Joe Bip

I really liked Muñoz and Sampayo's short graphic-novel biography of Billie Holiday. I believe it's out of print but can still be found cheaply. Very distinctively written and drawn -- not a straightforward cookie-cutter biography. R. Crumb did a great story, Jelly Roll Morton's Voodoo Curse, based on biographical material on Morton by Alan Lomax. There's also a book titled Cat on a Hot Thin Groove, which features classic illustrations and single-panel cartoons by Gene Deitch from Record Changer magazine, most of them about obsessive fandom rather than the music itself.

Sonny Stitt makes an appearance in that barometer of mass culture, Hi and Lois. How many people Chip's age know of Sonny? Pretty impressive for a character in a daily strip!

Yes, and Dolphy's absence surely counts even more heavily against it to many who would otherwise buy it. Fortunately it has sold well enough to keep it from getting deleted, so far, as many other OJCs have been.

I probably couldnt name three favorites, and if I did they'd probably not be surprising: Black Saint, Ah Um, and I'd have to think about the third one. I'd be happy to name what I think is one of the most underrated Mingus records, though: Right Now. Such lively, inspired performances of "Fables" and "Meditation for a Pair of Wire Cutters." Apart from a few typically raving Amazon reviews, I've never gotten the feeling that this record is really appreciated, and I can't really figure out why. I also think Epitaph is an important Mingus record, which probably doesn't get its due because Mingus doesn't perform on it and it was recorded after his death. If one takes him seriously as a composer, those shouldn't be deterrents. It's an important album.

I quit last month. I watched their selection gradually dwindle over a long period of time, and when they had a bunch of promotions in Nov. and Dec. I bought up almost everything left in my queue. What sealed the deal for me was when they started taking 3 weeks or more to ship items that had been at a steady spot in my queue for a while (and a replacement of a damaged item they said they had shipped 2-3 weeks before it actually did), and taking 2 weeks to reply to questions/complaints I sent Customer Service via their website. I'm glad I was a member, as I got a lot of good things -- mostly ECM and Blue Note discs -- for good prices. But I resisted the urge to stick around and keep buying discs I didn't feel any real urge to own.

I have the "Chronicle: Complete Prestige Recordings" and I'm pretty sure that contains everything (including the Coltrane sessions) all in one box. No reason to buy the seperate 4 CD Prestige Miles/Trane set or this new one as far as I can tell. None of the tracks on disc 4 of the Miles Legendary Quintet Sessions box were included on Chronicle. Also, the 4 CD set was newly remastered, but I haven't compared it with the old 1993 set. I got rid of the Chronicle set a long time ago and still have this stuff about two or three different ways.

I bought both box sets. I got the first one back in 1992 when I was first getting into jazz. I had even less money back then than I do now, and I considered the set an expensive lesson learned. Really frustrating to have to spend that much time skipping around to the finished tracks from the studio sessions. The packaging was attractive, and my only real complaint was that it was too hard to hold the book open to read it for any length of time because of the way it was bound. I've also never been a fan of storing CDs in hard-cardboard sleeves. If they fit tightly, you have to pinch the edges of the discs with your fingers to pull them out; and if they fit loosely they can just fall out (I think it was the former with this set). I bought the six-disc set to get all the studio masters in one place and hear how the remastering sounds. I've gotten much more enjoyment out of this metal box than the older set. Agree about the unsightly packaging, though. The disc art is funny: more appropriate to '90s techno than Lady Day. I made my own 2-CD set of the live recordings from the original box.

I don't know whether the existing footage still exists, but another question is who currently owns the DVD rights. The existing DVD was from New Yorker Films, which went out of business a year ago. However just a few days ago there was a press release saying they've been acquired by Aladdin Distribution and are going to be back in business as of next month. They seem to have retained the rights to the New Yorker back catalog, and if this still includes Jazz on a Summer's Day, then the question is whether they're going to be interested in going back and releasing improved special editions of things already released on DVD. The old New Yorker never really showed any interest in that kind of thing, and their DVD releases were in fact a slow trickle of things generally disappointing in picture quality etc. (Jazz on a Summer's Day was one of their better-looking releases, I thought.) Of course the newly formed enterprise could mean a break with the past, but I think we'll have to wait and see. If they no longer have the rights, this may bode well for some other company releasing a special edition. There's also the possibility that a company that releases jazz concerts on DVD could license just the extra footage, if it exists. Earlier thread: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=11306

No longer available. Thanks for looking

It looks like Jazz Loft is still taking preorders for it.

However, it looks like this set has four alternate takes missing on the Complete set (which I just recently bought for better or worse but haven't yet received): You Are My Lucky Star, I Could Write a Book, There Will Never Be Another You, and Yesterdays.All 4 of these are included in the RCA box (assuming the Yesterdays is the version with Coleman Hawkins). The box also has Don't Stop The Carnival and Jungoso. According to JSngry, Don't Stop the Carnival is on both. I know Jungoso is listed on the track listings for both. As for the "bonus tracks" (which I supposed were alternates) of "You Are my Lucky Star," "I Could Write a Book," and "There Will Never Be Another You" on Disc 2 of Original album classics. According to the track runtimes listed at Barnes and Noble they are all almost exactly the same length as the tracks on Disc 4, so I guess this confirms what JSngry said: they're not alternates and they just repeated the same takes. It seems like a pretty sloppy release but undeniably a good value.

However, it looks like this set has four alternate takes missing on the Complete set (which I just recently bought for better or worse but haven't yet received): You Are My Lucky Star, I Could Write a Book, There Will Never Be Another You, and Yesterdays. I also wonder if they remastered these again since 1997, but even if they did they're probably not too different. I have good vinyl pressings of a couple of these, as well.

Braxton seemed to have quite a favorable contract in terms of how much of his work Arista was releasing, but it seems a little unclear just how fully they financed and supported some of these recordings. I was recently reading that, referring to For Four Orchestras, executive producer Steve Backer had stated, "I can't think of another instance where a black musician, coming from the jazz tradition, has been allowed that kind of liberty, where that kind of money and that kind of energy have gone into a project with such limited commercial appeal." But Braxton himself said he had to front a lot of the money himself in order to do the project because Arista wouldn't take on the whole risk. "I spent so much money, and I owe so much that I came to Italy to escape my creditors and get as far away from them as possible" (Jazz on Record: A History). I haven't yet read the Mosaic booklet, so apologies if I'm duplicating anything said therein.

I'm not too familiar with the discographies of Stanley Clarke, Michael Brecker, or Return to Forever, and missed those. I almost guessed Return to Forever but I'd already filled in Chick Corea and couldn't believe that Return to Forever would also be included, especially with so many important artists missing. Clarke and Cobham also overlap with groups included. A more challenging and representative test might have included albums by Armstrong, George Lewis, etc. and a couple of free jazz pioneers of the generation after Ornette -- just my two cents.

Another heads-up: I got an email for another promotion in addition to the $5.99 special: buy two releases from the cart (as opposed to queue) and then get a free CD to redeem in January. I saw people on another forum talking about this as a buy 3 get 1 free promotion, but the email I received definitely said buy 2 get 1 free -- so perhaps it differs from one account to the next for some reason. Either way, worth looking into, especially because it can probably be combined with the $5.99 sale that's going on through 11/19. I'm probably going to use this opportunity to clear out my queue (probably leaving a few in there to last me until January when I can claim my free disc) and then quit. They need to improve their selection pretty drastically or I don't think they're going to make it. If anyone wants a good chuckle, browse their "classical" selection by looking at "artists a-z" (here) 95% of it is not classical. Joan Armatrading? Chuck Berry? Then when browsing "jazz" artists a-z you find pretty much the same artists. It's as though they're cross posting things in a ridiculous number of areas to cover up how meager the selection has gotten.

Thanks everyone for the replies. The Jazz Heritage release is a sort of nefarious-looking budget item from 1992 that I would guess does not have the best sound, but I was trying to investigate it because it was the cheapest option for me. Ultimately, quality won out in my decision and I decided to go with Storyville's "The Duke Box" from 2006, which includes the Fargo discs.

I've had the Book of the Month Club vinyl set for years and am looking at buying a more complete version on CD. The Storyville set is out of print, and it seems like the Definitive option is gone, too. So I'm looking at either the Jazz Heritage release (black and white cover) or the one on Jazz Classics (yellow cover with drawing of Duke and Webster). My main question is which has better sound. I'm looking to avoid the kind of poor noise-reduction that you often find with early live recordings like this one. If anyone has either compared these or simply knows if one or the other sounds bad, I'd appreciate the tip. The issue of completeness seems a bit frustrating because each set lists a few tracks not included on the other (unless these are just track listing errors), but the more important factor for me is how they sound.

It's worth mentioning that concurrent with Sun Ra - Continuation is a release of Bennink and Hazevoet's Calling Down the Flevo Spirit. About three years ago I learned from a reliable source I'll not bother to name that this would be one of the next UMS releases, and I'm glad to see it's finally going to become a reality. This was right around the time that the series went alarmingly from around 12 releases a year to 2 or 3, and almost all Sun Ra and Brotzmann. I'm not complaining about these Sun Ra and Brotzmann reissues per se; my point is that I started to worry even more that the series was having such a hard time that they were having to stick to the better selling artists (as opposed to, say, Starship Beer, I'd imagine). I wish there were enough support for them to up the flow again, but in any case it will be interesting to see what UMS brings us next year -- another volume of the Steve Lacy Cassette Archive perhaps?

$19.98? Ridiculous. Buy.com has it for $13.99. A little too soon to tell what DustyGroove's price will be. Edit: While I was posting on the subject of Sun Ra, I thought I'd mention info about the new releases from Norton but now I see jostber has already posted about them in the Sun Ra Corner.

Ivory Hunters was released again this year by Lonehill, although I haven't heard it. Seems like a good alternative to Blue Note's $17-SRP burned disc, assuming the sound isn't notably inferior.

Kind of interesting to note that this set is no longer showing up as "discontinued" at Amazon US, and they've raised the price to $55.98. No matter, mine is on the way from an Amazon UK marketplace seller. I've wanted to own this set for many years but I'm glad I held off for a great deal like this, as I've owned a lot of this material in three different forms already: the 3-disc Columbia Legacy set in the early '90s, then some of the best volumes of the Quintessential series, and most recently some of Hep's Teddy Wilson discs. I really need the whole shebang, though.

George Shearing Capital Live Recordings. Took me a long time to get around to hearing this -- Shearing just isn't too important to me. However, I've been pleasantly surprised a few times just on the first disc, such as the performance of Weston's "Little Niles" and the group interplay on Denzil Best's "Nothing But De Best." My only question is why Mosaic spread 4 1/2 hours of music across 5 discs. They could have put it onto four discs and still had quite a bit of room to spare. I've noticed this with a fairly good number of Mosaic's larger sets. I know that back in '94, when this came out, they might have been using discs that held 74 minutes maximum rather than 80, but even taking that into account it could have fit on 4 discs. I don't mean this as a criticism of Mosaic, whose efforts I greatly appreciate -- just something I've been curious about.

This is great news, and there won't be too much duplication for me. I've mostly been listening to Air albums like Air Song, Air Time, and Live Air, although I do have Air Lore on Vinyl. I just acquired Threadgill's Carry the Day and Where's Your Cup within the last couple of years, but I somehow managed to misplace the former CD, so I guess this set will remedy that. As for the 20-year span, it's a little unusual but nothing to get bent out of shape over. Mosaic is doing what they need to do to make some of this music more available, and I'm grateful for that. I know that such chronological jumps can be jarring on a single-disc compilation, but who would listen to a box set as big as this straight through? Just take into account the recording date of the material on each disc as you take it out to listen to it.

Is It Love or Desire is also out on 180g vinyl from Sundazed. I bought it as a gift for the significant other, so I won't be able to listen to it for a few more weeks. I'm told her sound on it is a bit different from the first two albums -- but still good.

I received the Wright CD from this series in the mail today and was surprised to find Frank's name spelled correctly on the spine and front sticker. I had been under the impression that the "Franck" typo was on the entire run of this. Because of this and the low price I found for a sealed copy, my first thought was that the label cheated on the "limited edition" and printed another batch, but if they had done that, one would assume they'd keep the web site active that's printed on the back (free-america.net). Also, I doubt sales for a Frank Wright CD would really be big enough to warrant going beyond the promised run of 5000.