosby never got around to recording Clement Clarke Moore’s enduring poem, “The Night Before Christmas” – also known as “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” As it turns out, Bing did record the poem in 1968 for an overseas Voice of America radio program. The master tape was recently discovered in the Crosby Archive and is now being made available for the first time in this limited edition colored vinyl single. The flip side contains two more Crosby Christmas chestnuts: “Adeste Fidelis / O Come All Ye Faithful” (a 1960 radio recording taken from A Christmas Sing with Bing) and a previously unissued 1960 duet with Kathryn Crosby on “Away In a Manger” recorded for Crosby’s annual radio special, “A Christmas Sing With Bing.” Last year’s Bing Crosby Archive limited edition Christmas single, featuring Crosby’s duet with David Bowie on “The Little Drummer Boy / Peace On Earth” sold out quickly.

Also Available From The Bing Crosby Archive
Bing Sings the Great American Songbook, Seasons (Deluxe Edition), Return to Paradise Islands (Deluxe Edition), On the Sentimental Side, Bing on Broadway, El Señor Bing (Deluxe Edition), So Rare: Treasures From the Crosby Archive, Bing Sings the Sinatra Songbook, A Southern Memoir (Deluxe Edition), The Crosby Christmas Sessions, Bing & Rosie: The Crosby – Clooney Radio Sessions

Exclusive Holiday Gift Packages Available at www.bingcrosby.com !