The Magnificent Goldberg

Delmer 'Mighty Mouth' Evans Johnnie Otis The Signifyin' Monkey

Thank you Rooster, that's a VERY important interview. MG

Nah! Unless you throw in a bigger house, Dan MG

Happy Birthday, Jeff, and many more. MG

The Pieman Peter Peter Knight (before you go to bed)

I think I maybe missed it, so I hope you had a good one, Paul. And a happy birthday, too MG

Those, particularly the second, are the funniest things I've seen this year! And it's been a pretty good year for stuff to make me laugh. Sending to my friends. MG

The Signifyin' Monkey Sigue Sigue Sputnik The Spotniks

Record companies don't have to DO anything with the indies they buy except product placement to keep exposing their copyrights on TV via adverts and cooking or decorating programmes. I expect Blue Note is still getting paid for use of Lee Morgan's 'Sidewinder' on a UK gardening programme, and the other day, I heard Booker T's 'Green onions' on a cookery programme. Not inappropriate. Heard any Four Seasons material on TV lately? Or in a film? MG

Ta. MG

If you've got the CD 'Elvis at Sun', which was a total revelation to me when I got it, this stuff is fine. Might get it myself. But 'Elvis at Sun' is the REAL thing! If I'd heard those recordings before I heard Fats Domino, perhaps my life would have been quite different... But just imagine, white Rock n Roll was started by a trio of two guitars and bass - no drums! There's only one track with drums on the CD. Now THAT is music making Rock n Roll. MG

Well, so it is! I'm an infrequent visitor to E-bay. So, Concord hasn't immediately stepped in to buy this stuff. Damn! I ain't gonna buy it - I've no room for it, can't store it properly and have nothing to play it on. Oh, and that one session ain't worth $40K plus post to me. MG

The Five Royales Joseph Brant John Norton

You're joking. I bet, if we look at the site just after bidding ends, we'll find it went for over $100K. Hope Concord are watching. MG

That's actually what I was trying to say. Oh well. And Jim's right, too. Oh well... Glad I came and did this. MG

There's also one unreleased 1955 track by Big Jay McNeely. The guy isn't selling the copyrights, just the masters. But it's out of copyright now, isn't it? MG

I'm sure you're right about mutual respect, Jim. I just don't feel attracted to his sound. It's kind of professional. As to part of society, sure you're right there. I don't make rules for anyone but myself and try to make as few for myself as I can. I never talk about what you or anyone else SHOULD do or think. MG

Checked the discography - there IS only one unissued Grant Green session with Dean and it's in here. Hope one of the Andorran pirates buys this to put out a complete Tommy Dean album. There's never been one and the guy was THE MAN on organ in St Louis. MG

I've never heard that before and always wondered what business a thirties bandleader had having such a huge hit in 1957 - #2 in Billboard pop charts, amazingly, #4 in the R&B charts. Well, now I know. Yeah, same rhythm as Earl used, but not quite as much ease or something. And obviously, the guy could play, though he didn't have much of an interesting sound. Thanks very much, Jim. Mucho appreciated. MG

As I'm sure you know, Jim, my interests don't lie in the field of music as art, or even the pure listening function, but in music as part of society. So, if you take that right out of it, there's nothing in it for me. But that's the opposite extreme from Earl Bostic. MG

Jay McShann Kay Starr El Mascalero

There's a note on the page of, I think, one of his LPs on the Discogs site, to the effect that Earl was very concerned to produce in live performances what the audiences had heard, so he wrote everything out. And, when King wanted stereo recordings of his big numbers, he got those sheets out and, even though most of the musicians were different geezers, they played them note for note the way they'd been played before. So yeah, they HAD played them a zillion times! I think I have one of those LPs, but it's a while since I listened to it. I may try ripping it and seeing how it compares. But that was what the guy thought. More than almost any other jazz musician, Earl seems to have been a person who thought of jazz in a functional sense - as part of the soundtrack to people's lives. Critics tend to use the term functional as one of disapprobation, but I reckon that, if you take the function out of jazz, you haven't got anything worth listening to; you've got music as art. Of course, there are degrees of detachment from function and it's probably best that there IS some detachment. But the example of someone who had no truck with the notion is important because it's one end of the continuum. MG

Guys - I just checked the master numbers - one of those boxes - far right - contains one of the unissued Tommy Dean sessions on which Grant Green played!!!!!! FUCKIN' BLEEDIN' 'ELL!!!!! MG

Er... Who is it, please? It IS a compelling image. MG

I don't think I know. Or I can't remember. I think it was different in Britain in the forties and fifties from what it was like in the USA. The BBC Light programme in those days had EVERYTHING on it. So you got a bit of everything. By the time the family actually owned TV (summer 1957) and a record player (Xmas 1958), I knew what jazz was and had heard a VERY wide bunch of it. So wide that a lot of us here wouldn't call a lot of it jazz. Yeah, getting my memories into gear, every Sunday, around lunchtime, for decade upon decade, you'd have the Billy Cotton Band Show. Cotton had a swing band in the thirties at least, maybe earlier, and the radio show had a mixture of big band pieces, comic songs, sentimental ballads, both sung by the lugubrious Alan Breeze, but always ended up with 'Somebody stole my gal' which had an extended half speed tag riff featuring a guitar solo by, I think, Judd Proctor. The idea that a band would or could end a tune, at a different tempo, and just repeating this quiet riff (though I'm sure I didn't know that word then) while a guitar player rambled on out into the universe seemed very odd, and I purposely listened for it at the end of every show. Well, YouTube hasn't got the tail end of the radio show but here's Cotton's 1933 recording of the song, which is NOTHING like the end of the radio show from two decades later https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQinqnJz42Q But the band was not too bad for a British Band. MG