John L

By conincidence, I was listening to a lot of Art Pepper today, including the recently released Croydon Concert. That one is really incredible, even in the context of the rather large volume of other live recordings from this period.

No duplication. I just picked up these Uptown Bird and Diz releases. Fantastic! Uptown has done it again. Bird is in great shape on this high fidelity broadcast from the time of the recording ban in the Spring of 1948. Diz at the Spotlight is in much better fidelity than previous releases that I have heard. wonderful recording (just heard it after my holidays for the first time a few minutes ago) but incomplete parts of five tracks are in fact on the philology bird´s eyes vol. 17. but here we have the complete tunes and in better sound quality. and to all the hardcore charlie parker addicts, please correct your discograpies: the track 5 "ornithology" is well known as from c. march/april 1946 with the nat king cole trio from los angeles. the piano solo is edited on all issues. it is issued on phoenix lp 17 and spotlite 123 "yardbird in lotusland". on cd on the french media7 masters of jazz 121 and on philology bird´s eyes vol. 18. now we know it is from the washington concert. and complete!! yes, uptown has done it again!! keep boppin´ marcel Marcel: I am very sorry for misleading you over Bird's Eyes 17. I thought that your comment was in reference to the 1947 Bands for Bonds recordings, and had completely forgotten that Bird's Eyes 17 also includes snipits from 1948 at the end. As you write, however, they cannot compare with what we have now. Also, thanks for pointing out that this Ornithology is the same one that had earlier been identified as being from 1946. I hadn't noticed that.

Too bad it's not Big John Patton... The Charley Patton box is tremendous, some of the greatest blues ever recorded.

While glancing through Eddie Costa's discography, I was struck by the fact that he seemed to have had progressively fewer studio recording opportunities, either as a leader or featured sideman in a small group context, during the last 4 years of his life. You would think that the spectacular work and recordings that he made in 1956-57 would have really launched his career, especially given that 1958-1962 were still prime years for the popularity of jazz. It appears that, on the contrary, his star fell during this time. Is there a story here?

Next year will also be 50 years since Lester walked the earth. Pres is forever young. His music just keeps getting stronger and stronger. The two greatest things in life are love and Pres.

Wow, you have a great memory. Yes, that was indeed the cover of the 45 version of Blues Pour Flirter, which, for some very strange reason, was actually not included on the Jazz in Paris release of Blues Pour Flirter. An alternate take is on the Saxophones Saint Germain disc.

The Jazz in Paris series reissues recordings that Criss intially made for Blue Star records: VERY strong stuff, Criss at his best. Fresh Sound indeed reissued it a while back on vinyl with the original cover

Sounds good in theory, is good in a lot of ways, but again i gotta ask - how wrong is this guy: http://the78rpmblog.blogspot.com/ Noted. Since this guy is working in Europe with public domain material, there is nothing illegal at all. The degree to which making available out-of-print material for free download is "wrong" is indeed debatable.

I see the distinction here not as CDR versus download, (1) but the desire to make out-of-print music produced and owned by somebody else either available for free distribution or for profit, and (2) the deliberate deception in hiding the fact that the music is a private copy. Somebody who puts the music up on a blog for free download is also in the wrong. Charging in addition $50 for it is much more wrong. Advertising it as a CD box set as if it were legit commerical CDs and not CDRs is much much more wrong.

That's what I guessed. Though the initial recording of tracks is done manually (I have to press a button to tell the recorder to start a new track) so the timing of each track will be slightly out of synch. But I image it goes for a 'best fit'. The only other thing I could think of was if it recognised the contours of each track in a graph format - peaks and troughs, like you see on a monitor. mjzee is correct. CDDB recognizes an album by number of tracks and the length of each track. I doubt that there are any other tricks. Usually, the process that you describe (analog-digital) would create fairly significant discrepancies in the track times that would prevent CDDB from identifying the album. This time, purely by chance, it must have come out extremely close.

Well, your can make yourself a copy of disc C before you get your money back and buy the rest of the box from Chuck. It looks like all of the CD offerings from Saturn are CDR bootlegs.

Yes, "Jug" is a great album, one of my favorites too. On that album, Ammons also plays some gorgeous blues on "Seed Shack" and "Miss Lucy."

RIP Another typical poor obiturary for an American music giant, as if his major accomplishments were "Laying the groundwork for disco" and "the voice of Chef." Yea, right.

I would never mistaken o Day for Night.

When you can play the blues like Cannonball, how much harmonic complexity do you really need? I can enjoy Cannonball's playing throughout his career, but I certainly don't give second tier status to the Savoys. In fact, if I could only have one Cannonball set, it might be "Presenting Cannonball."

You mean she didn't spend the night?

Yes, the Fresh Sound releases have a whole different feel about them than the Lonehill-Gambit group. The programming, packaging, and liner notes are intelligent.

I just heard the Giants of Jazz release. Very nice! Eldridge blows up a storm (surprise, surprise). Monk plays also plays very well for the time, and I love hearing him "mess up" standards that were not a part of his regular repertoire. Of the Giants of Jazz releases that I have heard, this is probably my favorite.

I would change "doomed to fail" here to "doomed to be highly imperfect." Success has to be measured in a relative sense. As I argued earlier, the dilemma is that the complete absence of copyright legislation is not an optimal solution to the problem. So we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. All we can do is try to do our best. And, yes, the fact that it will inevitably be heavy-handed means that we should be careful about applying it too liberally.

I still say that it is far from that simple, Jim. Create what you want out of existing music, but if you decide to market it as your own, you better be ready (if necessary) to defend in court the value that you have added to it. Copyright laws are highly imperfect, of course, and there are tradeoffs in whatever is chosen. I have worked in a few countries that had nonfunctional copyright laws. Yes, one could argue that a large part of the population of those countries was better off without them. But I seriously doubt that this would have been true if there were not a steady flow of creation coming from countries with functional copyright laws that can be stolen in this context. The extreme point of no copyright laws is not good for creation. On the contrary, people will become reluctant to create (especially with their minds) if they suspect that anything of value that they generate will be stolen right away.

If one man fucks another man's wife and a child is conceived from the union and grows up to be a successful human being, that makes it both, and then some, no? People with a weak stomach for ambiguity better just...stay inside for the next few decades. No worry. We spend a good share of our money of lawyers to protect us from ambiguity every day.

The point is well taken, but the issue is still a complex one. The problem is that, in addition to people wanting to fulfill genuine individual creative urges, there are even more sharks out there thinking only about money, and who would prefer making money using other peoples' shit if they can get away with it. The solution is not an easy one, but there is no avoiding tough decisions about what constitutes creation and what constitutes theft.

I am really enjoying the new budget 4-disc set GTM (2006) on Important Records. The Iridium might have been a grander concept, but I much prefer the GTM music in this kind of standard quartet format with Braxton as the only reed player. This is like a more fully realized verion of the excellent Delmark album (Four Compositions (GTM) 2000). The liner notes by Braxton are classic material. There are times when I think that he really is just jiving in the sense of making the text too dense and complex for anybody to understand. I particularly like his initial explanation and definition of GTM: "The idea for GTM came about as a way to establish an "orbit" quandrant area universe schema that "gravitationally" affects neighboring "event-stream" sonic events in a multi-layer three dimensional imaginary universe of activities (and target materials)..."

Yes, and to this list we can add his strong Russian imperialist views toward Ukraine and Kazakhstan. (although Reganite is quite an exaggeration) On the other hand, all of this should be weighed against the courageous stand that he took for many years in the Soviet Union in the name of civil liberties. His literary accomplishments also go far beyond "One Day..." True, the Gulag trilogy is as more documentary history than literature, but it was a very important history, the only such extensive history produced on this subject for a long time. I have mixed feelings about him as well, but I generally admire him quite a bit, nevertheless.

Thanks for passingt along that interesting commentary, Nate. I agree with David Sherr in that I don't consider Sonny Dream to be one of Criss' greatest. It is a fascinating CD, if not altogether successful. Horace Tapscott gives a very interesting account of this session in his autobiography. Tapscott writes that he assumed the deal included his LA band, which had rehearsed all of the material. He brought his band to the studio, but was then told that he could only conduct the other band that they had assembled for the recording. They wouldn't even let Tapscott play the piano. Tapscott's first inclination was to walk out together with the band, but he stayed on since he really needed the money. He felt very disappointed by the recording done by a band not familiar with his music.