Illinois Jacquet: Illinois Blows the Blues

"The Italian navigator has landed in the new world," read the coded dispatch to Washington during World War II. "The natives are friendly." This signified that Enrico Fermi's physicists, in their secret University of Chicago lab, achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Hadn't they heard? Six months earlier, Illinois Jacquet beat them to the punch, famously blowing his top on Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home." Come 1947, though, the Cold War chilled things out. Accordingly, "Illinois Blows the Blues," showing the influence of Jacquet's by-then employer Count Basie, is more July 4 starburst than mushroom-cloud airburst. Cancel the Hazmat Squad.