Daniel A

When looking for the cover of the original 10" LP release of City of Glass, I learned that Laurindo Almeida made his first recordings with the Kenton band. I would consider him an A-lister, but not as a west coast jazz musician of course.

I'm really attracted by the looks of those. Good too see that omni-directional as a concept lives on.

Thanks! When I got these some years back, I stopped thinking about upgrading. Maybe they lack the crisp treble of the best modern speakers, but I am more than happy with the overall sound. Each speaker has a 10" downwards facing driver in a bass-reflex enclosure, a 8" midrange and four cones for the treble range. They were built some time between 1966 and 1970.

Absolutely wonderful. I'm running a couple of active tube-powered speakers. The tubes are hidden within the cabinets, but you can just about see them through the ventilation holes.

Somehow a very captivating cover. I would have wanted to be aboard that train. How's the music? And what about "Volume III"? I'm playing this: 1966 US Stereo pressing. I have this both in mono and stereo versions. The mono is cut louder and sounds almost as if it has some extra reverb. The stereo version is better if one wants to enjoy Bob Florence's nice arrangements for the sax section, one of his better efforts. All in all, a very enjoyable album which I have listened to many times over the years. Is the second guy from the left on the back cover really Bill Perkins?

This is the most refreshing take of "On Green Dolphin Street" I know of. (And also the most extreme use of compression on the drum track) Never fails to make me happy!

The theme for Mannix is great. It has a feeling of that "1960s optimism" to it (though I'm too young to know first hand myself) and a kind of mixture of suspense and luxury which applies to some of the great movies/TV series of that time.

Nice to learn this after all these years! Ever since first watching this movie in the early 90s I was always astonished by the dry, close-miked recorded sound of the drums (for instance in the "roof scene") which sounded several years more modern than 1971.

All brutalist buildings do not appeal to me, but I would not dismiss something just because of the style. Some well known examples are large and overwhelming structures, but brutalist architecture can also be medium or small size. I like the former Czechoslovakian Embassy in Stockholm, located on a quiet street of town houses and smaller (but exclusive) residential buildings. Its size aligns with everything else on that street, but the very architecture is a good counterweight. I have always associated it with a piece of 1970s HiFi equipment.

Very good, congrats! As for myself, I have this moped from 1969 with a 50 cc motor which makes alla of one (1) horsepower! One might push it to 40+ km/h, but it rides better around 30.

A problem with all recent jazz (as in post 1970s) is that we never get to hear any alternate takes, so we cannot evaluate the inventiveness of soloists. I suppose that would take an expanded "reissue", but that does not ever seem to happen in the world of streaming (or vinyl, for that matter).

Isn't this against Discogs submission guidelines? You got to have a copy in hand to make a submission.

Modernism is not often mentioned in relation to 20th century architecture in Sweden, but rather "Functionalism" (or "Funkis" in Swedish), which to me is a less extravagant and more "Nordic" offshoot. A typical example of this is the main public library in Stockholm, designed by Gunnar Asplund and built in 1928.

For sure it's brutalist, but I think there's a link back to the more classic modernism. I'm no expert either, but I think contemporary architecture in Sweden gradually ran out of ideas in the 80s up to recently, but I see some recent signs of improvement. Every decade during the 20th century was distinctive up to the late 80s, when a lot started to look like a recycled, watered-down version of modernism. But I think there's still some hope.

Until a couple of years ago, this was the School of Architecture in Stockholm, built in 1967-1969. It has often been voted the ugliest building in the city, but I quite like it. It's a pity that they have moved to other premises.

Actually, it often seemed to be different music, but always very intrusive and distorted from overloading the speaker system. At one time when I was there, there was some kind of free jazz. Haven't been at the library for 20 years, but students used to sit there all day, some of them wearing earplugs. So they played something really loud so that nobody could miss that the library was closing.

No, never (except when the Stockholm University Library was closing at 9 p.m. and they put on some hideous atonal music to scare the students away). 🙂 I was referring to Library Music as a genre, also known as Production Music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_music In this case, it was of a variety that sounded more or less like "elevator music" (which of course has many different sub-types). Paging @Teasing the Korean.

This is off topic, but I don't know where else I could bring up this particular story. In the early 1980s, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, together with my parents. We stayed at - now demolished - Hotel Estoril Sol, a large, then still somewhat luxurious hotel with a thousand rooms, bowling alley and an Olympic size swimming pool. The rooms were equipped with built-in radio units which played pleasant-sounding 1960/70s library-type music. This fascinated me enough to make my parents ask a clerk at the reception desk how this system worked. They brought the hotel manager, who took me to a room full of steaming hot electric equipment, where the hotel radio channel were cabled out to every part of the hotel. Wish I had asked for a tape copy of the music as well.

Yes, vintage Impulse releases look and feel superior to almost anything else from that time. Even the cut-out holes seemed to be razor sharp and looked very slick.

😄

Oh, I fully acknowledge the genres as such (since reading about them, ten minutes ago), they just don't play them at Swedish malls. 😄

Neither of these genres exist in my country. But I love when something unexpected is being played in a mall, so much in the background that it takes a connoisseur to identify the music. Around 1996 I was at a Leclerc Hypermarché in France, and me and my friend (also a Dave Grusin fan) were astonished to hear the theme from "Three Days of the Condor" in speakers 20 meters above our heads.

There is fantastic live material in decent sound with the Hutcherson/Land group. It does not seem likely that Mosaic would combine it with studio material, but it would be nice to see a proper release of that material as well.

For some reason, the physical Birka store, while excellent, did not seem to attract enough customers. It sustained only a couple of years. It was situated only a block from the then location of more well-known Andra Jazz. However, Birka were kind of pioneers in going web-only already at the turn of the millennium. Here is a picture from the Birka store: Its owner, Torbjörn Sörhuus, was born in the same year as famed Andra Jazz owner Harald Hult, 1940, and had a similar history of starting out with a used book store, but also working as a journalist. After retiring from Birka Jazz, he wrote a fantastic book, loaded with rare pictures, covering just about all the record stores in Stockholm through the 20th century and up to modern times.

Not sure why, really, but to me, some of the Blue Note magic is lost just because of those black or white "B" labels. I just prefer to se the rotating blue/white label on the turntable. 🙂 Incredible find! Not as sought after title maybe, but in 1998 I found a mono copy of Hubbard's 'Blue Spirits' for 9 Euro in a jazz record shop (Birka Jazz, which some might remember from their later web-only incarnation).