jazzbo

Nine to twelve, depending on whose series you grab and how full the cds are.

I know there was one, but I've never heard it!

I agree. The Mosaic sets sound fantastic! They can be a little unsettling if you are very used to the lps or the previous cds. . . they ARE remixed. But the sound is GLORIOUS.

I'm a Bix completist, but I'm already complete!

The Bethlehem two lp/two cd set is interesting. Here is my favorite: This Sony Classical recording from 195 is da bomb.

That Columbia cd (an English copy!) is the one that got ME started some years back. . . . I've grabbed all I can find of his since! A MASTER! If I just had to have ONE it just might be the Storyville. . . .

I've never been able to pull the ebay trigger on these because the prices were too high. . . never heard this stuff. Eventually someone will put it out on cd. Good job for Water Records I'd say!

Don't hesitate to deal with this vendor. Good peop's! I've gone the "Maxislim" route. Not really more expensive if you search for a good price. Half the width of a jewel case. Can sort by colors. . . .

After my decade or so of upgrading, I have to recommend www.decware.com The products there are really so loud in the "bang for your buck" department, dependable, hand-built, and most of all sound fantastic! I've been using their products for about seven years and eventually my main system will likely be ALL Decware. . . right now I only lack the source component. You'll find innovative thinking in many ways as well. There are pages on room setup here that I think are quite valuable. I wasn't able to put them in place, at least not yet. . . .

I think you're right. Honestly, I won't have time to do the comparisons, but I DID do the comparisons many moons ago and I believe that with the Mosaic and the JIPs you won't need any of the cheap sets. . . .

I have all their stuff. It's only rock and roll. . . but I like it. I guess the drummer is my favorite. Tony Spargo (later spelling of his name) was a great drummer. I love his later appearances where he plays the kazoo while ALSO playing killer drums!

I haven't seen Natalie lately. . . did see her live about fifteen years ago. . . . I don't think they look that much alike to me. . . !

Brad, in the post above I say distinctly that OP is good here. BUT I'm not that big an OP fan, I recognize his technical prowess and his innovation, but don't like his sound and "feel" as much as other bassists. I really think that I'd rather hear Wendell in this session. That's me. I'm not the producer!

Al, hate to say this in a way: if you buy the first two JSP Django sets. . . you'll have the Mosaic set. . .and more material as well. And probably spend half the Mosaic cost or less.

Thanks for sharing that news. I'm excited about the Phantom on Water; it is going to sound terrific, better than the Select would be my guess!

I'll be getting all the March RVGs in a few weeks in one big whack. . . how's that for overload! I'm very looking foward to this one. . . .

I guess it depends on your system; for me the sound on the first three discs is NOT GOOD AT ALL, it has that treble grit that seems to be an artifact of the NoNoise board that McMaster has or just his frequency balance of choice. . . . I live with it, but in a system without tone controls you don't reach for it with relish! That said, there are great sessions in this box set, and as Dan has pointed out a goodly portion not on cd anywhere else. There is only one unreleased session however; the others have been released on lp and some on cd.

I don't quite see your point, thanks for correcting the typo, I corrected mine in the post. You don't think Marshall would be a better fit? I can understand that, don't agree, but understand; I just am not sure what you meant. I like him better as a bassist tone and function wise, and I like him working with Klook during this time period. But OP is very good here too.

You're welcome. Yes, OP is wonderful, but not one of my very favorites. . . if only it had been Wendell Marshall!

Here's my two cents. I got this reissue because I passed on a 29 dollar Japanese K2 of this about four years ago and never saw another copy. . . .This is one of my favorite jazz releases featuring one of my very favorite pianist playing works of my favorite composer and with one of my very favorite drummers on brushes. . . . I've loved this lp, and the cd in the Riverside Monk box for a long time. . . . I think this K2 reissue sounds better than the Monk box set, I just compared a few songs. It seems better focused. The bass is deeper, and yet also fuller and tighter (sort of an odd combination that one, go figure). The piano is more clearly presented, and oddly there is less prominent reverb. There seems to be more space in the sound, a blacker background, something like that. I LIKE the sound of the Monk box, but the K2 is an improvement. Not sure how they did that as Chuck says there are no master tapes available for this session, but they took a lot of care in the transfer I think, and the results are very good. Now let me just say I have been working on my stereo for years, have it at a point now where I feel it is very musical without being "hi fi'd up" or ruthlessly analytically revealing, and I enjoy a good remaster. If you're not a remaster-buying kind of person, and your forty year old Scott receiver is going along fine with the original filter capacitors and zipcord for speaker wire and you don't buy remasters as a general rule, fine, don't buy this one because it ISN'T one of those that are gonna rock your world.

Brad, you really should get "The Golden Flute" for the TENOR playing. It's one of Lateef's best, and you should like Teefsky.

MAN it's going to be great! MAN it's goign to be EXPENSIVE!

Many good items in this series. In the latest batch, The Golden Flute and The Cry of My People are NOT TO BE MISSED.

I have most of the Vaughn, and as Mike notes. . . there are tons of commercial pieces that I don't listen to. But there are bright moments as well! I have all the Washington sets and I love almost all of them! There are a few discs that are rather lightweight. . . but the bulk is wonderful music! The Kirk and the Merrill and the Brown-Roach are wonderful jazz resources!

News from the Supranet site. . . . March 1 2004 News Revenant Records - Albert Ayler Box Set Rumours of a box set of the unreleased recordings of Albert Ayler from Revenant Records began to appear last year in the music press. I decided to wait awhile before mentioning it here in case it fell by the wayside but I can now announce that Holy Ghost, a 9 CD set of previously unissued Ayler material, is due to be released on October 5, 2004. The importance of this can't be stressed enough. One of the reasons I started this site was a fear that Albert Ayler was in danger of being forgotten by the jazz historians and academics, sidelined as a minor figure in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s. The extreme nature of some of his music, its wild originality and uniqueness, combined with the mysterious circumstances surrounding his early death, have assured his cult status, but he has never really achieved 'respectability' amongst the critical community. I get the impression that while Coltrane, Coleman and Taylor are all comfortably housed in the Jazz Hall of Fame, Albert Ayler is still waiting in the corridor outside. The main reason for this is the Ayler discography. It begins with The First Recordings (which I don't think anyone would claim is a great album) and (almost) ends with the last three Impulse titles (which...ditto). In between there's some of the greatest music (not just jazz - but music) ever recorded, but in assessing Ayler's status, the critic has to deal with the entire body of work. If you'll allow me a metaphor, Ayler's recorded legacy is a jigsaw with some boring grass at the bottom, some equally boring sky at the top, an incredibly interesting scene in the middle, lots of gaps in the whole picture and no side pieces at all. The importance of the Revenant box set is that it will provide the majority of these missing pieces so that the critic will finally be presented with a fairly complete picture of Albert Ayler. Critics love consistency, they like to know where an artist came from and where he was going. Coltrane will always be king because his career was so well-documented. With Ayler there was never this consistency and his music lacked context. To give just one example, on all of his records (apart from Sonny's Time Now and New York Eye and Ear Control) he was the leader. So what was he like playing as a sideman in the band of another avant-garde genius? The Revenant box set answers the question by including the recording Ayler made with the Cecil Taylor unit for Danish TV in November 1962. The Cecil Taylor tape and some of the other Revenant material has been circulating amongst 'collectors' for years, and I don't mean to denigrate the work done by the team which produced last year's 'Ayler Tree', but that was an underground activity and the results were distributed among the cognoscenti. I'm not suggesting that the Revenant set will cause sleepless nights for the likes of Diana Krall, but what it will do is shift all of this Ayler material - 9 CDs worth - from the underground up into the light of day, thus becoming part of the canon of Ayler's recorded legacy and as such available for all future critics and academics to ponder over in the years to come. Over the next few months, as further details of the Revenant set are released, I will add them here - what's included and what's not. But for now I'll just mention two more items in the set. One is the Ayler brothers' performance of 'Our Prayer' at St Paul’s Lutheran Church, New York, on July 21st, 1967 at the funeral of John Coltrane - because of the circumstances in which it was recorded one of the most emotionally intense pieces of music I've ever heard. This will be its first legitimate release. The other is a track which I've never heard and which as far as I know has not been circulating among the 'collectors'. I mention it here partly to offset any impression that Revenant have taken the easy route of compiling the 'usual suspects' from the bootleg underworld, but mostly because it ties in neatly with the Cecil Taylor recording mentioned above. That was Ayler the sideman when he was starting out in 1962, and this is Ayler as a sideman in 1968: Pharaoh Sanders Ensemble: Sanders (tenor saxophone); Chris Capers (trumpet); Albert Ayler (tenor saxophone); Noah Howard (alto saxophone); Dave Burrell (piano); Sirone (bass); Roger Blank (drums) 1. Venus (Sanders) 22:30