It's one thing to discover and release a hitherto unknown recording by a jazz great with all the proper clearances plus informative liner notes once. To make it the raison d’être of your label is something else. But Resonance keep coming up with the goods and the jazz world is the better for it with the historical perspective and insights these recordings offer. A case in point is the debut of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra live at the Village Vanguard in New York City on 7 February 1966, plus a session from six weeks later at the club on 21 March 1966. The band came about following the break-up of Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band (of which Lewis and Bob Brookmeyer were charter members) and Count Basie's rejection of seven original arrangements he had commissioned from Thad Jones. Although the liner notes don't say, Basie allowed Jones to keep the seven arrangements and copied parts, and these formed the nucleus of the Jones/Lewis repertoire. On the 7 February session we have ‘Backbone’, ‘All My Yesterdays’, ‘Big Dipper’, and ‘The Little Pixie’ that were rejected by Basie and it's easy to see why; not only were they very un-Basie-like, but apparently they were too difficult for the Basie band to handle. From the 21 March session we have ‘A-That's Freedom’, ‘All My Yesterdays’, ‘Low Down’ and ‘Backbone’ that were also turned down by Basie, plus another three Jones originals and a series of standards arranged by the likes of Brookmeyer, who contributed arrangements at this time. Of the seven former Basie charts, none got onto the band's debut album from May 1966, Presenting the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis & The Jazz Orchestra, and two got onto the band's second album from April 1967, Live at the Village Vanguard, although much of the other material from All My Yesterdays did, such as ‘Mornin’ Reverend’, ‘Willow Weep For Me’, ‘Mean What You Say’, and ‘Don't Ever Leave Me’. ‘Lover Man’, on CD 2 of the All My Yesterdays set was recorded for Live at the Village Vanguard but was not issued. It took until 1969's Central Park North for ‘The Big Dipper’, one of the former Basie charts to make it onto disc, finally accounting for all seven of the charts rejected by Basie. What the Resonance release shows us is a significant selection of the band's core repertoire during the first three years of its existence, so providing eloquent summation of what this band was about – well written, modern jazz charts that were a continuation of the big band repertoire, impeccable section playing, good to excellent solo work from New York's ‘A List’ of studio musicians (many had ‘day jobs’ on the staff of CBS broadcasting) and an inspiring front man in Thad Jones. Little has been written about how he ‘conducted’ the band, but it's worth knowing that in a live situation he'd use hand signals to select soloists, signal members of the rhythm section to drop out, control dynamics, change tempos, repeat sections, cue a written insert and so on. It meant that ‘the arrangement’, though committed to paper, could be improvised on as well; as the liner notes point out, so much of what makes All My Yesterdays so exciting “were the result of [Jones’] impetuous conducting”.