David Ayers

You have the url? uh - Google it?

No-one forgot anything. Record producers like to make a name for themselves and for sure this record is as big a part of the Eicher myth as it is of the Jarrett myth. I wondered if he had changed his approach so I checked the Paul Motian Lost in a Dream which is also a concert recording. Again the concert promoter is not credited. I hardly have any CDs here with me so can't really look but I wonder if it is just routine not to credit promoters - except where the record producer is also the promoter in which case we never hear the last of it! Ah if only people really had said all the things attributed to them. My favorite is Uxbridge's leg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Uxbridge's_leg

No-one forgot anything. Record producers like to make a name for themselves and for sure this record is as big a part of the Eicher myth as it is of the Jarrett myth.

I also appreciated the discussion of the instrument and how it led him to play - that explains a *lot* about that recording.

Interested to learn about the producer, Vera Brandes, and sorry to hear she got stuffed by the label.

Awesome! Oh, wait... Thought maybe this was a kind of 'best of'...

That's a metaphor, right?

If you haven't yet seen the whole thing - you need to! I caught it by accident while channel-surfing. What a surprise! Anyone have a link to the whole clip yet?

If you search for Sidney Bechet under Music at amazon.co.uk you get 551 hits. How does anyone ever sort that out unless you already know the discography backwards? Whenever I look the Armstrong seems to be much more expensive than the other sets, so maybe they are factoring in that consideration. Who knows?

I suppose it's not the most 'important' Dizzy, but his soloing is just so fantastic - so many ideas.

I took a jazz history course with Chuck Israels at Brooklyn College in 1974, and Chuck went on about how brilliant a soloist Thad was. He was talking in terms of melodic/thematic improvisers, who he felt were superior to artists who simply blew on changes, and I think the context was Monk recordings, where he said Thad and Newk were perfect for Monk's music, and he denigrated Charlie Rouse by comparison, IIRC. One of my favorite Mosaic boxes, actually. There really is some wonderful, tight, smart playing on that Thad Jones set, I love it ... but I am just on Dizzy disk one and he is in a class of his own!

I'm a patient person. But.

I had him down as the classic pub bore writ large. I don't understand why his death has been marked in the mass media.

What? When you quote a post it adds a timestamp - e.g.

You have a lot more faith in art restoration than many!

Ah yes - but rewriting history is more fun. In that spirit, I will now take this quotation and retrospectively edit it into my past posts by way of celebrity endorsement. What do you think about that Chuck? [oh this is going to be easy... I just need to crack that timestamp code thingy...]

Some of those FD titles have been in print on CD recently - I guess the first thing that will happen is that they will disappear. I like the idea that a further selection of titles would come back - but the whole label...

I agree that such a history needs writing. It also needs to be done while there are still enough people left to interview. Individual biographies are a difficult genre and a lot of time is spent documenting things important for the life but less important for artistic/musical/literary history. Such a history, even a preliminary one which does little more than draw together already published sources (magazines etc) could be very useful, and of course the discography is taken care of to a very large degree by Peter Stubley at efi.

I was considering doing a bio of Parker but couldn't quite imagine how it would go. I guess I can't quite think how I would find time/will/purpose/funding to do one now, but you never know.

It comes around so quickly...

Currently on hmv.com [uk] for a good price. http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleMultiSearch.do?searchUID=&pGroupID=0&adultFlag=false&simpleSearchString=noone+victoria&primaryID=0&btnSubmitSearch.x=0&btnSubmitSearch.y=0 Quite a few good offers there in fact including the Berio reissue someone mentioned above. The offers have a tendency to disappear suddenly, though a few can also be found on amazon.co.uk. http://hmv.com/hmvweb/specialOffers.do?ctx=30;-1;-1;-1;-1&code=11WDP Delivery to Europe or to ROW is not maybe as cheap as amazon.co.uk... In fact read the small print as there is VAT weirdness going on which affects non-UK EU customers. Minefield. http://hmv.com/hmvweb/navigate.do?ctx=1053;-1;-1;-1;-1&pPageID=3329 Just look at the nice picture instead:

And the question too about how often really you get that in jazz. I wouldn't say jazz and I wouldn't say argument. Feelingful, purposive. I think Jones/Baraka saw the problem around jazz when he chose to emphasise blues. Incidentally I think critique of jazz-as-African-American-culture has been an important and not well-understood thread in African-American cultural discourse.

Can't you just wait for us to die? We are unlikely to understand the explanation and it would avoid inconvenient court appearances for you.