jeffcrom

It's good. I don't know if this will make any sense, but I've always thought that Michael Smith's playing provided Lacy with the most most sympathetic and fitting piano accompaniment he ever had. That's not the same thing as saying that Smith was the best pianist to play with Lacy - he certainly wasn't, from a jazz standpoint. But his accompaniments seemed totally locked into Lacy's vision.

New York Art Quartet - Mohawk (Japanese Fontana) Cecil Taylor - Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! (Pausa)

I bought one for a friend in a Target store near my house.

Sidney Bechet - Superb Sidney (French CBS)

When my first wife and I split up about 17 years ago, I dove heavily into two kinds of strong, emotional music - opera and the blues. They both spoke to me in a way they never had before. When my life got back more on keel, the appeal of opera lessened somewhat. I think think that the moment that made me think, "Okay, this is kind of silly," was when I started dating my second (and last) wife. Don Giovanni was playing in Atlanta, and I told her, "Opera is incredible, and this is my favorite opera - we've got to go see it." So we did, and I sat there thinking, "Oh, right - Mozart felt that he had to say everything at least three times before moving on." But if don't love opera like I did, I still enjoy it. The last performance I attended was about six months ago - John Adams' A Flowering Tree, performed with simple, minimal staging. It was pretty great.

Gene Ammons - The Twister (Prestige mono). With the cover shown above (there was at least one other cover), but not the record - mine is the blue-and-silver label. Whatever - the music is really making me feel good.

Same here, although I'm planning on giving BFT 108 a first spin this evening.

I've picked up some particularly nice early jazz 78s recently: Original Dixieland Jass Band - Darktown Strutters' Ball/Indiana (Columbia, 1917). An early pressing, judging by the spelling of the band's name. I don't have this take of "Indiana" on LP or CD - not sure if that really matters with this band. New Orleans Rhythm Kings - Mr. Jelly Lord/Clarinet Marmalade (Gennett, 1923). From the session with Jelly Roll Morton. I got this fairly cheaply, I think because there's a chip in the rim - which luckily doesn't make it to the first groove, so who cares? Chubb-Steinberg Orchestra - Because They All Love You/Willie Creager and His Orchestra - Show Me the Way (Gennett, 1925.) Worthwhile mostly for Wild Bill Davison's hot cornet with the Chubb-Steinberg band - this was one of his earliest recordings. The Arkansas Travelers - That's No Bargain/The Emperors - Go Joe Go (Harmony, 1927). The Arkansas Travelers were Red Nichols' Five Pennies, more or less; The Emperors were a large band led by Phil Napoleon. Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers - Black Bottom Stomp/The Chant (Victor, 1926). More surface noise, but also a more vibrant sound than either of my CD reissues of these sides.

The Who's Crazy soundtrack. I have it on an Affinity double LP, but it has appeared in other forms.

Ralph Burns - Jazz Studio 5 (Decca). Carefully manufactured out of the finest injection-molded plastic.

I've got all the released stuff by Circle, including the Japanese albums - and a little bit of other nice stuff as well. The two Japanese albums are very good - one is a concert recording of pieces that were also included in the ECM Paris Concert album (from a different concert, of course), and the other is a studio recording of a long improvised piece. I pretty much love everything by Chick up to the time Circle disbanded. Although I like some of his music after that (and I like some of it a lot), I don't entirely "trust" him after that, if that makes any sense. What I mean is - with most musicians, I have a sense of who they are, musically, and can gauge their level of "commitment" to their vision of what music should be. With Corea, I've got no idea who he really is, and what he thinks music should be. Of course, that might just be my hangup. Mr. Corea, or anybody else, certainly doesn't have to conform to my ideas.

Brothers and Other Mothers & Brothers and Other Mothers, Vol. 2 (Savoy). Side four of the former and side two of the latter - in other words, all of Allen Eager's Savoy recordings.

That's pretty funny. It's a really stupid idea, but I'd buy that album.

Be warned - great music, bootleg quality recording. It was mastered from a mono audience cassette recording.

As far as I can tell, there are only three recordings of Ellington doing "Trees," all live recordings from the end of 1948. And since I just listened to the first one, from the November, 1948 Carnegie Hall concert: "Trees" is a very bad song by Oscar Rasbach, based on the inane Joyce Kilmer poem. But in Ellington's version, it's sung by Al Hibbler. And Al Hibbler is cool. I'd rather hear him sing "My Little Brown Book" or "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," but I'm willing to listen to Al Hibbler sing "Trees." Or the phone book.

The man's sound was so big that it took those bigass grooves to properly capture all of it. This evening, in tribute to the small part of my ancestry which is Irish, I spun some Irish records for St. Patrick's Day: Patrick Scanlon (accordion) - Keel Row & Money Musk/Father O'Flynn & Haste to the Wedding (Columbia, 1917; 1919/20 pressing) John Taylor (fiddle) - Devil's Dream Reel/Speed the Plow Reel (Victor, 1921) James McCool - The Low Back'd Car (Victor one-sided, 1905). This song was quite a hit for Victor, and it remained in print for many years. I have a collection of old record catalogs from the 78 era, and "Low Back'd Car" is still listed in my 1925 Victor catalog. Mine is the orignal pressing, but the later pressings certainly must have sounded better, due to improvements in the material used to press records. Peter Conlon (accordion) - Keel Row/Rose in the Garden (Columbia, 1917; 1926 pressing) "Tom Shannon" - That Tumble Down Shack in Athlone/"James McBride" - Molly Brannagan (National Music Lovers, 1919-21). The budget NML label almost always used pseudonyms for the recordings they leased from other labels; in this case, they used two different pseudonyms for the same singer, Charles Harrison. The Four Provinces Orchestra - The Fairy Reel & Sheehan's Reel/The Seven Step & Shoe the Donkey (Victor, 1926) The Four Provinces Orchestra - The Drummer Boy/Fish and Chips (Columbia, 1929). One source describes the Four Provinces Orchestra as "the first of many great Philadelphia Irish dancehall bands." The lyrics to "Fish and Chips" are pretty interesting, promoting both "jazz from Americay" and Sinn Fein. I also have a 1922 78 on the Canadian Starr Gennett label of the Starr Gennett Military Band playing "Orange" marches and anthems. Don't think I'll play that one today....

I bought a copy of that for two dollars back around 1980. I hated the saxophone playing so much that I sold it. I wish I had kept it for the collectors' value alone - it's so rare that it fetches some impressive prices.

My comments are based on late-night listening to a Canadian HMV/Victor 78 which I got in Vancouver a couple of years ago. It came in a sleeve from Thompson & Page, "The Store That Service Built." The young man at the record store was surprised that I had never heard of that Vancouver department store, even though I live 1800 miles away. This "Clementine" is not the American folk song or the pop song recorded by the Jean Goldkette band with Bix Beiderbecke; it's a bouncy little Billy Strayhorn number. To me, except for the nice Rex Stewart solo, it's mostly about Ellington's reed sonorities. After Ellington's piano introduction, the riffy melody is stated by, what - one clarinet and four saxophones, or two clarinets and three saxophones? I'm not sure, but I lean toward the latter; when unison saxes play the bridge, I don't hear Harry Carney's sound - I think it's Hardwick, Hodges, and Webster, with Bigard and Carney holding their clarinets, ready to come in again once the bridge is over. I can't be sure, but you can seldom be sure with Ellington or Strayhorn. Johnny Hodges gets most of the second chorus (more wonderful reed sound!); his solo is based on a new chord progression, not that of the first chorus. It's a variation on something that hasn't happened yet, and doesn't happen during this piece. The contrast works, though. Stewart gets the third chorus, which is based on the opening theme. Then the reeds, in whatever combination they're really in, reprise the first sixteen measures of the first chorus. This is why I love the "Ellington-a-thon" - I had never listened to "Clementine" so carefully before, and there's more there than I had noticed before. It's not one of Strayhorn's masterpieces, but it still presents a lot to consider and enjoy.

I just read through the last few pages of this thread, and saw that "The Tattooed Bride" was included in Ellington-a-thon 11, and I talked about it there, too. Oh, well - I liked it then, and still like it.

Lee Collins - A Night at the Victory Club (New Orleans). Parts of two nights in 1951, actually - one side is with a little "Dixieland" band, but the other side is with a four-piece band (trumpet, tenor, piano, drums) that's probably the kind of band Collins usually played with in Chicago.

Yep. Same for mp3s - they all have their place. And for some of us weirdos, 78s are important, too, in terms of getting close to the original sound. Regarding Anderson's comments, I will say that a band I play with recently issued an album on CD and LP, and we had a hell of a time getting a decent-sounding LP out of the pressing plant. We went through five test pressings before getting something close to what we wanted. I think we chose poorly in terms of picking a company to press the records.

Well, well - I was searching for something else last night, and came across my old friend. I somehow missed this last post by Bev. I can see how this thread might come and go at various times, but I hope it never dies. I just listened to the studio recording of "The Tattooed Bride," from the Masterpieces by Ellington album a couple of days ago. That's the definitive version, but Ellington must have known that he had come up with something pretty good - after the piece was debuted at Carnegie Hal in November, 1948, he played it frequently in concerts over the next few years. Without actually looking, I think I have four live recordings of "The Tattooed Bride" from the late 1940s and early 1950s in my Ellington collection. In my opinion, this is one of Ellington's very best longer pieces. The length is perfect - around twelve minutes - and it's beautifully constructed. Unlike some of Ellington's more episodic extended works (like Black, Brown and Beige), you couldn't take anything out of "The Tattooed Bride" without destroying it. Almost all the material is based on a little four-note motive, but not in a forced or mechanical way - it all flows naturally, tempo changes and all. Jimmy Hamilton (on clarinet) is the only soloist, and his style fits the piece as well as the piece fits his style. (That statement may seem silly, but sometimes there's an uncomfortable tension between soloist and material on Ellington tunes when Hamilton is featured - think "Happy-Go-Lucky Local.") "Tattooed Bride" is supposedly programmatic - the story of a young man who only discovers that his bride is tattooed on their wedding night. That's kind of amusing, but I wonder at what point in the compositional process Ellington came up with the story. In any case, it's not really essential, or even important, for the enjoyment of one of Ellington's very best compositions.

Reuben Wilson Reuben James Peter Paul Rubens

Yeah, that's a good one.

Don Ewell - Trio and Quartet (Center)