Hot Ptah

I have tried several in stores and at home. Only one has really sounded good to me. It is the iHome Studio Series iP1, with Bongiovi Acoustics components. I read about it in a very favorable review in Jazz Times magazine, tested it at the Apple store, and bought it. We have been very pleased with it at home. It is the first iPod docking station we have used with genuinely good sound.

Wish I'd have known so I could have driven by and snatched them We moved the system into our new house. Nothing was dumped on the curb!

I think that many people cannot hear the difference between a vinyl record or CD played on a great home stereo system and a download played on an IPod. Or if they can, they don't care. In the early 1970s, there were many of us who had beginner stereos, which were not very expensive and not great in terms of sound quality. Then just a few in our peer group had put together the money somehow to buy a more expensive, better stereo. I remember that we would play something like Abbey Road on the better stereo and talk about how it sounded better than on our stereos. But we did not think that it really mattered all that much. Listening on the better stereo was like eating a really good steak once in a while instead of the hamburgers we all loved to eat. It was nice, a little luxury, but not essential. We did not think that we were missing out on all that much. I think that many people feel that way today. When we sold our house a few years ago, our real estate agent told us that we would have to rip out the high end stereo system built into the house by the original owner in 1962, because people today would not want a house with a stereo system. He told us to just rip the speakers out of the walls and dump them on the curb for the trash collector, if we wanted to ever sell the house.

I have known many people who are a little into jazz. I have known some who have about 10-20 jazz albums, of mainstream acoustic artists of real merit. I have known some who like a handful of swing era albums which they own. I have known some who like only 1970s fusion with electric guitars because it reminds them of progressive rock. I have known some who like a handful of ECM albums and see no need to go further. These people are not into smooth jazz or Kenny G, and have no interest in becoming jazz fanatics.

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It seems inevitable to me that something negative will happen with Sonny. The suspense is whether he will drag her down with him, or hurt her.

Ken Singleton Al Bumbrey Rich Dauer

Ginger Baker Peter Cook Irving Fryar

I have listened to BFT 75 once from Thom Keith's website,as he suggests. It is easy to do from there. This is a great collection of music. As usual, I don't know any of the songs, despite Thom's comment that he had placed some easy guesses on this BFT. I want to hear this BFT again soon!

I have been listening to Disc 1 and find it very interesting. The 1915 recording of "St.Louis Blues" by Prince's Band (Cut 15) is a much more distinctive arrangement and performance than many versions of the song from decades later. I am surprised by how heavily syncopated this performance is, and do I hear a bit of mambo rhythm there? George O'Connor's "N Blues", from 1916, strikes me as the earliest song on Disc 1 which has the sound and feel of blues music as we commonly know it today. I love the various sound effects associated with train travel, which had to be done live while the singer was singing and the instruments were being played. Many people thought that the ship sound effects in the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" song from 1966 were so cool, but here George O'Connor's 1916 record had the same type of thing. I doubt that the Beatles added their sound effects during a live take.

I talked to a waitress at a restaurant in Kansas City about the great hard bop playing as background music. I wondered who had such deteiled knowledge of jazz at the restaurant. She explained that the company which enforces the payment of music royalties from public places, requires such detailed paperwork of all background music played, that many public places just sign up with a business which provides them with the background music and takes care of all of the royalty paperwork and payments. So the song choices are not made by the public place at all. The public place doesn't care what music is played, as long as the royalty paperwork and payments are handled by the third party music provider. She said that her restaurant signed a contract with Muzak, which has gone into a lot more than its old easy listening background music, and now provides entire days of programming of old music to businesses, along with the record keeping and royalty payment service.

I agree with you on both characters. I think that they are meant to be irritating. It will be interesting to see where the show's creative overseers take these characters. I loved the piano lesson scene in Episode 3. where John Goodman's character treated DJ Davis like he was an unwelcome disease entering his house. But Episode 4 is where DJ Davis' stupidity really reveals itself.

Actually, when Big Al and I worked through this problem, my song titles did not show up on Microsoft's Media Player. It was only when forum members used different software than Microsoft that they could read all of my song titles sent through ITunes. I recall that Real Player and Rhapsody users could see all of the song titles which I sent through ITunes.

I wonder how Davis Rogan is reacting to the way that his character is developing. Especially by the fourth episode, he is being depicted as a bit of a buffoon. I am thinking of him as the George Castanza of Treme, only with great musical taste. I thought that the cameo appearances by McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter and Stanley Crouch in the fourth episode were quite cool. Too bad that they didn't let McCoy play some music though.

When I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the late 1970s, I was impressed with how Ernie Harwell seemed to be a universally beloved figure, among people of all races and all walks of life. He was truly a Detroit area icon. Love of Ernie Harwell seemed to be one of the few things that everyone in the area could agree on. As I was a diehard Milwaukee Brewers fan, of the George Bamberger Brew Crew era, I hoped that Ernie was announcing a Tigers loss every night, but I did like his announcing style when I would overhear a Tigers game. Driving around Detroit with a Milwaukee Brewers bumper sticker on my car was not the smartest thing to do back then. I was not physically assaulted, but received plenty of verbal abuse and gestures from other drivers.

Thom, I had the same problem with the song titles showing when I did my recent BFT through ITunes. Big Al removed the tags and knows how to do it. We found that the song titles would not show up with some recipients, but many others could see all of the song titles, depending on the software that they are using. It seems to be a quirk of ITunes.

Kenneth Williams was one of the great British comedians of the sixties/seventies - the only one who was in EVERY Carry-on film. And the Decca series "The world of" ran for hundreds of albums, including many classical reissues under the generic title "The world of the great classics". So it WAS a big fucking deal! MG This is not the first time I have screwed up with album covers of British artists. I need to research these artists before I post.

I will take a download.

Absolutely true. If you're truly dedicated to a genre, you do so much listening that even the classics begin to pall. This inevitably leads to the mining of lesser seams where there are fewer gems - but, by now, you're so steeped in the genre and your ears so attuned that you derive perhaps more pleasure from these minor works than you did from the classics in your amateur listening days. Also, I find myself checking out additional albums in certain genres or with certain artists, listening at least partially for that previously unheard "gem" track--is there yet another great song by______as good as his late 1950s classics that I was not aware of?

If so, when can we sign up for downloads or discs?

That seems to me to be true of the early albums and the more recent albums, cetainly the last three studio albums. I am not sure that it is true of the albums from Highway 61 through some point in the 1980s. It could be so, but I don't know if it is.

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! I assume that virtually all of the songs on the early Dylan albums, which are credited to Dylan, have at least the music copied from an earlier song. When I can actually match the earlier song with a Dylan recording, there is a little shock of recognition.

It's trendy to hate Starbucks, but when they came to Kansas City they elevated the level of coffee quality across the board, in my opinion. I like their house blend, Sumatran, Suluwesi, and Komodo Dragon coffee. They have had a good selection of CDs over the years, generally including quality jazz. It seems like they carry less variety in their CD selection now, compared to a few years ago. Some of the Starbucks in the Kansas City metro area are laid back neighborhood gathering places, some are not. It depends a lot on the location. I have tried some of the smaller coffee shop chains, and some of the independent coffee shops, and can't see any great moral virtues which they possess compared to Starbucks, while you are actually inside the stores ordering and drinking coffee. I think that is a common experience. I have heard some wailing Coltrane tracks at my neighborhood Starbucks, and no one looks up. It's all unknown background music to most people, who don't really care to know who is playing or singing it, I think.

CD #1, Song 5: Poor Mourner, by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet, November 29, 1902. This song was copied by Bob Dylan for the final song on "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", recorded in 1962, "I Shall Be Free", with composer credit to Bob Dylan on the album. He wrote new lyrics to the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet's song.