Spin And Groove

Whenever somebody asks me what makes the vibraphone such a magnetic instrument in jazz, I always end up pointing them in one direction — Lionel Hampton. The man didn’t just play vibraphone; he owned it, defined it, and made it swing in ways nobody else had managed before he came along. This copy of Standard Best arrived as one of those quietly exciting record-shop finds — a 2LP gatefold Japanese compilation pressed in 1981 on the Legends of Music label (catalogued as RJL-2017/2018). Twenty tracks spread across four sides, and every single one of them is a reminder of why Hampton was regarded as one of the genuine giants of twentieth-century jazz.

About the Album

Standard Best is exactly what the title promises — a carefully assembled collection of Lionel Hampton performing the standards he knew better than almost anyone alive. Pressed in Japan in 1981, it has that characteristic attention to detail that Japanese compilation houses brought to their output during this period: clean pressings, well-considered sequencing, proper gatefold presentation. The album pulls from Hampton’s rich back catalogue and gives you four full sides covering the breadth of the Great American Songbook — Stardust, Take The A Train, After You’ve Gone, The Man I Love, Lullaby of Birdland, Body and Soul, Stompin’ at the Savoy, My Funny Valentine, Mack the Knife, and twelve more. It’s a set that holds together naturally across all four sides.

The liner notes specifically highlight Stardust as the standout performance, and first listen confirms why. There’s a looseness and deep confidence to Hampton’s mallet work that makes even the most familiar melody feel like he’s encountering it fresh. He’s not reinventing anything — he’s simply playing, and doing it at a level that’s difficult to match. That’s the specific pleasure of a compilation like this: when the musicianship is genuinely world-class, hearing a musician this at ease with well-worn material becomes its own reward. Hampton swings because he can’t help it; that quality permeates every track here.

The 2LP gatefold format means you can’t rush through the listening. Four sides encourages you to commit — flip the record, sit back down, let the next set of tracks run. It’s the kind of record that suits a Sunday afternoon with nothing else pressing, and Hampton’s playing rewards the full attention.

Who Was Lionel Hampton?

Lionel Leo Hampton was born on April 20, 1908, in Louisville, Kentucky, raised partly in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before his family relocated to Chicago in 1916. He came to music naturally and was largely self-taught on drums and percussion before finding the instrument that would define his career. The vibraphone was still a novelty when Hampton began experimenting with it, but he understood its potential in a way nobody else had. His earliest recording on the instrument came in October 1930, alongside Louis Armstrong — and even then, the authority and groove were there. You can read more about his extraordinary life at the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters page dedicated to him.

The crucial turning point came when clarinetist Benny Goodman recruited Hampton in the mid-1930s. With Gene Krupa on drums and Teddy Wilson on piano, the Benny Goodman Quartet became one of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history. They performed at Carnegie Hall in January 1938 — the first time jazz had been presented at that venue — and they did it as an intentionally racially integrated group at a time when doing so carried real risk and real meaning. That performance is still considered one of the landmark moments of the entire genre.

Hampton left Goodman in 1940 and, with the crucial support of his wife Gladys, scraped together the resources to form his own big band. What followed was one of the most consistently exciting big band runs in jazz. His live performances became famous for their ferocity — Hampton would sometimes ride a single number for forty minutes or more on the back of escalating call-and-response exchanges and increasingly feverish improvisation. The 1942 recording of Flying Home, featuring an incandescent solo from tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, is still one of the most electric recordings in the genre and essentially launched the R&B era. Hampton received the National Medal of Arts, multiple honorary doctorates, and continued performing and recording well into old age. His legacy at the Kennedy Center gives a good sense of how far his influence stretched.

The Musicians

As a 1981 compilation drawn from recordings spanning different eras and sessions, Standard Best doesn’t come with exhaustive per-track personnel notes — pretty typical for Japanese compilation pressings of this type. What we do know is that Hampton worked with a remarkable range of players across his career: guitarists like his long-time collaborator Billy Mackel, bassists including Monk Montgomery, and a rotating cast of top-tier players from New York and the West Coast. Whatever the specific lineup behind any given track here, the ensemble playing is consistently tight, sympathetic, and swinging. Hampton had an unusual gift for inspiring the people around him to play at their best, and that quality comes through clearly in this collection. The musicians match his energy, and the result is a body of recordings that still sounds vivid and alive decades later.

It’s also worth noting that Hampton was one of the few jazz artists of his generation who successfully bridged the gap between swing and the emerging R&B and jump blues styles of the 1940s and 1950s. That breadth meant he could draw on an enormous range of collaborators — and that versatility is part of what makes a compilation like this work. The tracks feel connected even when they’re drawn from different sessions and different eras.

The Recording Setup

I recorded this video using a Thorens TD125 — a West German belt-drive turntable introduced in 1968 and widely regarded as one of the finest domestic turntables from the golden age of analogue audio. The TD125 is built around a suspended subchassis design with a 3.2kg dynamically balanced zinc alloy platter. Speed is controlled electronically through an AC synchronous motor, which gives it a stability and consistency that few contemporary rivals could match. It’s remarkably quiet in operation, with a deep soundstage that reveals a lot of detail in recordings like these. The build quality alone tells you why these machines are still sought after and restored today.

Running in the headshell is the Shure V15 Type III — a moving magnet cartridge that set a new standard for tracking ability and stereo separation when Stereophile reviewed it. The elliptical stylus is a 0.7 by 0.2-mil design, recommended tracking force sits between ¾ and 1¼ grams, output is 3.5mV, and frequency response runs from 10Hz to 25kHz. The V15 III was consistently rated as the best-tracking cartridge available when it was current, and many enthusiasts still rate its musicality above later Shure models. It handles the grooves with a lightness and confidence that translates into real detail at the listening position.

The phono stage is the Yamaha HA-5 Natural Sound Phono Equalizer — a compact MM preamp I’ve written about on the site before. Released in 1989, it uses a discrete configuration with RIAA equalisation accurate to ±0.5dB. It has a warm, honest character that suits jazz recordings particularly well, without imposing its own personality on the signal.

Everything is captured by the Zoom H4n, recording via XLR at 24-bit/96kHz in two-channel mode. The H4n handles the analogue signal cleanly and at a resolution that picks up the texture and character of the pressing without introducing its own colouration. It’s been part of the vinyl recording setup for a while now and consistently delivers.

Track Listing

Watch the Full Album

I’ve put the full session up on YouTube. Four sides of Hampton working through the standards he knew cold — settle in and let it run. It’s a great way to spend an hour or so with one of the jazz world’s most important voices.