The Magnificent Goldberg

Heavy D (& the Boyz) Brand New Heavies Freddie Waits

I'm also willing to bet that most independent stores (like our local ones here) aren't doing Soundscan. And the remaining indie shops are probably doing good business. If HMV close, as expected, that will leave Spillers (est 1894) the ONLY shop in Wales' biggest city (300,000 pop + the shopping venue for a further million in the Valleys). (And with thousands of rock bands in the Valleys, Spillers are flogging their CDs - the ones good enough to do what you all do - and having live performances in the (tiny) shop.) SPILLERS RULZE!!!!!! MG

That is GREAT news! Congratulations! MG

Yeah, you get what you pay for. And they're cheap enough to make buying them, warts and all, a good proposition to explore the work of someone you aren't familiar with. If you hit on someone you become really enthusiastic about, it's no problem to chuck the Quadromania set into the dustbin and buy a more expensive, better sounding, more comprehensive, better packaged set from someone else. That's what I'm going to do with Cab Calloway soon. But buying something by someone whose work you're already familiar with (as I did with Gene Ammons) is a very poor idea; as you've found out. MG

And Etoile 2000's "Boubou n'gari" sessions. These were taped rehearsals at Jandeer night club, Dakar in 1981, which produced some of the greatest classic early Mbalax. And Ouza's "Sen sougnou sama" session, recorded in Brussels. And "Hooting in Tooting". And Johnny Lytle's "People and love" session, just to see the look on Orrin Keepnews' face when they did something completely different from what I assume he'd expected. And, for similar reasons, Lou Donaldson's "Alligator boogaloo" session, to see how Alfred Lion reacted. And the Rev James Cleveland & the Angelic Choir session for "Peace be still". I think I'd quite liked to have been at the Beyonce session where she sang "undress me, undress me" (and to have been thirty years younger) but not for reasons that have anything to do with music :leer: MG

YESSSSSS! I can't imagine how that band (any band) could wail like they did in ensemble on that session, particularly on "Queer notions" - even less, how anyone could actually set it up! MG

I've got an answer to that one! MG

I'd have a many to many relationship between instrument/musician and track (an album consists of tracks, of course; didn't want to go into such detail because your "problem" seemed to be the boxed set - album relationship). Wouldn't make sense otherwise (database normalization) because it would be a hassle to even do simple queries like (pseudocode follows) SELECT track, artist.first_name, artist.last_name FROM [tables and join bla bla] WHERE instrument = 'kbd'. Is this a test? Yes - I agree it would be a hassle - and not really produce much of an interesting result. That's why I went for putting all instruments in one field. When I get it finished, if ever, I'll be able to pick out all albums with a trombonist on them, or a named trombonist, and that'll do me. And yes - I was really more interested in the boxed sets thing, but since you seemed to know a bit about the whole business, I thought I'd derail my own thread MG

We may not be tuned into that, but I think younger people are much more comfortable with sifting the enormity that is out there. They accept a TV that has a zillion channels (most of it of little interest) as the norm - yet still some things emerge as very popular; and some things become central for particular 'tribes'. In much the same way as we have gravitated to a place like Organissimo as a 'portal' for jazz information so their are 'portals' for hundreds of other areas of interest. Jazz is easy - yes, there's here and other places for jazz and one can connect. But REAL minority music has always been hard to find and has never had any kind of presence on the web - because the web only deals with things that prosperous people have an interest in. You can get a good feel for this by trying to find sermons on Amazon UK. There's no browse category for them. There isn't even a browse category for Gospel music - all the Gospel is listed under R&B & Soul! Now, you can get sermons from Amazon UK, but you have to know the names of the preachers. Putting in Rev C L Franklin, Rev Jasper Williams or Rev Leo Daniels gets you quite a few results (and I'm glad I tried it ). But as for finding people you didn't already know about, which is what the internet is supposed to be all about, it's hopeless. And Gospel is relatively popular! As for more obscure African material, good luck! MG

With a little trepidation I'll go for this one. Downloads if you can, but I'll PM you with address if you need to send a disc. MG

Have a great one! MG

Can't do diagrams on the PC, but that's more or less what I've got, except that album to artist is a many to many relationship, not a many to one; eg "ESPM the reunion: Live at Akhbar Hall" is by Charles Earland, Mel Sparks, Houston Person & Idris Muhammad. And I have loads of multiple artist albums (I expect we all do). MG Album : boxed set is n : m, so I corrected that in my diagram. I would use the "band/artist" entity just to have a name under which an album was released (there are probably better names to describe this entity). I'd have another m:n relationship between album and artist (and the instruments a musician plays on a given album). [band/artist]-1-------------<compiles>-------------m-[album]-m-----------------<has>-------------------n-[artist/musician] I keep a separate table for artists, too, with their nationality and what instrument(s) they mainly play, with a separate table relating artists to albums in the many to many relationship. I'm slowly building album personnel and tracks tables. If a musician plays several instruments on an album (or even track), do you record each instrument in a separate field or lump them all in together in one field? MG

That does sound like an ancient database! I never bothered recording track titles or personnel - I started off with one on a card index, so that wasn't a useful thing to record in those days because it couldn't be accessed systematically. I'm very slowly creating tables of tracks and personnel, just for the jazz albums - doing the same for African recordings, Gospel, Blues, R&B, Soul, Funk and Hip hop seems to present all kinds of different problems and produce very little in terms of benefits. But it's very boring and I usually find something else to do So I suspect that a smaller proportion of my collection is indexed now than was the case a year ago MG

Can't do diagrams on the PC, but that's more or less what I've got, except that album to artist is a many to many relationship, not a many to one; eg "ESPM the reunion: Live at Akhbar Hall" is by Charles Earland, Mel Sparks, Houston Person & Idris Muhammad. And I have loads of multiple artist albums (I expect we all do). MG

And we're all part of the jazz community, aren't we? Even if we're just consumers. MG

I've been using a relational database to keep records of my albums in since the mid eighties. I bought the odd boxed set but there were never enough of them for me to worry about handling them in a special way until I started buying Mosaics in 2001. Now I've got about 40 sets and, as I updated my database for the new year yesterday, decided that I'd think up a way of handling them consistently. The difficulty is that my database is constructed on the assumption that I can buy many different copies of an album - on different labels (Prestiges on Esquire, Stateside, Transatlantic, Xtra and BGP just in Britain), and mono, stereo LPs, K7s, CDs - but in the end, it's the same album, so I only have one data record for it (but several records representing the purchase of each version). So along comes, say, the Gerald Wilson Mosaic box, which represents new copies of a number of albums I've purchased (sometimes more than once ) over the previous thirty odd years, plus a few that I didn't have before. Consistent with the rest of the database, I record this box as its constituent albums. But that makes it difficult to see the data records relating to the box as a whole. I've created a couple of new entitiies and relationships between them and the other tables in the database and pulled all the data together (not without a puzzling error or two ). I've backed it up so that it hasn't overwritten the version I had yesterday. And I thought I'd ask how other people deal with this kind of issue in their own databases. MG

Well, yes. But they're both happening together so the effect is going to be mixed. In the thirties, the number of record companies in the US was pared down to two in 1934 - Victor and ARC - and the position was only rescued by the opening that year of the US subsidiary of UK Decca. This followed (as it is doing this time around) a period pre-crash of mergers/acquisitions/bankruptcies (Columbia went bust in 1922) between most of the largest US firms. After the Depression, the indies came in, as you've implied, and made headway - particularly in black music - precisely because the 3 majors were busy looking after their existing assets But the little chaps, in order to make headway, still had to understand a market - usually a local one. Not sure that's going to work any more. The danger must be that there'll be so much disparate stuff out there from so many individuals that no one will be able to find anything. (As I was saying just now ) MG

Good point Bev. What could start me on downloading would be full length sermons. But the difficulty is, how would you go about finding them on the web? At least in the past, one could look at the record companies that issued a lot - Chess, Jewel, Peacock/Songbird, Randy's and pick some up. And there were always other reasons to look at those companies' output, so you could get into it. The total isolation of musicians/performers doing their own thing seems to me to be counter-productive. MG

Smith Jones The Joneses

Oh sad! I haven't managed to get around to that Ace compilation yet. Only have a photo of her and Sonny on one of his LPs. Yes, I think her version of "Drown in my tears" was the first. Must get to that Ace CD. MG

Wrong government; apply to Taliban. MG

The Great Gates Lionel Hampton Lionel Jeffries

Aha! I'll get my coat. MG

They're not all old Warwick reissues by any means. I have a couple of nice ones by Bubba Brooks, recorded in the nineties. And there's quite a bit of stuff from Swiss Radio broadcasts. MG

Looks like the artist was Rube Goldberg, in which case it could also go in the "sleeves created by famous artists" thread. MG