C&A:

Riffin’ Around is the beginning in the recording of an extraordinary jam session that Charlie Christian presided over while the group was waiting for the clarinetist and bassist to arrive for a recording session held exclusively for the sextet.  This is another fortuitous event in which someone present was cognizant of the momentous circumstances – the Columbia studio engineers recorded and preserved the occasion.

In 1955, some parts of the session were first released in the early years of the LP on the first album devoted to Charles.

There is so much going on in this 3½-minute free improvisation that the comments and analyses are kept brief relying instead on the annotations within the transcription itself to be the commentary.  There’s some typical CC stuff here but there is also a lot that is not heard anywhere else, not at a regular recording session nor even at live events.

This is more like something Charles would be working out on his own, e.g., the repeated figures at mm 48-50 or those famous scales on mm 103-116 or the unrelenting transformations towards the end (mm 150-160 and mm 165-175) are not what one would normally hear in front of a formal, or even informal, audience.  On first hearing, this track is like a fantasy in a dream – it reforms into a fantastic reality only after extended listening.

As Riffin’ Around starts out there is quite a bit of noise in the audio that was recorded.  Fortunately the engineers were able to clear it up by measure 101 which is approximately where (two bars later) the beginning of the segment released as “Waitin’ for Benny” on the LP emerges – unfortunately, it included less than half (1:27) of Riffin’ Around.  Nonetheless, it was the first track on the second side of Columbia CL 652 and every note of that music became indelibly etched into our memory.

The entire 21-minute session was finally released about a quarter of a century later, on the Blu-Disc label, on volume three of “The Un-Heard Benny Goodman” LP series.