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The best pieces here, not surprisingly, are the ones by the composers with the most formidable reputations: Copland, Bartok, and Stravinsky, but the overtly jazzy Leonard Bernstein and Morton Gould pieces are a lot of fun too. The Bernstein piece sounds something like incidental music from "West Side Story". The Morton Gould piece is in more or less the same vein as the Bernstein, but it's a bit more serious. In every case but one the composer himself conducts, and in the remaining case, the Bartok, the composer plays the piano.
I heard the Woody Herman recording of "Ebony Concerto" many years ago, by the way, and at the time I assumed Herman misunderstood Stravinsky's intentions regarding the eighths. Herman swung them all, and pretty brazenly. This recording seems to prove me right, for with the composer at the helm the eighths are mostly straight, and when they deviate at all, they deviate subtly. It is often said that Herman commissioned "Ebony Concerto" or, conversely, that Stravinsky took it upon himself to write for the Herman band. Neither is true. The Woody Herman Band and Stravinsky were both recording for Columbia at the time, and Columbia commissioned the piece, hoping it might generate profitable cross-over publicity.
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