Michael Fitzgerald

This print through is caused by poor storage procedures - if you store tape "tails out" then you'll get an echo - not the pre-echo you describe, which is probably more objectionable. So be kind - don't rewind. Mike

No, no, no, you were right. Martin Williams and Nat Hentoff were the co-editors. Check Jazz Panorama introduction. Mike

A discographically half-baked entry (haven't yet checked the original LP, nor do I own the new CD). Date: March 25, 1958 Location: New York City Label: Decca Hal McKusick (ldr), Hal McKusick (bcl, as), Art Farmer (t), Bill Evans (p), Paul Chambers (b), Connie Kay (d), Jimmy Giuffre (arr) a. 104634 Sing Song (Jimmy Giuffre) b. 104635 It Never Entered My Mind - 03:49 (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart) GRP/Decca CD: GRD-651 - Now's The Time (1957-58) (1995) c. 104636 Yesterdays (Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach) Additional unknown title (104637). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: March 28, 1958 Location: New York City Label: Decca Hal McKusick (ldr), Hal McKusick, Frank Socolow (as), Dick Hafer (ts), Jay Cameron (bar), Bill Evans (p), Paul Chambers (b), Connie Kay (d), George Handy, Ernie Wilkins (arr) a. 104638 LaRue [aka Tribute To Brownie] - 04:12 (Clifford Brown, Duke Pearson, Nat Adderley) b. 104639 Now's The Time - 06:11 (Charlie Parker) c. 104640 Whisper Not - 03:19 (Benny Golson) d. 104641 The Last Day Of Fall - 03:28 (George Handy) All titles on: - GRP/Decca CD: GRD-651 - Now's The Time (1957-58) (1995) Omit George Handy (arr) on a, b. Omit Ernie Wilkins (arr) on c, d. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: April 7, 1958 Location: New York City Label: Decca Hal McKusick (ldr), Hal McKusick (cl, as), Art Farmer (t), Barry Galbraith (g), Bill Evans (p), Milt Hinton (b), Charli Persip (d), George Russell (arr) a. 104642 Stratusphunk - 06:29 (George Russell) b. 104643 The End Of A Love Affair - 04:41 (Edward. C. Redding) c. 104644 You're My Thrill - 04:05 (Sidney Clare, Jay Gorney) All titles on: - GRP/Decca CD: GRD-651 - Now's The Time (1957-58) (1995) All of the above tracks were on Cross Section Saxes except the unknown title. Mike

The Christmas period has historically been a extraordinary time for jazz recordings, I suppose because a lot of artists come off the road and are home for the holidays, so you can get everyone in one place. 1958 - Donald Byrd: Off To The Races 1958 - Sarah Vaughan: No Count Sarah 1958 - Melba Liston: And Her 'Bones 1958 - Gerry Mulligan: What Is There To Say 1958 - Ira Sullivan: Nicky's Tune 1958 - John Coltrane: (prestige) 1958 - Milt Jackson: Bags' Opus 1958 - Bud Powell: The Scene Changes 1958 - Zoot Sims & Bob Brookmeyer: Stretching Out 1958 - Chico Hamilton: Gongs East and sometimes there are great live shows while at home: 1958 - Town Hall, NYC: Miles Davis; Art Blakey; Sonny Rollins; Anita O'Day; J.J. Johnson - all on one bill. Just days before, Blakey had returned from Paris, where the Club Saint-German album had been recorded. Mike

All (?) the Jazz Casual shows are now on DVD as part of a 8-disc boxed set. http://www.ejazzlines.com/store.cfm?d=3017...77615&do=detail I seem to recall mention that some shows had been lost - can anyone supply further info on that? Mike

Yes! Larry's Jazz Go-Kart is hitting the road! Folks have been saying for years that jazz has to get down there in the trenches, bands have to pile into vans and tour like the underground rock bands do - y'know, look at Medeski, Martin & Wood, etc. Same deal with jazz authors - guerrilla hit-and-run booksignings on the street corner, flyers stapled to telephone poles, "five books for five bucks" public readings, etc. Just imagine....... Mike

The class on fusion is the one 1970s class. The class on the Young Lions is the one 1980s class. You'll be lucky if you even get anything past that. The Jimmy Smith class is shoved to the side in the 1950s to deal with Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, et al. Maybe two classes there - and you're still going to ignore stuff like Duke and Basie of this period. The Jimmy Smith class is shoved to the side in the 1960s to deal with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor, Stan Getz, et al. Maybe three classes there (still a hell of a lot better than Ken Burns). Same problem exists with earlier artists who were still active. You'll be lucky to hear any Wes Montgomery for the same reasons. Can it be done better? Probably - one of my favorite survey albums is the second volume of the "Blue Note's Three Decades Of Jazz" albums that goes from 1949 to 1959. In 13 tracks it gets you the basic hard bop background - everything from Monk to Miles to Clifford to JJ to Blakey to Silver to Coltrane to Rollins to Lou Donaldson and it includes the 1957 "Yardbird Suite" by Jimmy Smith - a killer! With that set as required listening for the 1950s, though, you'd still need to cover a lot more - what about cool, what about Mingus, Miles on Columbia, etc. Another consideration in teaching these courses is how much time is spent listening in class. Guided listening is important (students often have no prior experience at all) and outside listening is important too because in a one-hour class, if you listen to four full items, you've probably used up half your time. Another consideration is who's in the class - is this a class of jazz studies majors (a dreadful amount of whom don't listen to much of the history of jazz), is it music majors (classical performers filling up some music history elective credits), is it the unwashed masses ("normal" college kids looking for a non-demanding 3 credits)? In my own utopian university jazz studies program, things are set up quite differently (integrating history with performance, ensembles, theory, etc.), but I don't imagine it will ever be implemented anywhere. In the end, if you want to learn jazz history, you're not going to do it in a two-semester course at a college. It's a lifelong pursuit. Mike

I will grant that organ often receives short shrift in "survey of jazz history" type courses - guitar does too. Part of this is simply the problem of lack of time. For a two-semester course to cover EVERYTHING from New Orleans to now is pretty ludicrous, but that's how it's done. Count the number of weeks, then deduct several of them for quizzes, tests, exams. Realistically, there just needs to be more time - a two-year course would be an improvement, but most colleges don't value jazz history enough to allocate that much time. For heaven's sake, there are still two-semester courses on "history of music" - that go from Gregorian chant to today. That's over a thousand years. Jazz is about a hundred. Do a websearch on "jazz history syllabus" and you'll see what the basic approaches are. Mike

What's wrong with that? Ken Burns taught me that that's all there is to Jazz.

What is the source of this essay? Mike

That's the first I've heard of this "Beuscher" spelling - maybe you need to tell these folks: http://www.saxgourmet.com/history.html because it's very clear that the ads always spelled it Buescher. Or is there more to this than meets the eye? Mike

Rutgers IJS has many horns, but not the ones you mention. One of Bird's horns is in Kansas City, right? http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/IJS/jazz5a.html Mike

The "buzzy mouth organ" is the Synclavier harmonica sample. I don't see anything particularly wrong with Bev not liking that and wanting to hear a GUITAR sound from a guitarist. I don't have a problem with the guitar synthesizer and Synclavier stuff, but I can understand someone not liking it. There's a pretty radical difference between a *guitar* (whether acoustic steel string, nylon string, electric 12-string, hollowbody, solidbody, Pikasso 638-string, etc., along with all the various alternative tunings that Metheny has used, along with all the various chorus, delay, multiple amplifiers, etc. that he's used) and the *triggering* of synthesizers by a guitar-shaped object. Mike

I hear you! My situation was that I didn't find the perfect database to handle everything for years and years, so I held off on doing the "comprehensive" work and kept track of my collection (and also just what is out there in existence) with a very bare-bones system (started in dBase, currently in Microsoft Access) that has over 20,000 entries, but only artist, title, release year, label, catalog number, format, and a couple of notes fields. But since I started using BRIAN in 1997, it's been able to handle just about everything I can imagine, so it's now just a matter of doing the data entry - and convincing others to use the program so that the data entry work can be spread around. Should you decide to use BRIAN, do keep in touch and let the other users know what you're planning to enter so we can all benefit from each other's efforts. Mike

I've already entered just about every Blue Note session from 1950 to 1970 into a database that is set up perfectly to handle discography information (named BRIAN after discographer Brian Rust). I've also entered a lot more than that - I currently have about 4500 sessions, almost all post-war jazz. I've used the best sources available - the issues themselves, the Jepsen, Bruyninckx, Raben, and Lord discographies, for Blue Note the Cuscuna/Ruppli second edition book, etc. I've checked titles with BMI, ASCAP, GEMA, the US Library of Congress. I hate to see other people needlessly reinventing the wheel, going through the same data entry, then repeating mistakes that have been already been corrected elsewhere. Here's a partial list of stuff that is already entered and could be made available free to other BRIAN users: http://www.JazzDiscography.com/Temp/boxedsets.htm Please - if you're interested enough to enter stuff into any database, surely you're interested enough to do it right - which *cannot* ever be done with Microsoft Works, I'm afraid. The BRIAN application is free - tech support by its developer is great (and also free) and since there are a number of others already using the program, sharing information through the programs data exchange feature is ready to go. More info at my website. Mike

Happened to look at this LP today - the tune in question is actually a feature for contrabass trombone. ========== The title of I Ain't Gonna Ask No More is a reminder of Toshiko's dues-paying days in New York when, after finding herself at the mercy of agents, she came to the point where this was her self-made resolution. "I decided that all I should care about is doing what I believe in, trying my best to devote all my energy to it, and letting everything else take care of itself." Tabackin adds: "Phil Teele is very proud of the contrabass trombone he owns, so Toshiko thought she would write something for him to use it on. It's a fun piece, kind of tongue-in-cheek." Notable features are Britt's [Woodman] trombone solo and a couple of choruses of blues scored for the saxophone section in spread out five-part harmony. Toshiko points to Charlie Parker as a source of inspiration. - notes by Leonard Feather Mike

I was going to paste in 500+ of these babies, but I decided against it. Mike

Well, shoot, when you called your dad did you ask whether they ever had bands down there in the basement at any point? Mike

I gotta point again to the marvelous three-parter on Lewis here (particularly the second part): http://www.furious.com/perfect/coltrane.html http://www.furious.com/perfect/coltrane2.html http://www.furious.com/perfect/coltrane3.html It does a good job of explaining why he is so well-liked and well-respected (and of course, tells quite a bit about the Coltrane book). It would be nice if there were enough time in this life to just siphon out everything that he's got in his head. I think his next book will be the biographical dictionary of jazz that he's been working on for many years. Even with the huge scope of that, there are areas that he could delve into much deeper, I'm sure. Mike

Student teaching, no matter how good the experience, is NOT the real thing. You really don't learn what you need to learn until you are out there on the job yourself, where YOU make the decisions, where YOU handle the problems. Hopefully you get a good cooperating teacher who is open to advising you after your student teaching is over - because that's when you'll have all kinds of questions. My last job was very close to a big university so I've had quite a few of what NJ calls "pre-student teachers" - observer/helpers for a total of 20 hours in a semester. I've tried to impart the fruits of my experience, distilled into tips, tricks, etc. but I have a feeling that because they hadn't been out there as teachers that many of the students didn't pick up on them then. Maybe now that some of them are out there they will remember them. Mike

That idea of old broadcasts lingering in space somewhere is great. Has anyone used that in a science fiction story? I think it has a lot of potential. Or maybe one of those forensic investigation kind of things. Mike

There are some solo analyses in the little Twain book, but it's not just a book of transcriptions. There are two Lester Young books under Porter's name, that one, and the Reader, also mentioned above. Mike

This is a reprint, not a new book. Originally published by Twain. A nice little book. Mike

The bass trombonist with Toshiko was Phil Teele. A monster. The record is called "Tales Of A Courtesan" on RCA. Mike

Discography is quite a different world than biography. I do have and use discographical materials in German, French, Italian, etc. etc. Even some things from Japan. My apologies, but I can't read German. (I can do reasonably well with French.) For my research, I HAVE and DO read articles in numerous other languages through translations by colleagues (Swedish, German, Italian, French - I recall all these for the Gryce book). But for just having on the shelf reading, no, I do not have a library of books in any other language than English and therefore don't keep up with what is published in those other languages. I've already said "mea culpa." - that's Latin, btw. Mike