AllenLowe

paypal is not only completely safe, but much better than any other entity I have ever dealt with when it comes to returns and seller misrepresentation. And yes, they have my bank account info, all of my medical records, and a few snapshots of my wife. I mention all of this because of some of the suggestions here that it is risky to give them access.

not to rove too far from the subject, but those older horns just breathe like newer ones don't - weirdly enough it's like the difference between tubes and solid state.

that's quite a nice solo on You Don't Know What Love Is. As for saxophones of choice, well, it's the reason so many contemporary players have that buzzy, kazoo-like sound. But they've been seduced by how much easier modern horns play. But it's a real loss for the soul of the music.

I wouldn't know where to start, so I think I won't.

well...if it were that straightforward. Sometimes I see it as replacing one self-destructive dependency with another. And I have seen it more than once, though I should not mention any more names....

yeah, Dolly was so proprietary about Jackie's career and so over-demanding in terms of fees that he gigged relatively little in his last years. When I ran the New Haven fest and tried to book him she was impossible to deal with, and I offered some real money. I always noted that at his death there was relatively little acclaim, relative to his musical stature, because he just wasn't out and about that much. She thought she was being slick, but I remember a well-known jazz agent at the time telling me he had removed Jackie from his roster because Dolly was so impossible to deal with. Jackie was a very nice guy, but he deferred to her in everything, in that way that recovered junkies and alcoholics tend to give absolute loyalty to those who stuck with them when things were really at their lowest. As for Jackie's playing in those last years, his sound became that buzzy, Yamaha-thing (that's the way those horns sound and I hate them). I called it dissident indifference above because his playing had, to my ears, a kind of angry (at the business) indifference to what he seemed to think was musical and sonic focus. It lost its connection to the earth, in a way which I find hard to explain. It's just all spread out, brilliant technically but cold and distant. But, clearly, other people hear it differently. To me he peaked in his '60s playing.

those Steeplechases are my favorite Jackie; he seems to have reached a peak, influenced by the "new freedom" but not trying to play in any way other than his accustomed style. As for his intonation, it is beautifully expressive in its early sharpness; his later work has a kind of dissident indifference which completely turns me off (though it still has more than traces of the old brilliance). (and I defer to Larry Kart, who has very smartly, in this forum I believe, explained why McLean's later work leaves him cold). It probably has nothing to do with Jackie, btw, but anyone who plays older, non-Selmer saxophones understands how hard they are to play in tune, especially in the more-noticeable upper register. But that's another story.

sorry, wasn't trying to be overly dramatic. I am doing very well, definitely in remission, but the whole experience was so hellish that it enforced a certain sense of new urgency about getting certain things resolved -

I'm sure you would.

the problem is that if I donate the collection now I want it where I can get access, as I still have some things I want to to do and write. So I was hoping to find something in the New York/Connecticut/New Jersey area, but so far no luck.

and therein lies the rub - because of the historical projects I have been working on for 20 + years, my collection is organized like a step-by-step study of all of American vernacular music from about 1900-1960. My long term goal, toward which I am making no progress, is to find an institution that wants to preserve it and let me organized it for the purposes that I gathered it; for the short term I do want to sell off some of the excess. But there are parts of this collection, as with Schildkraut et al, that are irreplaceable. On the other hand, if I die in the next year or two there will be no recourse and this thing will likely just disappear.

thanks, this is illuminating. Not surprising, but illuminating.

on a private level most of my "audience" - and I use the term loosely - want hard copies, though I use Bandcamp and it has worked well. And since I am currently signed to ESP, I don't have to worry about all of it anymore, which is nice.

been so busy lately with the book, writing volume 2, recording and composing, etc etc that I feel like I have lost touch with the world of interest-in-jazz and its market (such as it is). I have a fair amount of CDs I want to sell, good stuff, mostly older jazz and I have no idea if anybody is buying these suckers any more. I ask because I would like to know before I go to all this trouble of collating, listing, etc. if anybody is purchasing anything any more in the time-of-download. Whaddaya think?

trying to get paid in this business is one of the most frustrating and humiliating activities known to man and woman. I've actually made money on the new book because I just did it myself, and even turned down one offer from a small publisher. I just won't go that route any more. Let me add, however, that ESP Records, my current label, is the first of any size I have dealt with that honors every commitment, financial and otherwise. Thanks to Steve Holtje, I should mention, who is in charge.

coincidence department: Trenner, an excellent pianist, had been living in this area for years and just died about a month ago.

one of the stranger moments of my life; I got a call one day, must have been around 1978, and the voice said "hi Allen this is Bill Evans; do you know where I can get some cocaine?" I was friends with his wife and he was visiting (she lived in a suburb of New Haven) and I guess he was strung out. I was unable to help.

just to note Simmons was part of a panel, maybe last Fall, at Lincoln Center. He was in a wheel chair, but mentally completely on top of things.

there's something about San Francisco street musicians; some time in the 1980s I saw DuPree Bolton playing out there.

yes, original source is about 80 percent of the battle. Transfer a mint 78 and you will sound like a genius. A lot of that first generation of restorationists like John R.T. Davies, as great as he was, had been able to, let us say, "borrow" some amazing things from the EMI vaults as well as pick things up from RCA that were about to be thrown away.

actually, true story; Dexter was dead two hours before he finished playing his last tune.

have not had the decay problem; might be a program issue.

it really depends; I start with a typical tune - 3 minutes average let us say - by setting the de-clicking with the before/after button, listening, in real time, for distortion of any kind. After a general run, if there are still left over noises, I enlarge the wave form and try to zero in and just de-click on that tiny fraction of time with the noise, and apply de-click. If this does not work I sometime have to snip it by hand, which is tricky because it can disrupt the time flow.

I always declick and decrackle first; and I do all de-noising by hand, meaning that one should NEVER use the program the way the program advises you to use it, by having it create a noise print in which it "learns" the noise and then eliminates it. This is always grossly destructive, and is why you hear these youtube guys who offer tunes in which they have created that horrible gurgling effect. De-noise can and should always be done manually, like a filter in which different frequency bands are individually de-noised. But then ALSO remember that you can never eliminate all noise without harming the sound, so you almost always have to leave some.

lotsa programs around, best I've used (and I used it on all 800 tunes I just restored for the new project) is de-click, denoise, etc from Acon digital. It was something like $99 and seriously it's as good as the $3000 CEDAR system (or at least the one that used to be $3000) -