TT: For friends with big stockings

• The Bing Crosby CBS Radio Recordings (1954-56), a seven-CD box set from Mosaic, consists of 160 songs originally transcribed by Crosby for broadcast on his radio shows of the Fifties, all of them accompanied not by a studio orchestra but by an exceedingly spiffy four-piece jazz combo led by Buddy Cole, one of the top studio pianists of the day.
Nowadays few people remember that in addition to being a consummate balladeer, Crosby was also one of the smoothest and most elegant jazz singers who ever lived. ”Bing had the best time, the absolute best time,” said the great jazz drummer Jake Hanna, who played with Crosby late in his life. “And I played with Count Basie, and that’s great time.” This set leaves no possible doubt of his urbane, unflappable swing. The superb liner notes are by Gary Giddins, whose two-volume biography of Crosby (the second installment of which will be published in 2012) promises to be definitive.
• The Golden Age of Television, a three-DVD Criterion Collection box set, contains eight live TV dramas telecast between 1953 and 1958, including the original versions of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty,” J.P. Miller’s “The Days of Wine and Roses,” Arnold Schulman’s “Bang the Drum Slowly,” and Rod Serling’s “The Comedian,” “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” All eight plays were rebroadcast on PBS in 1981 and later issued on videocassette, but this is the first time that any of them has been officially released on DVD. Would that the Criterion Collection had gone the extra mile and thrown in one of Horton Foote’s teleplays–I would have loved to see what “The Trip to Bountiful” looked like on TV–but even as is, The Golden Age of Television is a time capsule full to the brim of the best that live TV had to offer in its halcyon days.