This collection of excellent music from the Modern vaults has been a long time coming. Compiled more than two years ago, it was back-burnered while I consulted the various oracles of R&B research for information on Albert C Wichard, aka “Cake”. Virtually nothing is known about the man whose drumming had been at the core of almost all of Modern’s early sessions, other than he’d been dead a long time and that he died young. But Cake Wichard was high profile enough to have had several sessions for Modern in his own name, and this top-notch package collects up the contents of all of them, in many cases for the first time on CD.