With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount of this material available for Stash to source and reissue and when the well ran dry, Brightman re-focused on making original recordings. Some of these were made with new and emerging musicians, others with veterans.

Brightman came of age during the late 1930s, when, following a paradigm-shifting night at the Savoy Ballroom in 1938, he became a jazz fanatic and weed connoisseur. Unknown to his conservative parents, he spent much of his free time over the next few years hanging out uptown cultivating his new interests. Brightman's world view was much like that of the self-professed "white negro" and fellow viper