It's called the Count Basie Story and, like previous proper boxes, this collection tells the story in chronological order. It starts with "Shoe Shine Boy", from the 1936 session that introduced the names of both Basie himself and the great tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, to the world. Many years later veteran producer John Hammond described this as "the most perfect recording session I was ever involved with". From this auspicious beginning, the story unfolds to show how Basie's band, with its matchless rhythm section, taught the swing era how to swing. Through numbers such as "One O'Clock Jump", "Swinging the Blues" and "Jumping at the Woodside", Basie's amazing cast of soloists--Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Herschel Evans and many more--influenced the entire history of jazz. As the years passed, the band became slicker and used more elaborate arrangements, but never lost the essential simplicity of its approach nor its solid grounding in the blues. Listen to "Harvard Blues", a masterpiece from 1941, for proof of that, with Jimmy Rushing's high, intense voice, Don Byas's silky tenor saxophone and the majestic harmonies of Buster Harding's arrangement. Along the way we catch glimpses of the various small groups--the Kansas City Seven, the All-American Rhythm--which occasionally popped out of the main band. The tracks take us as far as 1950, when the end of the big-band era forced Basie to cut down to a small group for a while, and even that was a superior little outfit, composed entirely of top soloists. As both a musical anthology and a narrative, this collection is impossible to fault. A box of four CDs containing 99 tracks, many of them timeless classics, complete with a 48-page illustrated booklet, all at an eye-poppingly low price. How do they do it? It doesn't seem to matter, as long as they continue to produce stuff as good as this. --Dave Gelly