Of the fourteen tracks on this CD, ten have not been previously issued. The four tracks previously issued (on Southland LP 220: Mike Lala and His Dixie Six) are tracks 5-8: “You Tell Me Your Dreams” (1); “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It”; “Pagan Love Song”; and “Rose Room” (1). While several tunes, such as “City of a Million Dreams” and “You Tell Me Your Dreams,” appear twice in the CD play list, each version is a different take from the other.
Only two of the various personnel on these tracks appear on every track: Joe Capraro on guitar or banjo and, as we might expect, Raymond Burke on clarinet. Burke, as Paige Van Vorst points out in his liner notes, “never became a household name.” The same could be said of almost all of the others with the exception, perhaps, of Bob Havens, thanks to his appearing on the Lawrence Welk show from 1960-1982. The rest of the musicians listed will be familiar in some degree to most aficionados of classic New Orleans jazz. Many New Orleans musicians who achieved wide—even world-wide—recognition, such as King Oliver, George Lewis, Kid Ory, to mention but three, did not confine themselves to New Orleans; most of those on this disc, however, did not venture far, if at all, from New Orleans, including the one in the spotlight here, Burke, which undoubtedly accounted in large part for their obscurity.
