John L

The sound is quite muffled and the solos are very short, but I think that it could be Mobley. What he plays on Off Minor is nothing much, but he gets off a fairly nice short solo on Well You Needn't. Monk's playing is also interesting on the latter. Like I said, however, this session is the last reason to get the disc.

I'm surprised that there isn't more excitement about this one. Maybe some of you already had this music. I didn't. The 1957 session with Thad Jones and the extended 1948 tracks are fabulous. The sound quality here is quite good, particularly on the Thad Jones session. I have always loved the combination of Monk and Thad, and it is great to have more. The 1948 material is both historic and exciting. The session with Steve Lacy is also a blast. The sound quality may leave something to be desired, but it is good enough to close your eyes and imagine what it would sound like in Hi Fi. Some tapes that many of us often listen to sound a lot worse. This is a unique and extremely interesting item. The Steve Allen show tracks, Mobley or no Mobley, are very minor items in this great collection.

Wow! Thanks, Brownie

John--you perform with drummers? Tom- Yea, I've been doing that a little for fun here in Moscow. Nothing serious, obviously. I am no excuse for a professional musician.

I agree with majority opinion here. I find it to be a good, but not great, album. But good is still pretty damn good.

I have been living in Moscow for the last few years, but didn't bother to change my profile. I'll be back in Washington some day, perhaps.

Virtually every drummer who I have had the honor of performing with here in Russia.

Damn fine singer? Maybe. But she never did anything for me. I have tried to listen to her. I have even heard her in concert. I remember her once singing "Ain't Nobody's Business if I do," which struck me as one of most shallow and antiseptic takes on the blues that I have ever heard. But I guess that taste is taste.

Being at the Cow Palace for New Years in 1976 was special for my Christmas season.

In order to get your MP3 files in iTunes in really good order, there is one rather tedious operation that needs to be done. iTunes creates individual folders for artists and a single folder that holds all "compilations." The idea is that a compilation is a CD with multiple artists (as opposed to a collected works CD of a single artist.) But this is all muddled in the CDDB database. Sometimes it almost seems as if "compliation" is attached to CDs on a random basis in the CDDB. If you rip a CD of a single artist and CDDB labels it a compilation, iTunes won't file it in the artist folder, but in the compilations folder with no artist designation. Similarly, if you rip a multiple artist compilation that is not designated a compilation in CDDB, iTunes will scatter the MP3s into multiple artist folders, as opposed to creating a single folder for the album. Therefore, I look at all my new iTunes folders and then make corrections to the "compilation" designation through iTunes editing (get info function). An even easier option is to check, and change if necessary, the designation before you rip.

Ripping alternatives to lossless sounds smart. Then CDs really do begin to become almost obsolete. My collection is large enough that I will need to wait for the next generation capacity equipment for that.

I don't know, Tom. That is not something that I have ever tried. I keep my iTunes folder in my 500GB hard drive (As you probably know, you can choose where you want your iTunes folder in "preferences: advanced." There you can also choose an option to have iTunes either draw on files from multiple sources, or have iTunes make an automatic copy of everything that you load to the (active) iTunes folder. I just keep everything in one place. So I don't need to have files in multiple sources. I back up my iTunes MP3s on another 500GB hard drive. That is not an extremely cheap option, but I already have over 300GB ripped or downloaded that I don't want to lose. Here is something interesting that I discovered: If you make an external hard drive your default iTunes drive and don't hook it up to your computer when you boot, the computer will default to the computer's hard drive as a new temporary iTunes default. So I take more portable computer, rip files in the States, and then bring them back to Russia on my computer's hard drive. I then move the MP3s to my hard drive and iTunes autonomatically recognizes their new home. John

I would also highly recommend the choosing the "organize my music" option in the iTunes preferences. What this does is the following: When you decide on how you want to organize your music through the editing options in iTunes, iTunes will automatically organize your MP3 folders (in the iTunes directory folder) around the same principles and with the same new labels. This has a lot of advantages. You can find your MP3 files quickly if needed. If your iTunes program or computer hard drive crashes and you have your MP3 files backed up (as you should), you can restore your whole iTunes libraary in a matter of minutes on another computer, or with another downloaded iTunes program.

Actually, here is something that I wrote a while back on another Francis Davis thread here when the book was fresher in my mind. It seems that my concern then was mostly with a lot of simple factual errors that should have been caught by a good blues editor. "I read Francis Davis' blues history book not long ago. It bears out Clem's complaints about factual errors, which taint what is otherwise an interesting text, at least in parts. Some of the errors are so simple that any editors with some blues knowledge should have caught them. For example, Davis writes that Tommy Johnson was a part of Lester Melrose's Bluebird stable in the 1930s, and that Earl Hooker was one of many "musical children" of Muddy Waters that came out of his bands. Not even close. He comes a bit closer when he tries to make the case that Robert Johnson based "Love in Vain" on Leroy Carr's "How Long, How Long Blues." But still no cigar. Musically, the song clearly comes from Carr's "In the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down)."

Allen: There is an ocean that separates me from the book right now. There is also a few years of time since I read it that separates me as well. When I get back to the States in December, I will take a look. John

Yes. The reason that I read the book was that I often find Francis Davis interesting and insightful. But I agree with Chris. I didn't like this one. On the subject of white ignorance of the blues, I recall that Francis Davis was generalizing in both directions. He broke down white fans into ignorant frat boy types and equally ignorant "serious" white blues listeners.

You are my hero I've been following my music cyberguru Lon around music BBSs now for at least 10 years.

Good to see all of this love for Stanley Turrentine here. Count me in the fan club.

That's encouraging, Lon! I wish Helen and yourself all the best. John

The Zephyr site uses a 256 bit rate, which minimizes losses, even though it makes the files somewhat large. Lon: why do you do all of that converting? Why not just load the 256 bit MP3s directly into iTunes and your iPod? They sound good in mine.

I read it a long time ago. I don't remember everything about it, but I remember that I wasn't too pleased. One thing that stands out in my mind is Francis Davis preaching from his high horse about how white fans like blues for all the wrong reasons and just don't understand the music. I guess that he is unique in that regard.

I already had a problem of music overload before I started downloading the Dead recently. How do you guys find the time to listen to 3000 3-hour shows?

I also remember a New Years Eve show at the Cow Palace. Santana led off. It was probably 76 or 77. I can't recall the quality of the show very well. I was REALLY smashed.

Thanks, Lon. I think that I have it figured out now.

That Zephyr site looks impressive. I tried downloading a few shows, but there is something about their MP3 format that causes my computer to have fits. It takes it more than a minute just to copy a 10,000 kb MP3 file from one directory to another. I haven't tried loading them into iTunes yet, but I am afraid that there might be an explosion or two.