Face of the Bass

I actually think the Miles Blackhawk sets are underrated. Other than the Plugged Nickel box, it's probably the live Miles I prefer the most, at least from his pre-electric era.

Thanks for the info. I've dug back into the Sonny Rollins' bio, but I haven't read the Paul Chambers book yet and I really should. Years ago I nursed delusions of writing a biography of Paul Chambers. I am glad somebody actually took the time to do it.

Wanted to tap into the hive mind here for a moment. What is the best book that covers the milieu surrounding Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s? It could be either a book that fixates on Blue Note as a label, or a book that fixates on the style of music that Blue Note centered on, or a book that is a biography or autobiography of a particular musician. Asking because I haven't heard good things about Richard Cook's Blue Note book. Also not looking for a book that is mainly cover art or photographs. Thanks.

Does anyone know how many leaders of Blue Note sessions pre-1970 are still alive? Off hand I can only think of Rollins, Burrell, Dizzy Reece, and Hancock. Anybody else? For me, what's great about the Tone Poets is the cover art. Blue Note cover art is iconic, and the Tone Poets do a fantastic job of presenting that in full size. I prefer CDs to vinyl in general, but I like the Tone Poet series a lot. I honestly wish they would put the same production standards on all their catalog.

I hope he's able to do it! Biographies are hard, but jazz I would argue is really suffering from good biographies outside the obvious ones (Coltrane, Davis, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, etc.) It was great to see the Sonny Rollins bio that came out not so long ago, and the Thelonious Monk bio that Kelley wrote is fantastic. Jazz needs much more of that kind of thing. More books on Davis and Coltrane ain't it.

In all seriousness, anybody think the world needs an Andrew Hill biography? I think among all but diehard jazz fans his name and work don't resonate as much as they should.

Between this and the upcoming Michael Veal book, somebody needs to alert the publishing industry that we don't need more books on Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Give me a book on Andrew Hill and Eric Dolphy.

That's a good point, but if you want a new vinyl copy of the more common titles, what super-duper versions are in print right now? I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like to see them do the Tone Poet treatment for their whole catalogue from the 1950s and 1960s.

I like the Tone Poet series. The quality is very good and I just pick out the albums I really love as it's nice to have them in vinyl with the larger cover art. Blue Notes does seem though to be in a bit of a logical conundrum. The Tone Poet series tends to focus more on more obscure releases, the kinds of titles that used to come out in the Connoisseur Series on CD. Meanwhile, they also have the Classic Vinyl series, which is good but doesn't have as much artwork. So they are doing nicer releases for the obscure stuff, and more ordinary releases for the most popular items in the BN catalog. Kind of seems backwards from what you might want.

I have the following for sale. PayPal only, PM if interested. Cost includes shipping to the US. International deliveries would cost more, depending on location. Thanks for looking! All discs, booklets, cases, etc., are in excellent to like new condition. No scuffs or scratches of any kind. Mosaic #249: Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet: $110 Mosaic #208: The Complete Roost Sonny Stitt Sessions: $115 Thanks for looking!

Hi Clifford, I really enjoyed the podcast with Marc Masters. I'm looking forward to reading this very soon and doing a lot of exploring of Shipp's work on Rogue Art, which I haven't listened to that much until recently. Congratulations!

Just came to +1 this. This site should rename itself as a Mosaic Records fan site. As near as I can tell, that's the only thing people want to talk about here that is related to music. And the threads are no more substantive than the ones at the Hoffman forum. Just people getting excited about getting tracking numbers, telling everyone when their set arrived in the mail. Then...nothing. No discussion of the music, no discussion of anything of substance. This Sonny Clark set also just exemplifies everything that is wrong with Mosaic now. Recycling releases on CD that have mostly been easily available for years, mining the exact same musical territory to increasingly diminishing returns, refusing to branch out into different genres and eras of jazz or ways of presenting the music. Mosaic's catalog is the best argument I know of that jazz as a genre really is dead, and Organissimo's devotion to this label has killed the discourse here. Alright, I'll go back to the hole I crawled out from now.

I deleted my original posts because one user decided to attack my ability to do my job, during Teacher Appreciation Week, in a time period (post-pandemic) when it is extraordinarily difficult, demanding, and stressful to be a teacher. (Dan Gould). Honestly, I don't want to be on this board at all anymore and don't want anything to do with Organissimo. I reached out to a moderator asking to have my profile deleted (this is apparently not possible on my end). This will be my last post and I ask that no one contact me anymore from here. My life is stressful enough as it is. If the thread cannot be deleted by moderators, if the profile cannot be deleted, just leave it alone.

No. What I was trying to do was to address the historic underrepresentation of female instrumentalists by the label. I wasn't the one who complained about the price (Mosaic prices are very reasonable and honestly I would pay more for the sets if they would upgrade their packaging). The point of the thread is to start a conversation about the gender bias in jazz and in how it is understood historically and documented (or not) by Mosaic. I am not a "disgruntled customer." I only mentioned selling the two recent sets when someone pointed to them as examples of Mosaic still doing good work. It is amazing to me how resistant people here are to analyzing the politics of this music in any way, shape, or form. One thing I have taken away from this discussion is that putting it on Mosaic is pointless. The label is what it is and honestly it would be better if other labels did the sets that we need, like the Dorothy Ashby set coming out next month. I imagine this would have been a more fruitful discussion somewhere else, perhaps a forum that isn't crawling with Mosaic fans who just want to document the growth of their collections as consumers rather than think about the music more deeply. There also seems to be a general resistance here to talking about the politics of representation in jazz, as this is now seen as "woke," which I don't think anyone who uses that term would be able to define. Whatever.

I guess part of my issue is that none of the currently available sets are interesting to me. I've never liked the JATP concept; the musicians who played in it are obviously great, but the vibe of the recordings is kind of monochromatic. Those Dial and Bee Hive recordings disappeared many years ago. Their rate of putting out sets has definitely decreased significantly.