Boots Randolph - The Yakin' Sax Man (2013)

In the case of some artists, part of the package that comes with commercial success is to have their archive of material turned into a sloppy mess by a confusing jumble of business interests. RCA made loads of doolah off innovative artists coming out of the country & western scene and the studio empire presided over by Lord Chet Atkins, one of the big breadwinners being tenor sax honker Boots Randolph, whose instrumental hits exploded on radio and jukeboxes for a while. The label owes these artists enough that it is insulting no serious effort has been made to create well-produced, comprehensive collections of some of them, a problem that will hopefully be rectified eventually. In the meantime, listeners have the work of the low-budget Camden line, which siphoned off anything remotely commercial from parent company RCA for repackaging purposes as if it was cheap gas. These are albums that are stingy on playing time, as if some overlord had looked at a quality Boots Randolph album and ordered it cut in half. The packaging is generic and brings to mind a designer hustling toward a lunch break. The Pickwick International conglomerate also got involved in licensing the low-budget line, exporting in and out of Canada with apparently only one goal: the creation of an even shoddier product, the vinyl an imitation of a Shakey's pizza crust. Someone might pipe in at this point and say "It's still pizza!" and yes, it is still Boots Randolph, meaning if you put this record on at a party, for example, there would be a series of people asking who this is and making comments such as "Oh, how cool!" Some listeners may perceive the last decade of the 20th century as the era when instrumental music began crashing through genre barriers, but the much less pretentious work of Randolph and his unidentified associates goes in many of the same directions. The musicianship is tops, allowing the players to smoothly fool around on the perimeters of funk, swing, R&B, balladry, Cajun, Italian, and Latin. This collection contains both "Sleep" and "Sleep Walk," which can't be a bad thing. The Pickwick version has a different playing order.