Ted O'Reilly

Paypal sent from Toronto...even used US funds! Happy to keep Organissimo forum active...

As I mentioned, the man who wrote the intro to the set, Ron Gaskin, is a friend. I asked him if he had any information about the "30+" tracks, and he said no, that his work was after the fact of the content preparation. But interestingly, he emailed me "when the first pressing (do they call it pressing?) was made of the set, no one at Verve realized that on the Ellington disc there were 3 tracks prominently featuring the guitar of Barney Kessel. But good old Ron spotted it (jazz fans tend to listen) and it was quickly corrected." I don't know about the Kern being released last week...this is as a single CD, I assume? Perhaps different branches of Universal work independently, and the Canadian office originally worked on the complete set for Canadian release only, as (don't forget) Oscar Peterson was Canadian, through and through, and never lived anywhere but Montreal as a young man, and Toronto for the rest of his life.

I wouldn't call the packaging "cheap", but there's nothing fancy. Mono-colour oranges on the box (making the negative white-on-orange script hard to read), and just black print on the booklet and the paper CD sleeves. It's all solid quality, but Budget. All manufactured in Canada. I'm wondering if the '30+ new' claim may mean something like "we at Verve have never released 30 of these 108 tracks on any other CD releases we've done" rather than "we have 30+ tracks that have never been heard outside the recording studio on the day they were taped". I'm not complaining, by the way...these are very pleasant recordings, done for easy listening rather than stretching boundaries. I like 'em... They're playing in the background right now. Can't you hear them?

Okay, I just went and bought this at L'Atelier Grigorian's Toronto store. (The official release date is Tuesday, but they have it on the shelves today). It's a very spare production (at least compared to say, Mosaic) with 5 CDs in paper sleeves in a basic cardboard box. A booklet is equally basic, with an articulate foreword/overview/intro of sorts by a friend of mine, jazz fan/poet/retired record retailer Ron Gaskin (I didn't know he had done this). As personnel on all tracks is OP with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, and dates indicated as July 14-August 9, 1959 in Chicago, little research is needed, but: the claim is "30 + tracks never before on CD – amazingly, there are still some new things to discover" and there is no indication anywhere as to what is 'new'. There are 108 tracks in total, brief readings with most under 3 minutes, with 3:39 the longest (I Only Have Eyes For You). Disc 1 is 12 tracks of Cole Porter, 12 of Richard Rodgers. Disc 2 is 12 Irving Berlin, 12 Jerome Kern. Disc 3 has 12 Ellington. Disc 4 is again 24 tracks, 12 each Harold Arlen and George Gershwin. Disc 5 has 6 from Harry Warren, 6 from Vincent Youmans and a dozen from Jimmy McHugh. Nothing is noted as an alternate, or previously unreleased, though each track does have the master take number noted (showing that they didn't go in and do all Porter one day, Ellington the second, etc.). Going strictly by memory (my Lord discography is unfunctioning these days) I'd be stunned to learn that there is anything new here. I suppose if you have the original LP you would know what is extra, but it's sloppy to make a claim, then not follow through with the details. The compilation supervisor is Thom McKercher (of Unversal Canada) who thanks the Verve NY staff for "unearthing" the material, so if there is previously unavailable material, they surely should know what it is, and should tell us... The essential thing is the sound, and it's first-rate, nice and clear and open. It's an official Universal release, not pirated (maybe they're fighting off the 50-year thing by getting it out a couple of months early) so you can ethically pick up a very good value package that's also legit! Very good price at $32 US through http://www.grigorian.com/webstore/view.php?iid=353291

I think Medjuck's right about the imposed intermission... 'Twasn't presented that way on this side of the Atlantic. I saw "Silence of the Lambs" in Zurich, and was stunned when, just before the big reveal as the camera looks down into the pit, the screen jumped to a jaunty "Let's all go to the lobby and buy some candy" and a 10 minute intermission. The tension was completely broken, never to be recovered. I wondered if they would have done the same in "Psycho", just as Janet Leigh is soaping up...

That Grigorian price of $35 CDN is very good -- the HMV Canada website has it at $55 CDN. http://www.hmv.ca/hmvcaweb/en_CA/advancedS...cordLabel=Verve And, Atelier Grigorian is a very good record store, though I've never dealt with them online, just in the shop... Mailing CDs is costly these days....12 bucks to send 5 CDs from Toronto to a friend in NYC.

Since many re-issue projects (especially LPs) came from the marketing side of record companies, perhaps the objective in some cases was to make old material somehow sound more "Hi-Fi", emphasis on "High", meaning brighter sound. It was certainly the marketers who came up with the idea of reprocesssed stereo -- breaking down honest, clear mono with slight channel-to-channel delay and different EQs. Bad in "stereo", worse if you had the misfortune to hear it folded back to mono. I remember some particularly bad Decca things in the '60s, the Lunceford band, for example.

Bad transfers, I'd say. I have good versions of most of that material...

Interesting that the Grigorian website (it's a first-rate record store, BTW, for classical and jazz material) indicates that it's a CANADIAN EXCLUSIVE BOX SET!!! The legendary Oscar Peterson, an icon on the world’s jazz scene since the early 1950’s, recorded all of the tracks on Oscar Peterson: The Songbooks in July and August 1959, with the artists that would become to be known as the “classic” trio – Oscar Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. 30 + tracks never before on CD – amazingly, there are still some new things to discover. 5 CDs of some of the greatest standards ever written – Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin & more - a who’s who of the Great American Songbook. 108 tracks – this is the first time these tracks have been available at a super budget price. I'll drop in and get one!

Italian jazz? Aren't most of them from Switzerland, with a Swede for good measure?

Nor to Canada, or anywhere other than the US and territories. Too bad...it's a very good price.

Just turned 67. One of my earliest memories, probably late 1944 or early 1945, is visiting the troop transport on which my dad was a signal officer, this at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard north of San Francisco. Gotcha by a year... My dad was in the Canadian Merchant Marine, doing North Atlantic convoys and ship deliveries for the Navy... Hazardous work, and no pensions. And Seeline, you could HEAR the marchers, as I recall. Radio is the most visual medium there is. (I worked in it for more than 40 years...)

I'm just old enough to have thought that radio shows like the Breakfast Club were a novelty, because all I knew was TV. I remember liking Don McNeil's voice and thinking he sounded friendly, but that's about it. I must be of Larry Kart's vintage or more (late 60s), since I too recall the radio version from the 1940s, and thought it wonderful (I was a child). Didn't they always do a "march around the breakfast table"?

Does this mean they'll send new discs to those who've already received their copy, or that they're holding up on shipping until correct discs are inserted into waiting boxes? It would seem that they've shipped 900 so far? It could be pricey re-sending that many individual discs. I ordered mine 'way back in March, but Canada Customs is (as usual) holding up delivery, no doubt to justify its exorbitant warehousing/handling costs. (What's this Free Trade stuff???)

How about no number? I have the Nat King Cole set (still unopened) that's marked "Grieveson", or pre-number, since my friend the late Gord Grieveson (who supplied much of the material) supplied my copy. He got several copies as payment I suppose...

Matt, this is great info...just what I was looking for. Thanks a lot. (And good luck with that Cold Fusion stuff. Good item on 60 Minutes last night).

Can current TV sets (LCDs, plasmas) take cold weather? I mean REALLY cold weather... A friend wishes to replace the old set at his summer cottage in pretty-far North Ontario, where temps can get down in winter, like -20, -30 celsius. Not wishing to move the set in and out, he wonders if the new sets can withstand the winter? Would Liquid Crystal Display become Ice Crystal Failure??? What'cha think?

Is "Thelonica" not a combination of Thelonious and Pannonica? You know, the Baroness? Nica, as in Nica's Dream and Pannonica?

This is funny! I went to http://www.ibdb.com/ to learn more about the production of Pipe Dream, and see that Braff played the part of Pablo, "a wetback". Further clicking leads to the discovery that Ruby Braff is female!!!: http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=94882

Ruby told me that this photo is false. It was assembled (or whatever they called Photoshopped in the '50s), and fairly close "forensic" observation shows he's right: the light/shadows don't match properly between his image, and the rest of the photo. He claimed the picture of him was done for publicity purposes for the 1955 Rodgers & Hammerstein II broadway musical Pipe Dream, based on Steinbeck's "Cannery Row". Braff appeared on stage...

Is that code for something? No. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. :blush2: For some reason, my message showed up twice and I removed one of them.

Okay, I'm a little reluctant to share this story, as there will no doubt be smartass, jejeune remarks, but... When it was revealed that Ms. Chambers had done porn as well as modelling, the Ivory Snow people promptly did a replacement of the package's photo image with a painted one. The commercial artist who painted the new image worked from photos. The models for the photo, posed just as the client wanted, was my then-wife, a busy model, and my still-daughter (now a beautiful 35 year old woman). The painter of course did slight representational changes so that Ivory Snow could never again be caught in the identification game. The fee was a flat 75 bucks or so, for about twenty minutes work, and anonymous fame... (Edited to remove double-posting).

Big confusion here. Cadence is the Rusch operation and Coda was originally operated by John Norris and Bill Smith. Their label is called Sackville. Back to the woodshed. Actually, Sackville is exclusively Norris' label, and has been for about a decade. Bill Smith still does the graphic work, but Norris owns the imprint. (He should get up to the late 20th Century and get online, but he chooses not to. Fax is the most up-to-date technology he has embraced.)

I can tell you that two great players, Don Thompson and Terry Clarke who played and recorded with her (Take Two, Concord CJ195), and who know guitarists -- Jim Hall, Ed Bickert, Lorne Lofsky, Reg Schwager and others, both thought she was terrific. I remember interviewing her, and she was quite nice: shy and restrained, though I'm told could be wild under the influence. She was married (well, you know...) to Monty Alexander, and I think their breakup was over her chemical activities. Here's a link to her last performance/recording that I know of...from Melbourne, Australia, just a week before her death in Sydney.

In that case, No, you may NOT meet my daughter.