The pile of recordings featuring trumpeter Rostelle Reese would be much harder to step over were uncredited West Coast studio session contributions from the '60s factored in. Reese's background was in jazz, however, a genre in which his participation was historically solid despite somewhat sparse documentation. He certainly averaged less than one recording session per year in a career that began circa the mid-'30s in a band known as Charlie Crusoe's Cotton Pickers. The examples that do exist of this trumpeter's playing represent an essential if underappreciated aspect of swing mastery, Reese marching in step for great jazz generals such as Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, and Benny Carter.

Reese actually started out as a hotshot teenage trumpeter, triumphing in brass contests for the sharpest solo. He worked with Fletcher Henderson in 1938 and by the early '40s had put in time and riffs with the bands of Leonard Reid and Erskine Tate as well as Hines. No less a trumpet master than Cootie Williams chose Reese for a combo heavy on horn-hauling in 1942; tenure with Lunceford took place following the Second World War, concluding in 1947. Jazz still dominated Reese's playing schedule in the '50s. There was a short period when he played in a sextet fronted by John Kirby; he also collaborated with Claude Hopkins, the early master of Kansas City jazz, as well as superb vocalist Billy Eckstine. Discographers list his final jazz sides as being recorded in 1966, a session also featuring his brother, ironically one of the only times Arthur Reese managed to record at all. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi