EveryMann

Hello Tom-- Good eye--it's actually a Six. It belonged to a friend of my older brother's, who was the neighborhood Fonz growing up in the 1970s. He died tragically years ago, and I managed to acquire his single stray KLH Six that had been stored away in an attic for years. It's the perfect match for the Fisher TA-500 mono receiver and the three-color Garrard Type A. I feel like I'm listening to Sam Cooke's Night Beat and my Mingus LPs exactly as they would have sounded in the early 1960s.

Ha ha! Here is the rest of the room, incidentally...

Hello again— I’m not having a problem with records “wearing out,” but I bought a marginal VG copy of a Prestige record many years ago that had pops & crackles to begin with. My question is whether a clean 60s pressing is going to be virtually identical to a 50s pressing, save for the blue “Trident” label in place of the yellow/black label with the fireworks.

Hello— No, it’s the original Shure M3D cartridge that came with the turntable. Though it’s a stereo cart and my system is mono, it sounds fantastic. I do have a mono GE VRII—it’s the red one for broadcasting applications—but I like the sound of the Shure better. I believe it tracks at around 3.5g.

Hey! My turntable resembles that remark!

Hi Dmitry, and thanks-- I did read an online overview of the Prestige label history; it mentions that @1963 pressings are prone to hissing due to a minute percentage of paper (label) from recycled vinyl records present in the composition. The guy who's selling the record in question has strong feedback, and he says it's in 1- or 2-play condition and it sounds fantastic.

Gentlemen: Relatively new jazzer here. My original 50s copy of a certain iconic Prestige record wasn't in great shape to begin with when I bough it, and a few years and many plays later now, I am looking to replace it. I have no interest in new 180g reissues--I need to have the old, thick, musty cardboard cover in my hands so I can read the liner notes while the record is spinning, and I do not need to be distracted by unsightly bar codes while I am doing so. Harrumph! I digress. Assuming it's the same RVG info etched into the dead wax, is the blue, so-called "Trident" label second-pressing from the mid-60s essentially the identical record to the 50s yellow & black label? Thank you...

E-Flat Boogie for the win.

I bought a black-label copy of this LP recently on a whim--I'm a big fan of Atlantic R&B and this colorful cover caught my attention--and I can't stop listening to this cool, guitar instro bossa nova record. I'm trying to find one of these Warner/Japan CDs, but as the few I'm seeing are over $45, I think the Collectibles CD pressing at $10 will have to suffice. Highlight for me is I'll Remember April.

Hello Dmitry, and thanks. A big part of what I love about mono--just as you point out--is that my $10 bargain-bin Horace Silver records that look only so-so sound like a million bucks!

I have a dedicated mono setup (Fisher 500 receiver from the late 50s, KLH Six speaker, red/white/gray Garrard Type A table) and I have a GE VRII Broadcast mono cartridge. Listening to my Blue Note and black label Atlantic LPs, I am transported back to 1961.

Dredging up an old thread here. Once upon a time, my opinion of jazz was that you had Thelonious Monk, and then you had varying degrees of elevator music. Then I got into Mingus...then Coltrane...and little by little I've been getting it. While listening to old Sonny Rollins tunes on YouTube (is he the last surviving member of that famous 1958 Harlem photo, by the way?) I came across the Bags Groove record. Brain-sprainingly great! How did this one manage to evade my radar all these years? All the heavy hitters on one album, and I can't get enough of the title track(s) in particular. In researching which CD copy of Bags Groove to buy, I settled upon this one: VICJ-60263 Bags Groove - Miles Davis for $11, based on nothing other than the fact that it has a cardboard sleeve, and my CD copy of Pithecanthropus Erectus has a cool cardboard sleeve. A quick google search for this release brings me here, and the organissimo.com thumbs-up convinced me to pull the trigger.

I chanced across this Al Caiola record at some point in my youth, and few tunes have captivated me the way Strait Ahead did in my formative years. The LP was first released on RCA in the late 50s as High Strung, and it features Pizzarelli prominently. I cut my teeth on this one and learned all the parts on my first guitar: a beat-up ES 125TC that's long gone. So sorry to learn of his passing now.

30 Rockfellow

Wow; sobering news. I met him in Memphis at Huey's, but that was 25 years ago now that I think of it. Time marches on.

Since another lifetime ago when I was a teenager in the 1980s, I've been intoxicated by all things King. The 5 Royales and Hawkshaw Hawkins, anyone? James Brown and Cowboy Copas? What a weird and fascinating label with a roster of artists that spans the lexicon of American music, and serves as the barometer for cool by which all others are measured. Just like the time I stumbled upon my first-ever King LP in the .25¢ record bin at a junk shop @1984, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," I still experience that very same flash of excitement whenever I chance across one of those black label nuggets of gold in "vivid sound" now, some 35 years later. Even back in the 1980s those Freddy King, Clyde McPhatter/Dominoes, and "Battle of the Blues" LPs seemed like relics from the Bronze Age. Consider Mr Philip Paul, King session drummer... Mr Paul played on Freddy King's classic guitar instro LP "Let's Hide Away and Dance Away" and the Charles Brown yuletide classic "Please Come Home for Christmas," as well as Little Willie John's "Sure Things" LP, that includes the high-dollar 45rpm northern soul cult classic "I'm Shakin.'" (They tell me there are "northern soul" clubs over in England where young women in their 20s will line up around the block to get into on Saturday nights, and then dance until 4am to old R&B records. I should like to visit such a fantasyland one day, but alas, I digress.) Further back? Mr Paul is on LWJ's "Fever," Hank Ballard's "Look at Little Sister" and "The Twist," and the turban-donning Lynn Hope's "Shockin'." Further still? That's Mr Paul playing on Bull Moose Jackson's "Big 10-Inch Record," Tiny Bradshaw's early 50s sessions that produced "Heavy Juice" and "Powder Puff," and Wynonie Harris records like "I Get a Thrill" and "Don't Take My Whiskey." Wynonie Harris... Mr Paul is still going strong at age 94, and he gigs every Thursday night with his band at Arnold's in Cincinnati. At this late juncture, it's absolutely mind-blowing to think that the guy who played tubs on the second-ever King LP release (Tiny Bradshaw's 395-501) and Wynonie Harris sessions can be added as a friend on Facebook.

Trying to figure out why my copy of Bill Jennings/Jack McDuff's Glide On with the Prestige 7177 cover has a Status label record inside leads me here. Someone wrote "1967" on the back cover, which would jive with what you mention about the mid-60s release dates for the Status pressings using leftover covers.

I'm not much of a jazzer, but this record is absolutely mind-blowing. I chanced across a mono copy for cheap; I bought it on a whim and it turned out to be one of my all-time favorite records. I've since picked up Brilliant Corners--which I also love--but it's Monk's Music I'm constantly reaching for when I fire up the lo-fi. Question: was Coltrane really nodding off before his solo, or do we chalk that up to folklore?

Yup--Easton Avenue in New Brunswick. I still have copies of his Black Sun Tabloid quarterly mailings stashed away somewhere.

Great thread! I have skimmed through many of the pages today to while away the idle moments here at work (shhhhh). I've cashed out of my high-dollar guitars long ago, keeping only a Frankenberry guitar I made out of parts from City Lights Music in the 1980s, and for sake of sentimentality, the very first (1970s) Telecaster I bought second-hand back in high school. And this 1965 Mosrite bass. I'm not much of a bass player--and the only amp I own now is a little 1960s Ampeg Jet--but it's relaxing to pull this out every few months and wheedle out some Tommy Cogbill runs through those ancient flatwounds that date back to the Clinton administration. It has an interesting history and I have some old emails I exchanged with Andy Moseley where he remembers this one being custom-ordered in 1964/65, and they ended up making 3 guitars and 2 other basses in this color out of the same can of paint. Maybe not a concentric-knob Jazz Bass in terms of value or playability, but as for coolness, it's the barometer by which all else is measured. PS-- Here's the Frankenberry I made in the 1980s. Coffin case made by someone named Strang Rodstiehl, current whereabouts unknown.

I thought I'd owned all of Babs' 78s at one point or another, but I'd never even heard of those two London issues. As for the St Louis Blues/Prelude to a Nightmare record you reference, you certainly can't say Babs didn't have some heavy hitters playing on his sessions. My record buying days are pretty much behind me, but I did pick up an original copy of the Voila LP a year or so back with the record in really nice condition, but the cover marked down by the seller for "writing on cover"...which was actually done by Babs himself.

Amazing--that cache of Babs' autobiographies at Norton you reference came from me. I was living in what was originally a walk-in closet in the Ansonia building on the UWS of Manhattan and working at a restaurant downtown @1995. On my way in one afternoon, there was a guy selling old paperback books on a table set up outside the subway at 72nd & Broadway; I would have walked right past if the retina-searing cover of "i, paid my dues" hadn't jolted me to attention. I knew Babs put out some records on Blue Note, and thumbing through the pages there, I was hooked. I bought the few copies that were there on the table, and the next morning I found myself outside this guy's apartment up in Morningside Heights where I acquired the last 2 boxes (200 books) at $1 each he had left that Babs had evidently given him as collateral at some point for borrowed $$ that was never repaid. It's the most brain-sprainingly entertaining book I have ever read. He puts random words in caps that don't seem to convey emphasis, and he will completely throw big-time musicians right under the bus, but then change the name of some random woman he picked up while waiting for a table at a restaurant ("we shall call her Lu so as to protect her identity") of someone nobody would know anyhow. I have re-read it many times: if 1/5th of the tales he tells are true, then Babs lived an amazing life. Anyway, I brought one box over to Billy & Miriam's Norton HQ in Brooklyn where I swapped it for a stack of King label & Bo Diddley LPs. From the box I kept, I've given them out to friends over the years, and it has just come to my attention that even used copies are commanding pretty big money at this point on the popular auction site (though I'm not sure if anyone is actually paying the asking prices). I still have @20 copies left. His records aren't quite up to par with his tome, but I do have Weird Lullaby--with Tadd Dameron tickling the ivories--in my 78 juke. That one really speaks to me.