Gene Krupa: How High the Moon

By mid-1946, when Gene Krupa recorded 19-year-old arranger Gerry Mulligan's arrangement of "How High the Moon," the 1940 Broadway show tune was such a jazz staple that interpolating Charlie Parker's "Ornithology" (based on songwriter Morgan Lewis's lunar phases) was a transparent signal of wannabe hipness. Even so, the fading, 37-year-old Swing Era superstar drummer deserves credit, both as talent scout for discovering Mulligan and as bandleader for so crisply executing the lad's buoyant chart. Despite this track's substandard audio on Columbia's 1998 Mullenium CD, the postwar swing-to-bop transition is revealingly documented from the belly of the beastGene Krupa's throwback big band.