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I'm now listening to Géza Anda's wonderful performance of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. It's sides 5 & 6 in this 5-LP set: Beethoven Bicentennial Collection: Music for Piano, Vol. VIII (DG, 1971)

Dirty and low-down, this rips! Ray gets into some Ray Russell territory at about 1:20, very heavy!

Back Cover of : Sonny And Cher „Mama Was A Rock and Roll Singer“ (MCA) 1973 ….

Rough mix from from a session on April 15; I am on tenor, Ray Suhy on guitar. Nick Jozwiak on bass, Shadow Atlas on drums. Very listenable, though it is not final. Working title is Utah Smith I am extremely proud of this performance; when jazz players try to be funky (and I have taken some flak here for suggesting this) they usually fall short. Truthfully, they rarely truly understand the old music this is based on. In jazz we like to praise our "elders" without having actually listened to them very much. Utah Smith was an evangelical guitarist, a pioneer of the country/blues style of fusion. Ray Suhy is the best guitarist I have ever heard, can play any and everything. This will be part of a 4 cd set coming out in 2 volumes in early September. It is not too late to get a heavy discount on pre-sale. Just don't tell Justin IV (or is it VI?).

Finaya Plaster - You Are Always In My Way

Mission accomplished?

Besides myself, Duke Ellington comes to mind

This LP is mono and I wish it were stereo. It has such a flat sound. Little ambiance, unless you count the reverb added to Elvin Jones' drums in places. It makes it sound like each player is in an isolation booth and when they solo, you only get the mic from that booth.

When Pinder left, his replacement, Patrick Moraz, hastened the band’s decline with his mediocre contributions.

String Quintet D.956

JJ Johnson - J Is For Jazz (Columbia).

I stopped watching the Marvel movies when they started having to be watched in some sort of "timeline". Now this timeline has pre & post death arcs because apparently, a bunch of Marvel's superheroes were killed off in one of the Avengers movies? Anyway, if I need a syllabus to watch any movie, I'm less likely to watch it. Having said that, "Guardians of the Galaxy" was very enjoyable. The sequel less so. By the time III came out, I lost interest. PS - I'm sure I watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" out of sequence but I don't care.

OK, I found it. In the booklet to Blue Note's Nichols 3-CD complete set, Cuscuna wrote: PRODUCER'S NOTE During 1980 and '81, I systematically listened to every tape in the Blue Note vaults. Among my discoveries were 8 previously unissued compositions by Herbie Nichols, but no titles were provided for them. Circulating tapes among musicians brought only one title, "Riff Primitif," provided conclusively by Roswell Rudd. The search for the Blue Note recording files was still on and getting nowhere. When Hitoshi Namekata asked me to put together a 3-LP set of unissued tracks from the Blue Note 1500 series, I used "Riff Primitif" and another original that had similarities to a Herbie Nichols composition, "Argumentive". So I called it "Argumentative Variations" (it turned out to be called "Trio"). Herbie's music is so startlingly original that making it available became something of an obsession. When there appeared to be no hope of finding Herbie's own titles for the new-found material, Charlie Lourie and I began researching a definitive set of Herbie's music. Roswell Rudd researched Nichols' life and edited the booklet for the eventual Mosaic collection, and I resigned myself to using "Untitled #1", et cetera, for the unissued material. Alfred Lion, Blue Note's founder and the producer of these sessions, was as disappointed as I was about the absence of titles, explaining that Herbie put a great deal of thought and meaning into his titles. But as luck would have it, while searching through the Francis Wolff photographs of Blue Note sessions that were in his possession, Alfred accidentally came upon the long-lost Blue Note session logs. Suddenly, we had titles. But more importantly, we had a road map to these five sessions of brilliant, complex music. With this priceless navigational chart through the session reels, it soon became evident that a wealth of worthy and different alternate takes existed. Added to the 2 tunes already issued and 6 more to come, we found 18 enlightening alternates.

Fascinating.

Huh. I just looked at Discogs, and all titles have names. Why did I remember "Untitled Original"? Bad memory about this, I guess. Apologies.

OT, and yet ... The above statement is a bit ambiguous. Are the tune titles on the "brown bag" Herbie Nichols twofer alrerady those that Michael Cuscuna was able to reassign according to the session notes or are they non-definitive "provisional" titles?

Cuscuna himself told the story in the intro to (IIRC) the first book of Wolff's photos. He started Mosaic with Charlie Lourie, and put out the Monk box. One day, he got a long-distance call, and he recognized the voice from listening to BN session reels. Lion demanded to know who Cuscuna was and who gave him permission to release the Monk sessions. Cuscuna spent the phone call calming Lion down, and a friendship developed. Cuscuna would call Lion to see if he had any memories of particular sessions, and Lion would also call Cuscuna to chat. One day, a huge trunk arrived: Lion entrusted Cuscuna with Wolff's negatives. Even better, lurking in the trunk were session notes for many sessions that had no documentation. For example, when Herbie Nichols's "The Third World" brown bag was released, many tracks had no names. These notes contained the composition names, which is how they appeared in Blue Note's "The Complete Blue Note Recordings" package.

Yeah, 44 Basie is "plentiful". But my interest is mostly Presz, and for me, the Everybody's record has the cream of the crop.

I was thinking that or from Wolff's family. They weren't somewhere in the BN archive.

IIRC, Michael got the Wolff images from Ruth Lion.

The Doris Duke Foundation today announced the recipients of the 2024 Doris Duke Artist Awards, the largest prize in the United States specifically dedicated to individual performing artists. This year’s honorees are Nataki Garrett (theater), Shamel Pitts (dance), Acosia Red Elk (dance), esperanza spalding (jazz), Chay Yew (theater) and Miguel Zenón (jazz), each of whom is being awarded $525,000 in unrestricted funds and an incentive of up to $25,000 to save for retirement. https://www.dorisduke.org/news--insights/articles/doris-duke-foundation-announces-2024-artist-awards-for-excptional-achievement-in-dance-jazz-and-theater/

Any notable birthdays falling between April 26th and 30th? Ms. TTK is seeking suggestions for her radio show. Thanks in advance.