Welcome back to this special retrospective music-posting feature. The gimmick is simple — each week, you post a list (ranked or unranked) of your favourite 25 (or however many) albums of a given year (or, occasionally decade). We are now moving backwards through the early days of the LP era. A lot of the early 33 1/3 rpm turntables were 10 ” in diameter to accomodate 78 rpm records. The late fifties mark the period where backward compatibility with the 78″ rpm was finally abandoned in favor of the longer playing time of the 12″ record something that had immediately appealed to issuers of classical music but that purveyors of other genres were slower to adopt. I’m listing a lot of 10 inch records below even though the CDs where I originally heard this material were based on the 12″ titles and configuration not the 10″ ones. To give an example of how confusing this can sometimes get, here’s a quote from Wikipedia about the Miles Davis LP orginally titled Volume 3: After the 10″ LP format was discontinued, the tracks would all reappear on the 12″ album version of Miles Davis Volume 2 (BLP 1502), alongside tracks from Davis’ first two Blue Note sessions. In the CD era all six tracks would be reassigned to the CD version of Miles Davis Volume 1. So the same six tracks were either issued on Volume 3, Volume 2 or Volume 1 depending on whether or not you are referring to the 10″, 12″ or CD format.
My personal list is alphabetical Asterisks (*) indicate post publication edits or additions.
[spoiler title=1954]
Louis Armstrong: Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy
Art Blakey: A Night at Birdland, Vol. 1
Art Blakey: A Night at Birdland, Vol. 2
Art Blakey: A Night at Birdland, Vol. 3
Jacques Brel: Grand Jacques
June Christy: Something Cool
Miles Davis: Miles Davis Quartet
Miles Davis: Miles Davis with Sonny Rollins
Miles Davis: Miles Davis Volume 3
Ella Fitzgerald: Songs in a Mellow Mood
Dizzy Gillespie: Afro
Al Haig: Al Haig Trio
Elmo Hope: Elmo Hope Quintet
Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk (a.k.a. Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins)
[/spoiler]