Forums

Thanks for your feedbacks, everyone. But I am very far from knowing everything about every Prestige session. It just is so that these "early" Prestige Sessions are particularly well represented in my collection and I have owned a fair share of these recordings for a very, very long time. So you may be able to imagine my surprise at seeing some statements fall back behind what seemed like long-established "state of the the research art" knowledge to me.  @Mikeweil: I am afraid you missed a little detail: From what I have learnt from personal remarks about his background, Tad Richards is of a generation BEFORE yours and mine. Which made it doubly difficult for me to understand and to find the right words, because as you say I would have expected a heavy reliance on online sources from a (much) younger generation.  As for Michel Ruppli's label discography, I do own it  and did it consult it repeatedly (as well as "The Prestige Book" from the (Japanese) Jazz Critique series (No. 3, 1996) while reading the Listening to Prestige books. And they were useful for checking a number of facts before posting too.  However, the Ruppli discography needs a bit of careful use too. My copy (another of those occasional finds in the music book corner our our local shop) is the first edition of 1972 and I have a hunch there were later updated revisions. The 1972 edition, for example, understandably does not list the non-Prestige 1949 Serge Chaloff session (that I had singled out in my "review") in its "reissues from other labels" section. But OTOH it did list the 1944/45 Joe Davis sessions reissued in the 7500 series much later (PR7584). Not plausible either ... A great compilation of sessions but the links to Prestige are tenuous at best.  

I've been dealing with members of older generations for quite a few years by now, the vast majority of older people sucks at discographical research, or any type of research for that matter - which is fine I guess..., still I don't think that there's much of a downwards trend in the quality of research that is being produced... Listening to Prestige was born in 1940 btw

Reading Big Beat Steve's thoughtful comments makes me wonder if Listening to Prestige ever bothered to take a  look into or even buy Michel Ruppli's label discography - which he definitely should. I already had such thoughts when reading his posts. I have full respect for his intentions and enthusiasm, but think for such a book you have to dig in a little deeper. I guess that's the new generation, content with what they find on the web, or even think that's all there is. While reading many Wikipedia articles I often wonder if they are allergic to libraries.

Ken Peplowski - Maybe September (Capri)

👍