Atlantic / Wea
1986
50 by Bobby Short
About This Album
For a middle of the road nightclub entertainer during the rock era, Bobby Short was very well documented on record. This was due to his long on-and-off association with Atlantic Records. The New York-based label led by the Turkish brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and Jerry Wexler made its money on R&B music initially and rock eventually, but the Erteguns in particular were always jazz aficionados who frequented the New York clubs, and they could afford to indulge an affection for the suave Short, who held forth in a series of those clubs until he secured his permanent residency at the Cafe Carlyle in 1968, brightly declaiming the songs of Cole Porter, Noël Coward, George & Ira Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, and others while fronting a piano trio. For the most part, Short's Atlantic LPs can't have cost too much money to make, although his series of double-LP songbooks of the early '70s must have absorbed something in pressing costs, even if one of them, Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, actually made Billboard's Top LPs & Tapes charts for a couple of months in 1972. The compilation 50 by Bobby Short, released as both a four-LP box set and as a double CD (with slightly different sequencing, no doubt to even out the lengths of the LP sides) may have been the Erteguns' greatest indulgence, however, and a monument to their noblesse oblige as well as their love for Short.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 2,7 and 13)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 5,12 and 23)

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