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This is not your typical Blue Note album. Sure, Oscar Pettiford and Ed Thigpen swing impeccably on bass and drums, but fronting baritone sax, trombone and guitar? Sounds more like a description of an oompah band than jazz, but honest, jazz it is.

Leave it to Pure Pleasure to unearth great, but obscure titles like this, but more importantly, kudos to the label for having the nerve to put their money where their eclectic musical tastes reside and release it! And this one’s a double, making the enterprise twice as risky.

I know people who actually think that The Ramones were a “joke” band&#151sort of a punk version of Sha Na Na. I’m not kidding. I know people who thought The Ramones were a sloppy outfit goofing around on stage. I know people who think Joey Ramone was a screamer. But then I live in the suburbs.

One of the first “concept” albums, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely invited listeners back in 1958 to pull up a chair and share the singer’s misery exquisitely expressed in a carefully collected set of tunes given sensitive, sumptuous backdrops by the late, great Nelson Riddle.