doneth

I'm disappointed at Naxos's rising prices, but let's face it, the CD market is collapsing. One used to grab a handful of Naxos CDs like candy bars because they were so cheap, but fewer people were doing that (they want their music online or free), so Naxos had to raise their prices, so I can no longer afford to buy 'em by the handful. Until about ten years ago a Borders store in West Des Moines had a huge selection of Naxos CDs; Borders is gone and Barnes & Noble treats music like greeting cards...or candy bars...

German Archiphon issued just the quartets in 1992 in a 2-CD set, then I bought the M&A set, I think on Chuck's recommendation. The earlier transfers of these very unusual recordings are brighter but also a bit shrill, and noisier. I prefer the M&A, as warmer and more listenable and of course as Chuck says the box contains many more goodies. Nowadays the transfers could be improved but we are lucky to have them at all.

Martha Glaser died on 2 December 2014 aged 93. She was indeed the toughest of gatekeepers!

A dear old friend of mine, who now plays cello in the Montreal Symphony, wanted to go the college in Bloomington in the early 1970s and was being interviewed by a committee; she had been playing for years at that point, and the panel was badgering her about her academic record. Starker finally growled, "Oh, leave the girl alone; she's smart enough."

I've published several books and I've kept all the reviews. There aren't many bad ones but they are the ones that make me laugh: in every case the reviewer has an agenda which makes no sense to anyone but him. Don't forget that Ted Brown likes All Music!

Two points to be made: because of the collapse of the record biz, there is a new emphasis on playing music for a living, with selling a few recordings as a side benefit. That's why a lot of pop and rock bands give away a new single on their websites; we may be getting back to the music business as it was before the baby boomers started buying albums by the millions. And the other thing is the single itself: fans are able to buy the track they want for 99 cents instead of an overpriced, over-produced album, just as I used to buy 78s for 89 cents when I was a kid. These are changes, as someone said, not the end of the world, and they may be changes we should welcome. Donald Clarke

More and more of us don't. I don't even like the cellphone, but can no longer do without it, and there's no point in having both.

A track called 'Makin' Time' is one of my favorites, recorded in 1954 and should have been reissued on the "Interchange 54" CD; it is in the same groove as "Audrey". But apparently it's lost in the vaults because it was only ever issued on the sampler "I Like Jazz" and nobody but me knows it exists (boo hoo, sniff). Desmond is sensational on it IMO.

Best news I've heard today!

I read this and enjoyed it. It's very thorough and told me a lot I didn't know about Rachmaninoff. I agree that the price is ridiculous.

According to AMG he was born in 1921, so he was either 88 or 89. Chuck, Any chance the LP will be reissued on CD? I was planning a late fall issue but it feels a little creepy now. I will see how I feel about it later. Don't postpone it, Chuck. I remember you telling me about Eddie Johnson, and now I've been listening to the Beautiful Indian Summer LP for many years, which we wouldn't have if you hadn't done it. The sooner you reissue it the more people can hear it.

I've often thought that one had to be very lucky to have been born white, male, American, and before Pearl Harbor: too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, I've been surfing all my life on the tidal wave of prosperity thrown up by the baby boom. I've never really had to worry about anything. And now that I'm a 'senior' with no pension and a reduced Social Security as a result of having been a grasshopper all my life, I've got a wonderful wife who has a terrific job. I must be the winner of winners!

Sue who? In Serbia? I should try to hire a lawyer in a country that is still hiding Ratko Mladic?

I'm reading it and I'm enjoying it. It's a very good popular bio so far, not the be-all and end-all that Kelley's book on Monk is, but Teachout does his research and writes well. He follows Gary Giddins' (much shorter) book in emphasizing what a good man, what a great American, Armstrong was.

When I started this thread I had forgotten my best publishing story of all. I sold the Serbian language rights to my biography of Billie Holiday to Narodnaknjiga in Belgrade for $1,000. The contract (dated 'this 26th day of 2006') says that the money was to be paid 'on execution of this agreement'. They have published a book, ISBN 86-331-2068-2, a copy provided to me by a member of Organissimo, and the translation copyrighted 2005 (?) but have never paid me a dime. RIPPED OFF (boo hoo)

Two unrelated observations: 1) On one of her earlier albums she rescued 'Garden in the Rain', which I thought was a lovely song and sounded vaguely familiar, driving me nuts until I remembered it was a nasty hit over 50 years ago by the Four Aces, who I disliked intensely; and 2) On Elvis Costello's new CD he sounds like a dying cow moaning through its nose.

My pal cornettist Gerry Salisbury had a day job in a studio, and played on a Van Der Graaf Generator album; he was amused to have kids asking for his autograph.

Chris is a pal of mine, and I hope to heaven he is not 'late'! He edited some novels by Jeffery Archer, who makes a lot of money spinning stories but is a terrible writer, and will not allow anything to be changed, including nonsensical errors of chronology, like having a character 28 years old and 34 two pages later.

If you get her phone number, pass it around. If she's not a copy editor.

Since we have so many writers on the list, and since publishers' editors are thin on the ground these days, I thought it might be fun to have some specific horror stories about copy editors and proofreaders. When I had contracts with Penguin in London, and the sainted Jon Riley was my editor (he is now on the Board of Directors at Faber & Faber), David Duguid was the copy-editor on the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, and he was magnificent, making queries on almost every page and helping to improve the book in a thousand places. He had retired, and after a while stopped taking freelance jobs from Penguin: 'It's only a little job,' they would say, and he replied, 'You always tell me it's only a little job!' If you take it seriously, it is never a little job. Then when I was publishing The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music, they sent it out to a freelance they trusted who didn't know anything about music, and (it turned out) was having a nervous breakdown at the time. This was a disaster. This person rewrote sentences to say exactly the opposite of what I had written. I wish I could remember some specific examples, but the funniest thing was that everywhere I had written 'record', it was changed to 'recording', as though we buy recordings in recording shops, have recording collections, and keep them on the recording shelves. I practically had to rewrite the whole damn book, and to this day I wonder if any of the nonsense slipped through. When I was dealing with the transcriptions of Linda Keuhl's marvelous interviews for my book about Billie Holiday, a lot of names were spelled wrong and so on; Linda (or whoever was transcribing the tape-recorded interviews) had obviously never heard of some of these people, but all the info was there, and it was a kind of fun detective work. 'Wallace Stein' stumped me until I realized it was industry executive Ted Wallerstein. Some of you others must have stories to tell!

I am disgracefully bad at remembering where I got stuff. I got that poster either from Joel Lazar, who was Horenstein's assistant during the last few years of his life, or from Mischa Horenstein, a nephew.

Yes, and he actually had a record shop I think, and started selling records through the mail, and then started the Dot label and discovered Pat Boone. I used to listen to Randy Blake's Suppertime Frolic, where I first heard Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and the only place I ever heard the Chuck Wagon Gang. The only thing I've been able to find out about Randy Blake is that he used to broadcast on Border radio, that Mexican 100,000 watt station, and sold boxes of baby chicks over the air. Could I have been listening to that Mexican station in Wisconsin in the mid-1950s? I suppose so...

So what do y'all think of the Xmas album?

I didn't buy the Grammy-winning Columbia Holiday set several years ago because I couldn't afford it, I already had almost all those tracks, and I hated the packaging. Now I received my ten-CD set from Amazon.co.uk today. It cost $33.41 including postage. The booklet is complete. The transfers are a little harsh, but at least I can hear everything. One of my favorite tracks was always 'I'll Never Be The Same', and sometimes I'd be listening to it and I'd think 'Geez, maybe it's too slow', but now that I can hear Jo Jones's brushes clearly, of course it's perfect. Now if only they'd do something similar with the big RCA Ellington box...

Thenk yew, thenk yew, don't applaud, just throw money. The sad thing is that the supply of Horenstein airchecks is slowing up. I haven't been able to add anything for more than a year.