The Magnificent Goldberg

Hm, before I forget Jimmy McGriff - Moonlight serenade, from "Movin' upside the blues" - Jam - swings like crazy, but is so cool and beautiful. Todd Rhodes - Dance of the red skins, from "Blues for the Red Boy: The early Sensation recordings" - Ace. Holly Dismukes' really scorching alto solo on this stopped me clean in my tracks this morning! MG

McCoy is an interesting player to me. He was never 100% devoted to Acid Jazz. Most of his albums have a wide variety of music in them - some Bebop stuff like "Doxy", "Stonewall" and "Mysterioso" (note the Milt Jackson connection - McCoy was a big fan), which I don't think were there to show his prowess as a bop player so much as to add variety to the programmes, - a lot of ballads, at which he was as superb a player as Johnny "Hammond" Smith and wrote some lovely ones - as well as funky stuff and straight swinging in four. His Prestige albums were all produced by Cal Lampley. As soon as Bob Porter took over from Cal at Prestige, Freddie McCoy stopped recording for that company. Porter speaks quite disparagingly of McCoy's importance and I wonder sometimes if the changeover at Prestige had anything to do with McCoy's ceasing to record there. But his last album is very different. No Acid Jazz at all. It's a spectacularly uncommercial commercial album which sometimes calls to my mind George Braith's "Musart" LP. Freddie's sound has always been particularly attractive to me. Actually, he has two sounds. On his funky material, he sounds very tough and hard, with almost no vibrato. On ballads, his sound shimmers even more than does Milt Jackson's when he's playing with the MJQ. MG

Freddie was the first jazz musician to take up James Brown's developments in R&B and apply them to jazz. In a sense, therefore, he pioneered Acid Jazz and deserves a place in the history books for that (whether you like the music or not). Ace, on its Beat Goes Public label, included a fair number of McCoy tracks in its various artist Acid Jazz compilations. I recall other British labels with McCoy tracks, too. I think most of those only came out on LP ayway, since they were aimed at dancefloor audiences. He ran his own band for several years but was never widely successful. He made eight albums (plus a "best of" compilation) Lonely Avenue - PR7395 (1&2/1965) Spider Man - PR7444 (10/1965) Funk drops - PR7470 (6/1966) Peas & rice - PR7487 (10/1965 & 4&5/1967) (includes the original version of "One cylinder") Beans & greens - PR7542 (10/1967) Soul yogi - PR7561 (1&2/1968) Listen here - PR7582 (6/1968) Gimme some - Cobblestone 9002 (late 1971) A lot of those albums are pretty short. You could probably get all 7 of the Prestige albums into a Mosaic Select (if Mosaic could release Prestige material and if MC would touch it with a bargepole ) I suspect the reason Fantasy never released any of Freddie's albums on CD was because they had made plenty of money licensing individual tracks to British dancefloor companies and they probably didn't see much demand from the US. His Prestige LPs hit SILLY prices over here in the eighties. MG

Souleymane Faye Lamine Faye Vieux Mac Faye

Mobuto Sesu Seko Sekou Toure Toure Kunda

Oh yes, I used to have "A bag full of soul". Flogged it when poor and always regretted that. I have all Jimmy's JAM albums. JAM made some great Soul Jazz albums. MG

Last night Kenny Burrell - Both feet on the ground - Fantasy Bobby Timmons - Chicken & dumplin's - Prestige (Transatlantic UK) MG

Don't think so. I may have passed up trashed copy once. Why do you ask? Your name occurred to me when side 2 started with a not altogether awful version of "Quiet village" MG

In contrast to previous years, there doesn't seem to be much Soul Jazz coming out in Japan this year. MG

Cousin Joe - Complete recordings 1945-1955 - Night Train International MG

Keith Moon Sunny The Asteroids

No. Actually, I was never too keen on them. I only have three of his SS albums - "The big band", "Step 1" and "The worm". I think I've made a mistake there. MG

No. Actually, I was never too keen on them. I only have three of his SS albums - "The big band", "Step 1" and "The worm". I think I've made a mistake there. MG

Hey TTK, have you got this one? Wynton Kelly - Coming in the back door - Verve stereo I used to think that the best thing about this LP was that it was only 27 mins 37 secs long. But listening this evening, perhaps I'm feeling a trifle more charitable than that. MG

Specsavers Specs Powell Specs Wright

He's magnificent, too MG

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080526...le-6323e80.html To me, the most telling thing is the last paragraph - if Government statisticians have noticed, it must be bleedin' obvious! MG

This evening Sonny Phillips - My black flower - Muse promo Don Patterson - Why not - Muse Bill Hardman - Politely - Muse Freddie McCoy - Beans 'n greens - Prestige Buddy Johnson - Fine brown frame - Decca (MCA) Ben Webster - Atmosphere for lovers & theives - Polydor (UK) Jack McDuff - Prelude - Prestige black label stereo What's with these black labels? This one looks like an original to me. Did they come out between the yellow and blue labels? Or were they early stereo versions of the blue labels? MG

Yes - I got a credit, which I used a week ago to order the Jansen again (plus some others to take care of the voucher) - v happy now. Even happier when I get that order delivered. MG

Melvin Rhyne Hank Marr Caesar Frazier

A VERY influential programme. Nice to marry a Playboy bimbo TWICE! RIP, he must need it. MG

From a different angle http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080526...ay-6323e80.html I think the key paragraph is this MG

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080526...al-6323e80.html MG

Garth Hogarth Sir John Tenniel

Interesting album. Just started listening to Jimmy McGriff - Black and blues - Groove Merchant (South African or Australian issue by RPM (PTY) Ltd - nice pressing wherever it comes from) MG