What I think I'm hearing from all this is that I can maybe work my way from Willie Bobo's finest hour on Verve to maybe Willie Bobo's finest 90 minutes on Verfve, or maybe even two hours. That sounds like a task I'm willing to undertake leisurely and casually. We all need hobbies, right?
Looking like there's maybe an interesting "contrast and compare" to be made with Bobo's Verve work & Mongo's Columbia work of the same time (a lot of which I'ce come across leisurely and casually, that's a good way to go about stuff like this, it seems). Mongo's stuff is more obviously "Latin", but Bobo's stuff seems a little "looser" in both conception and execution, a little more New York street-y/party-ish. I like 'em both in their own ways, but Bobo's stuff seems a little more "organic" in some ways, like he don't mind playing "Come A Little Bit Closer", he's like , whatever, let's just play, whereas Mongo's stuff has a little bit of ok, this is what we're gonna play, let's just do it and do it well, and at some point we can do something else. And yes, the guitar in Bobo's work does give it a defacto "crossover" starting point.
Like I said, though I do like them both. Especially enjoy hearing Hubert Laws playing some nastyass soul tenor with Mongo. Really enjoy that.