John L

A great man in a and out of music. RIP

Yea, I like Small Talk as well. The instrumentation is quite interesting: 100% certified Sly. I like some of the songs too. Compared to what? Well, I personally enjoy it more than the first three albums.

Interesting.

Strange. Why would they bother to discontinue it if they have 1000s of copies lying around? I believe that there are Mosaic sets available that have been on the market longer than the Berigan.

It is a good sign that the Berigan is already selling out. It means that JSP didn't completely destroy Mosaic's market with their quick and blatant ripoff of the set. They didn't even bother to change the track selection or ordering, but just removed the alternate takes.

"Sit and Cry (and Sing the Blues)" on Artistic is a beauty, maybe my single favorite Buddy song. (Otis Rush plays the guitar break on this one.) I am puzzled as to why virtually nobody covers it. Maybe the stakes were just set too high.

I guess that it is a matter of taste. For my taste, Buddy Guy has a tendency to sometimes go a bit too over the top in his guitar playing. I find his work most enjoyable when he is loose, but still somewhat restrained and concentrating on putting across a blues song rather than dazzling an audience with fretboard gymnastics. I think that several of his Chess recordings are genuine masterpieces, and not just for the guitar playing.

Thanks, Late.

For Buddy Guy, I would start with the Chess recordings. There are some good one-disc best of collections floating around. There is also a complete 2-disc Chess collection, but it includes a lot of trite pop pieces along with the blues masterpieces. Then I would get "A Man and His Blues," as recommended above. For Gatemouth Brown, I would start with the early Peacock recordings. They are available in various forms on disc. Of his more recent work, I especially like "Gate Swings."

I have the Jazz Door Belgrade disc too. So can anybody confirm or refute the above conjecture that this is a different concert from Berlin?

It is amazing that they still refuse to release the 5/8/77 concert commerically. The soundboard is excellent. There is absolutely no reason not to do it. Of course, it shouldn't be called a "Dick's Pick," given the fact that Dick considered the concert too overrated for release (but at the same time proposed that the version of Morning Dew is the greatest of all time).

The McVootie collection is a lot of fun.

Thanks. I somehow missed that one. If only I could get search literate on Organissimo, I could spare you guys all this trouble. But the search function here has me a bit confused. I don't know about the controversy, but I like Super Blue.

I just bought a reissue of Freddie Hubbard's Super Blue on the Mosaic Contemporary label. Has there been a discussion before of Mosaic Contemporary (a new subdivision of Mosaic records) at Organissimo? There is no mention of it at the Mosaic website. There is a Mosaic Contemporary website address on the disc that doesn't yet exist. I wonder what else they are planning to reissue?

YES! The Moon is Rising is one of my absolute favorite pieces of blues on record. The rest of the album is superb as well. I don't believe that anyone has mentioned George Freeman's Birth Sign yet. So I will.

I met Andrew Hill in Paris on the day that Lester Bowie died. Hill had been at a vigil for Bowie the night before leaving for Paris, and I broke the news to him. I will never forget his reaction. He looked at me, and could see that I was upset. Then he very calmly shugged his shoulders and said, "that's life." RIP, Mr. Andrew Hill. That was some life.

I always really loved brousing through LP or CD stores. I enjoyed collecting them, but... ...I am all for technical progress. I just love being able to carry around a huge amount of music in my breast pocket. You can find more music on the internet now, including rare jazz and other music, than it was ever possible to find before. I no longer care about having an "object." I've gotten over it. I want the music, not the object.

I was at that concert. It was a complete fiasco, one of the worst that I have ever seen. Believe it or not, that was actually one of the better moments. The big band played their own harmonically complex (and usually rather stiff) arrangements of swing standards, and didn't try to accommodate Griffin at all. There was no rehersal. They gave him a whole thick stack of music to read on stage. But Griffin warned them that his eyesight isn't good enough to read, so he will just have to wing it. Ms. Tomayeva was, as you can hear, rather terrible. The worst moment came at the end. They finally settled into something simple that Griffin could blow on: a slow blues. Every member in the big band took a solo, but then they ended the song before Griffin could even blow a note. They just left him standing on the stage like an idiot. I had never seen anything like it before. Very disrespectful.

Thanks a million, Chas! This site is a tremendous resource!

Can anybody give me the discographical information (musicians) on Budd Johnson's French Cookin' and Off the Wall? Much appreciated.

I see that you have some good beer to sit corrected with. John

Who did Mingus not want to kill?

I've been enjoying very much the recent reissue of his "Everest Sessions."

Absolutely

My son worked in that Amoeba a year ago. He told me something extremely interesting that goes along with this article. Amoeba now apparently does most of its business through its policy of buying back used CDs at half price. You can imagine what people are using that for. It's cheaper than iTunes. My son said it was like a CD rental store. The same CDs kept going out and coming back in the next day.