Hot Ptah

Alex, I am glad that you enjoyed playing my BFT. You are correct about James P.--what a great cut.

Durium, You have given us a very enjoyable BFT. I am humbled by my inability to even guess at the musicians, even after your clues. I will look forward to your Reveal, which will give me a new shopping list. Compared to some members here, I am just not good at identifying BFT selections. But I found your BFT to be very memorable, and I thank you for putting it together for us.

I received the Woody Herman Mosaic from my mother.

I will take a CD. PM sent with mailing information.

Chuck, I have sent a PM for a last minute Christmas gift order.

This is like the time when we moved into a new office in a new building and the first day we walked in and it was all really different and we all looked at each other and said, "this is nicer than what we had before."

Happy Birthday!

I buy both CDs and vinyl, whatever is in front of me with music on it that I want to hear. Used vinyl can be very inexpensive these days.

I like Dexter Gordon's "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas".

It's a matter of taste. The original LP is one of my favorite albums of all time. When I heard the expanded album, I found it interesting, but thought that the energy of the original LP had been dissipated. The original LP is tight, exciting, to the point, without a wasted note. The expanded LP has exactly the same ensemble parts and solos, but more added all over the place. Just when you are used to the music going to a certain place, it does not go there. It doodles or fiddles around instead with a longer solo or another musician's solo, which is often not as powerful as what had been included in the original LP. So that is certainly interesting from a certain standpoint, but it is not as good an album, to my taste. For a rock album example--I think that Duane Allman's solos on "One Way Out" on "Eat A Peach", and "Statesboro Blues" on "Live At Fillmore", are just the right length, tight and powerful. What if an expanded version came out, where he doodled around for several minutes to no great effect, at the end of the solos which are so familiar to us. And then what if the full band came in with passages which were new to us, but not that great, before the original recordings resumed. That would all be intriguing to a fan of the group, but not as good.

Richard Davis said something to our jazz history class, "it's easy to sit on a couch, years later, and criticize someone who was out really doing something at a time when it wasn't easy to do it." He was talking about Louis Armstrong's live performances and the negative comments people made about them years later. I think this could apply to Pablo Records though. In the 1970s, who else was going to release albums by these artists regularly? It was not the most lucrative business idea in the 1970s, by a long shot. Granz could have done it better, but he did it.

Willie Pickens--Jazz Christmas For me, many Christmas albums have one or more cuts that make you cringe when they come on. So if the album is listenable all the way through, that is better than most Christmas albums. For consistently nice background listening, with some interest if you are really listening:

For what is it worth, I talked to Johnny Griffin in a bar for about two hours in the spring of 1980, while he was being interviewed by a friend, and he told us about how he was visiting Monk in those days, and how Monk was dying. He became quite emotional as he told us. He had only great things to say about Monk.

Is #8 by Steve Hobbs, from his "Escape" album?

Actually, Drab Zeen was a gift from a friend -- who probably saw the mention in the Star. Shidler, OK, is a strange, haunted place. Just driving through, you get the sense that it must have been a real hub of activity decades ago. There were some huge oil fields nearby, but the boom is long past. I had no idea there was a dance hall. I imagine it's ruins now, like much of the town. The surrounding countryside, like much of Oklahoma's Osage County, is stunningly beautiful. A little research suggests that Big Beaver is a nearby creek or river. There's a Little Beaver creek too. And apparently there was a Big Beaver School. Oh, the mockery its students must have endured! That is more, and better, information than I have ever read about the origins of the song title, "Big Beaver." I know a Wills fan who will be very interested in your first hand information about Shilder. Apparently none of Wills' biographers actually visited the city to learn more about the song title, "Big Beaver."

The very best part of that album is that you can hear the band talking amongst themselves. At one point, one of the saxists asks another one if they can borrow a reed. Imagine that! I love the part in "All Star Road Band" near the end of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", where to my ears the band is playing together with wild abandon, almost coming apart in their enthusiasm but keeping together--very exciting. They are going beyond a rote rendition of the piece and playing all out, as one.

First of all, that's a more recent recording. Definitely. So not Seeco & less likely Fania. But... The tune itself shows up on this DVD: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&a...10:jifpxzqkldfe which seems to be an accompaniment to this album: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&a...10:diftxqqgldje The tune itself is not on the album, but the album appears to be all vocal. The brevity of this cut would make it a nice track to roll opeing credits over. So it might be that this cut was from the same session, in which case, here's your personnel, including Mario Rivera: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&a...txqqgldje~T20BC The 1991 recording date makes more sense relative to the recording quality than does the Amazon blurb. I listened to online samples from that 1991 album, and they had a different overall band sound to them than the cut I included on the Blindfold Test, to my ears. I do not think that the 100th Album version is the version I included. However, I do not have the DVD to play repeatedly to be sure.

New Orleans Suite Historically Speaking 70th Birthday Concert Plus about 100 others tied fo 4th.

I have a correction to offer here, but first I just want to say that this track is a longtime favorite of mine, and I thought about including it on my blindfold test (#3). The song ("Você Abusou") was not written by Antonio Carlos Jobim, but by the duo of Antonio Carlos & Jocafi. They recorded it in 1971, and it went on to become a very popular song, and I believe a big hit by vocalist Maria Creuza. At any rate, the "Antonio Carlos" part was correct, but it wasn't Jobim. Somebody made a mistake on the credits for "Jazz Poet". Thanks for that information. All this time, I had been thinking, that Jobim, he just wrote so many good songs, including some I did not even know about. Is the dance hall/pump station in Shilder still there? Thanks for the positive comments. When I searched for Drab Zeen in Google, one of the few print references to it was an article years ago in the Kansas City Star, not a music article per se, but more of an article about global commerce. I wonder if we both bought Drab Zeen after reading that article.

Thanks for the positive comments, and I hope that you have fun with Booker and Wills.

I had a feeling it might be Tito, but I've only heard more recent stuff of his so far. In view of what you say about how fruestrating the sleeve notes are on this compilation, I'll try to find some other compilation from the same period MG If you have more luck than I did, please share your information!

It wasn't a comeback album. The real comeback was in 1983, when the band reformed to play at Sunsplash, Montego Bay. They cut the live album "Stretching out" (ROIR) in June and July of that year, as part of the runup/rehearsals for that gig and the subsequent London Sunsplash. One of the Sunsplash gigs was recorded but I don't know which, and they also made a studio album for Island "Return of the big guns" in 1984. SUbsequently, they moved operations to the US and recorded "Ska voovee" for Shanachie in 1992/93 (there's no recording date on the sleeve). (Just so's you know ) MG Thanks for that information. The Shanachie packaging had a bit of hype in it, then.

That Anthology set is not a bad place to start.