Hot Ptah

Point well taken. My only interest in starting the thread was to point out the massive size of what will be released. When the Duke Ellington Complete RCA set was released, I thought that one was big, but it is modest compared to what Young has in mind.

Happy Birthday, Chuck! I really wanted to post an image of Discount Records on State Street, but there seems to be none available online, or at least they are difficult to find if any exist. Here's the closest I could get--hopefully it will create a happy memory of your time managing Discount Records:

From this article about Neil Young's pending release of 50 Blu Ray discs of his career archives, it occurs to me that this will amount to far more than 500 CDs of music. How much more, I am not sure. I could see Duke Ellington in the jazz world filling up 500 CDs with his worthwhile output, including rarities. I wonder if Neil Young, or almost anyone else, has that much material of interest. Neil Young is putting his past on Blu-ray 2 commentsby Brandon Bailey - May. 14, 2008 09:05 AM San Jose Mercury News SAN FRANCISCO - Rebellious rocker Neil Young hates the sound of compact discs. So he waited 15 years for a different technology, which he says will allow him to share his life's work the way he wants his fans to enjoy it. Starting this fall, Young plans to release a comprehensive archive of music, videos and other material dating back to 1963 on a series of interactive Blu-ray discs, which he demonstrated last week for several thousand software developers and tech enthusiasts at Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference in San Francisco. "It's the history of a creative process, the development of my music and actually of my life," Young said after the demo. "It's interactive and online, and it will grow." The project could signal a broader use of the high-definition technology known as Blu-ray, which was developed with Sun's Java programming language, and which emerged earlier this year as the global standard for high-performance video from Sony and other companies. It's unclear how many fans will have the equipment, and the time, to enjoy such a comprehensive archive. Young said he hopes fans will spend hours exploring an interactive timeline, playing classic hits and unreleased tracks, while examining contemporaneous films, photos, recording notes and other documents. With up to 50 gigabytes of storage, Blu-ray discs have five to 10 times the capacity of DVDs, which in turn can hold far more material than CDs. Young, who lives on a ranch in San Mateo County, Calif., is planning a series of five volumes, each consisting of 10 discs. He promised that fans will be able to download additional material from the Internet as it becomes available. At least as important, Young said, the collection will represent an alternative to what he characterized as the tyranny of inferior sound. Blu-ray developers say their technology provides far superior audio quality as well as high-definition video. "CD quality is very low resolution, maybe a step above MP3s. It was a crime to make that the standard for so many years," he said, complaining that music fans were forced to accept CDs because they were marketed as an inevitable and necessary new format. "It was the Patriot Act of music," he said, drawing laughs. Reminded that many music fans these days download and play songs on portable MP3 players, Young said: "My heart goes out to them." But the 62-year-old rocker acknowledged that most consumers don't have Blu-ray equipment yet. Analysts say Sony and other companies have sold about 1 million Blu-ray players, while Apple has reported selling more than 150 million iPods. Sony has also sold about 3 million PlayStation 3 game consoles, which have Blu-ray capability, as Young pointed out. He did not rule out the possibility that the songs, dating back to his early days in a Canadian band called the Squires, might be released in other formats. "I'm not interested in making MP3s, but I'm not going to say to Apple: No, I'm not going to let you issue MP3s.' " Young, in a cap and sunglasses, appeared on stage with Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz and praised the technology that Young said enabled him to complete a project he first envisioned 15 years ago. But the artist, whose long line of hits - from "Cinnamon Girl" to "Rockin' in the Free World" - includes a song in which he vowed never to shill for a sponsor, told reporters that Sun is not sponsoring his project. "I'm actually plugging myself," Young said of his appearance. "They've enabled me to do something I've wanted to do for a long time. I feel like it's a good thing to acknowledge that."

There's quite a lively music scene in parts of Arizona Looks like a crowd of swing era enthusiasts.

Is a PhD all that essential to get a job as a jazz university educator? Bobby Watson got hired to head up the University of Missouri-Kansas City jazz program, for example. If he has a PhD it has never been mentioned in the several years he has been here.

I would be thrilled if such a festival was available to us in Kansas City. It seems impossible that it could ever happen here.

MG, Just for fun, I started to compile my own list of "Inessential But Enjoyable Jazz Albums in All Genres", but gave up. I am highly impressed by your achievement in putting together your list of 100 Soul Jazz albums. It's difficult to make up one of these lists! My head hurts from trying to do it.

I bought Bill Harkleroad's (Zoot Horn Rollo) solo CD from a few years ago, and emailed him at the email address in the CD packaging, telling him that I liked his book and the CD. We then exchanged a series of emails in which he said that in retrospect, his time with Beefheart was dominated by emotional abuse, which he could not break away from when he was young as it had beaten him down and depressed him. He said that it was a very negative experience overall, one that had a long-lasting negative impact on him. I commented that I had a similar experience in business with a tyrant boss with a hot temper and nonsensical demands, when I was starting out. I could tell from Harkleroad's responses that he had, indeed, suffered significantly. I do not view the "romantic mystique" of Beefheart and his music in the same way after that exchange.

Was Madison, Wis. the mistake, if you don't mind telling us? Madison was not a mistake. Whitehall was. Timing is everything when you have children. The change was probably good for them and bad for me. I will sort this stuff out 'til my death. It's all different with children who are not grown. I moved to Kansas City 25 years ago, "just to try it out for a short time." The birth of our child and his immersion into local disability programs kept us here forever. You just can't pack up and leave so easily with children. Allen, Richard Davis is almost 80 and is still the jazz professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He's had the position since 1977. Madison is affordable, beautiful and a lively cultural place, and a do-able car ride to Chicago.

I liked Brad Leal's playing. I couldn't tell if he had more range than he was showing and was trying to fit in with Cole like hand in glove.

Was Madison, Wis. the mistake, if you don't mind telling us?

The Ann Arbor answer is actually not a bad one, in that if you may want to make a living from jazz in a university teaching position. If not Ann Arbor, another major university city. Seriously, I would think that your Devilin' Tune series may be impressive on a resume to a University..

I saw Richie Cole at the Blue Room in Kansas City on Friday night. He was playing as well as he did in the late 1970s. His solo on "I Can't Get Started" was excellent, a level above skilled bop blowing. I was struck by how old, and unhealthy, his face looks up close. He was standing on the street corner in front of the club between sets and I walked by. I hope that he is well.

I toured an exhibit about Miles at a museum in St. Louis' Forest Park about ten years ago. Some of the clothing he wore onstage in his later years was in a glass case. It was striking how small his jacket was.

It's not essential. It's one of the nicer luxuries, though. A person near death from starvation and disease in a refugee camp in the Sudan needs essentials. Music would not be among the first things needed.

Burleigh Grimes Gaylord Perry Mike Scott

We have three IPod users on our computer, myself, my wife and my daughter. Each of us has a distinct music library on ITunes, very different from the others. We all log on separately onto the same computer. None of this is particularly difficult. If we can do it, anyone can. Collectively our computer knowledge is extremely limited.

In 1976 I had a summer job in a papermill, inspecting thousands of logs an hour that came by fast on a conveyor belt. If any logs had bark stuck to them, I had to swing a pickaxe at them, pull them off and later chop the bark off. I had dreams all summer about logs going by in front of me endlessly. The dreams lasted for several months after the job was over, then I never had one again.

Perhaps if you issued multiple reissues at once, a 20 bit reissue of the entire series, a 24 bit reissue, an SACD reissue, the RVG compressed sound reissue, a reissue with an added track of obtrusive static throughout...... Then members here would have to order multiple copies and start up threads comparing the minute differences in sound.....

Wow! I am going to run out and buy Fireball, Machine Head, Deep Purple In Rock....well, maybe not. Interesting though that they stand up pretty well. In a similar vein, I just heard the first three Chicago albums for the first time in over 25 years, and was surprised at how good they sound to my jazz hardened ears.

I found out just in the past few years that Chuck Nessa was the manager of that store in the years immediately before I started college in Madison. His great taste was still in evidence when I got there, in the jazz inventory and the knowledgeable staff he had trained.

Got 'em all already, or otherwise I would be unable to resist your marketing campaign. Thinking of the potpourri of deviled tunes, I want to shout out loud, a notable album back cover quote-- "God! This is a tasty little sucker!"

For several years I had a recurring dream of finding a cardboard box full of albums, still in their shrink wrap, on the sidewalk in front of Discount Records on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. (That is a store I shopped at a lot for about six years). In the dream it is always very late at night, so that there are no people around. In my dream I am always very anxious about what to do. On one hand, I would love to have the albums. They always include some very old looking James Brown albums with cover art which I have never seen in real life--on the covers of these dream albums, the artwork is just James' face printed in all red ink or all blue ink, kind of a promotional poster style of artwork. On the other hand, I always get very afraid in the dream that I will get caught if I take the box of albums, and I start to think of the terrible consequences for my life if I get arrested for stealing them. About this time I wake up, drenched in sweat. I have not had this dream in several years, but it was a regular for quite a while.

They were popular in the early 1970s with high schoolers--has anyone with jazz ears listened to their albums recently? Do they stand up musically at all? I'm just asking--I haven't heard their music in decades.

I have to admit that this discussion made me curious, and I pulled out the Nessa albums which I purchased in the 1970s to see what colors are on the labels. I had never thought about it before. My copy of "People In Sorrow" has the blue and white label. Chuck, if you had done nothing with your life but release "Les Stances a Sophie" and "People in Sorrow", you would have left the world a better place!