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Kevin Bresnahan

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Everything posted by Kevin Bresnahan

  1. I'm off to Limerick Ireland for a week. I wonder what the live Jazz scene is like over there?
  2. He was one of my favorites. I loved him in "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad World". The world is a little less funny place with his passing.
  3. All VSOP CDs are now CD-Rs. I found this out when I ordered Danny D'Imperio's latest CD, The Upstate Burners - "Live at the Rum Keg Lounge" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Upstate-Burners-Live-Lounge/dp/B005P89E3G), paying very good money from Amazon, only to find out it was a cheap(er) CD-R. When I told Danny that this is what was happening, he bitched to VSOP and was told that this is what they were doing from here on out and that there was no problem with CD-Rs. Clueless idiots. I have backed it up to a hard drive as well as a 2nd CD-R (better quality). I have had quite a few cheap CD-Rs fail. One was Alan Grant's "Opening Night" with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. I laugh when I see how much people are paying on the secondary market for that CD-R.
  4. From http://www.mosaicrecords.com/prodinfo.asp?number=212-MD-CD: Limited Edition: 5000 copies
  5. Stag's Leap Petite Syrah is one of the finest Petite Syrahs being made these days. Well worth what they're charging, especially considering the grape's low yield. You should treat yourself to a bottle Goodspeak. You only live once and you don't want to lying on your deathbed wishing you had bought another bottle of great wine. Screw it, just buy a bottle.
  6. McCoy Tyner is one of the greatest Jazz musicians still walking but it's painful to say that it doesn't look like that will be true much longer. He looked more than a little frail last night. Barely walking and barely talking. I felt like I did at Tommy Flanagan's last concerts - I think that I just saw McCoy for the last time. And as great as the show was, it was incredibly short. They started late and played for about 45 minutes. The crowd gave them a standing O and they came back and played a short encore. I haven't been to a show with a set under an hour at a Jazz club in a long time. Short but oh so sweet. McCoy may be frail on his feet but he can still wail at the piano. It's actually pretty amazing to see him shuffle in and sit down and then see his hands and fingers start flying.
  7. You meant to say "certain" Californian wines, surely. True, a lot of the more fruitier, jammy wines come from California and those are often difficult to pair with many foods but there are quite a lot of wines that pair very well with food. It's often very difficult to pair some of the wines in my cellar with a meal. Rare steaks off the grill - easy. A pasta dish with a chorizo, spinach & tomato in a light garlic sauce? Not so easy. And let's face it, a majority of the chefs in any area are usually making flavorful dishes like this all the time. Not too many "chefs" are making spaghetti Bolognese. FWIW, a lot of the French & Italian wine makers have been slowly moving toward the fruitier, jammier styles for decades as this has been shown to be what the wine buying public likes (and often gets the high scores in wine publications). If someone opens a perfect "food wine" and starts sipping it as they cook, they might find the acidity or the earthiness or the lack of fruit off-putting. They might write off the wine right then & thyere. If they hold off until the food appears, they'd probably feel differently but most people can't hold off that long. Ha ha. I go to a lot of wine tastings. There are a lot of times when I'm sipping a wine solo that I'm thinking "Good food wine". Others make me think, "Great standalone wine". And even others make me think "Great cheese & crackers wine". Those lines blur a lot too. I tend to buy the "great standalone wines" more often than "good food wines" because I never know if I'll be opening that wine with a meal or just for sipping when friends come over.
  8. McCoy Tyner is coming to the Regattabar in Cambridge, MA tonight. Gary Bartz on tenor will be interesting. I haven't seen Bartz in a long time.
  9. Coleman Hawkins - The Genius Of Coleman Hawkins (Verve)
  10. I was told by Cuscuna that all that they have from Turrentine's Minton's recording dates are the released tunes. No master tapes exist as far as he knows. If someone has a "private" tape with more, it's more than Blue Note has. FWIW, Lee Morgan's "Lee Way" is in the same boat. No master session reels. What we got is what we can get.
  11. What a fun date! I play this on CD quite a bit. Well worth the listen.
  12. What kind of preamp is it? I agree with Lon that if there's only two tubes, you don't have a tube rectifier. However, a two tube preamp isn't really the kind of tube preamp I've ever worked with. With only two tubes, it's likely a "hybrid" tube/SS preamp. It's nearly impossible to get enough gain out of just two tubes. Try swapping the speaker wires from one to the other and see if the sound tracks the speaker or if it stays in one channel. If it tracks, it's a speaker. If it stays in the same channel, it's the preamp. Offhand, what are you using for an amp? In my experience, a lot of single channel audible problems are from the amp, not the pre. Kevin
  13. I prefer the "No Room For Squares", "The Turnaround" and "Straight No Filter" in session order, like the original CDs from the 80s/early 90s. When I picked original LPs, the change in pianists was noticeable to my ears. The RVGs were based on the 1960's LPs and added some bonus tracks. To reissue the Straight No Filter 3 track session they created a new limited CD with the leftovers. If you're talking about the Connoisseur CD, they duplicated the original 1986 LP track order, which was issued to get all of the unissued tracks from "No Room For Squares" and "The Turnaround" out. It had 3 different bands/pianists on it.
  14. Sonny Stitt - Constellation (Cobblestone). One of my favorite later Stitt dates. Great band and Sonny's in fine form.
  15. Nice date! That's a different cover from the CD. Is there any different material?
  16. Miles Davis - My Funny Valentine (Columbia) Two eye mono. Nice sounding pressing. I still think the latest CD sounds better but I got this for a good price so I thought I'd see what it sounded like.
  17. Dave Brubeck - Re-union (Fantasy). Nice red vinyl pressing. OK music but certainly not all that adventurous. The red vinyl makes it tough to tell that the pressing's a bit beat up but not too bad. I wonder if this is why they did this.
  18. Max Roach +4 = Newport (deep groove Mercury). I still can't get into Draper's tuba solos. They just don't sound... musical?
  19. Scott - I was just becoming an adult when CDs were introduced and even then, I was an serious audiophile. CDs definitely started out as a format marketed to audiophiles. The first players were big bucks and weren't found in your average audio Hi Fi store. I first heard a CD being played on a Phase Linear CD player hooked up to a high end Mcintosh system standing among a group of fellow audiophiles, both young & old, who had all seen the write ups of this new "perfect sound forever" format in one or two of the stereo mags of the day. We all loved what we heard. I immediately started saving my money for a player. I bought one a short time later and within a few years, I had given away all my vinyl because I just loved the sound of CD. It was almost universally considered better by audiophiles. The "vinyl is better than CD" stuff started much later. It started out as a small protest among some of the vinyl diehards because back then, you could discuss the science of sound and prove that digital has better reproduction capabilities than analog. They had it rough back then. Science was against them. These days, the "golden ear" argument reigns supreme. Science is out the window. "Vinyl is better because it sounds better on my system" has become a irrefutable statement of fact. Forget the fact that the S/N, is 100s of times better. Forget that wow & flutter is non-existent as is rumble. Forget about surface noise. So now we're in this stage where a technically inferior playback medium has somehow taken over as the better format. I used to be able to silence the "vinyl is better" arguments for many years with a simple blind test with a CD-R needle drop of an LP. I would play the actual LP or the CD-R of that LP and compare it to the CD. The "vinyl is better" listener could never distinguish between the CD-R of the LP and the LP itself. Once they heard the surface noise and its artifacts (pops, clicks, etc), they would immediately pick it as "better" whether it was on the CD-R or on the LP. It's really not the digital audio that the vinyl fans want and/or miss, it's the ambient noise associated with that vinyl that they want and/or miss. The CD playback system itself is not adding or taking away from the music. It plays back exactly what you feed it. Master a CD to sound good and it will play back with good sound. Master it to sound like crap & it will sound like crap on playback. But you know, it doesn't matter. I'm buying and playing records again because it's fun. I know that I have CDs of a lot of music that sounds better than it does on record but I guess I miss the LP playback rituals. I guess I miss the big artwork - hey, I can read LP liner notes without my reading glasses! I suppose I miss the surface noise too (sometimes... I still %$&^ hate pops during bass solos). But I really don't miss all those crappy pressings. All those scratched up LPs in the used bins. All the wear & tear (I'm on my third cartridge). And you know what I hate the most? Having to get up every 15-25 minutes. I miss being able to sit (and maybe fall asleep) in my chair for a solid hour and not have to worry about getting up to get the stylus out of the run-out groove. Kevin
  20. When CDs first hit the market, *no one* was claiming it was any kind of "step backwards" much less a *major* step backwards. It has always been touted as an audiophile-level sound. And when done right, it can be audiophile sound, as mentioned in the initial post of this thread, quoting Ian Anderson, who has heard a master tape or two.
  21. Dannie Richmond and the Last Mingus Band - Plays Charles Mingus (Timeless). What is it with these flimsy LP covers from this time period? They're like thick paper rather than cardboard.
  22. I agree with you on these two. I tried telling people over on the Hoffman forums this but I was overruled. Hoffman himself has come out against these CDs so you're wasting your breath trying to convince them that they're not all bad.
  23. Dexter Gordon - The Resurgence Of Dexter Gordon (Jazzland). This date never thrilled me all that much.
  24. I brought an old CD into work today that I hadn't spun in a long time. It's a CD from alto/baritone saxophonist Del Dako on the Storyville label entitled "Balancing Act". It's a nice date and one I wish I had played more often. As I sat here listening to this CD, I got to wondering if Dako was still playing and touring so I Googled him only to find out that he died January 19, 2013. A nice obit can be read here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/del-dakos-saxophone-improvisations-matched-his-bold-approach-to-life/article8908538/. Interesting to read that he was forced to switch to vibes due to a bicycle accident. RIP Del Dako. Only 58. Gone too soon.
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