The Magnificent Goldberg

That's a really interesting post, Crabgrass. Thanks. MG

Laura Branigan Lauren Bacall Humphrey Bogart

Idris Muhammad - Turn this mutha out - Kudu (UK) Mickey Fields & Groove Holmes - The astonishing Mickey Fields backed by the world's number one most exciting organist - Edmar orig (with George Freeman & Billy Jackson - same band as on "The groover", live at the Left Bank) MG

I got mine from Amazon UK - it was about £3 ($6) cheaper than Sterns. I see Amazon.com has it down for US release on 25 April. Price for pre-orders is $20.98. But I dare say, if you wait till then, you'll be able to get it cheaper. MG

Anyone have any information on this? Is it good? Available? Available from CD Baby. Read what SoulStream said in the sleeve notes, which are printed on the CD Baby site. Personally, I wouldn't be without it. MG

I still (mostly - overslept today) get up at 6, same time as when I was at work. Now I do it for myself, I enjoy it much more MG

There's some old Yorkshire saying (come on TonyM!) to the effect that you've got to eat a pinch of dirt. I never had a problem with eating dirt. Only at home; not elsewhere! After all, it's my own dirt. MG

A BIG WINNER! MG

Percy Bysshe Shelley Mary Shelley Frankenstein

Ah, I just fell in. The US has a population of about 4 million a year, so excluding 17 years' worth of kids reduces 300 m to 232 m - which is, near as dammit, the number I'd calculated as the working age population (231 m). So it looks as if what's happening to inactivity may well be demographic - baby boomers hitting their sixties and effectively retiring, even though you don't count it as such. And these numbers will be larger than the numbers dying of old age. MG

Yes - sunny most of day but bloody big black clouds rearing up in west just now. Nipping out for a quick cough and drag before the rain starts. MG

What's the story on this? Why is inactivity rising in America? (I understand that benefits are nothing to write home about over there - so the incentives to find work are a good deal stronger than over here.) This is an answer based purely on speculation, but usually a decline in the unemployment rate during a period of weakening economic activity is attributed to "discouraged workers" -- ie, workers who give up on finding work because they simply can't find one and drop out of the labor force. (In the US the UE rate is defined as [people actually working] / [people actually working + not working but actively looking for a job].) Between Jan and Feb the labor force participation rate ([people actually working + unemployed but actively looking for a job] / [over-18 civilian non-institutionalized population]) fell by 0.2 percentage points. However, I'm not sure how much can be explained by "discouraged workers" -- I will try to check. I did find this page on the Department of Bureau of Labor Statistics's website -- however, it compares Feb 2007 to Feb 2008 (apparently this data, unlike the unemployment rate, is not seasonally adjusted, making month-to-month comparisons unreliable). It looks like out of the 350K people or so leaving the labor force over the past year, about 50% say they "want a job" but only a very small fraction (about 5% or so) qualify as "discouraged" by BLS standards. Of course, we would ideally want to compare Jan to Feb. Thanks for that table, Guy. I worked out, circuitously, that the US had an inactivity rate of 34.75% in February. That really shocked me! The UK inactivity rate (November) is 25.3%. I assume the "total not in labour force" excludes kids below legal school leaving age (16 here) and people over retirement age (60 f & 65 m here). I was also surprised to see inactivity has risen by 1.351 million (1.7%) over the past year; the 5.6% increase in discouraged workers is still too small in absolute terms (21,000) to make much of an impact on the big numbers. Something else - something major - seems to be happening, apart from a few more people thinking there aren't any jobs. MG

Is that a historically high level? I had a feeling that overseas tourism in the US fell off remarkably after the invasion of Iraq. MG 1) We are talking about rates of increase rather than levels. 2) Iraq or no Iraq, as traveling here gets cheaper more and more people will do it. Oh yes. I didn't phrase the question properly. I meant, has this 7% improvement taken tourism to historically high levels? MG

I'm looking forward to it. Be careful not to use the wrong syntax, or Jim will have your guts for garters MG

Falstaff Orson Welles Orson Kartz

Mango Santamania Luisito Quintero Pucho

They're wonderful, aren't they? My REAL list of Soul Jazz favourites has about 300 albums MG

I'm most grateful Mama. Yes, X77 is pretty poor. "I'm in the mood for love" is also - as you say, "Caravan" is OK. So is "Sweet Georgia Brown" - Roberta Flack lifted Holmes' approach on her last album (and made a rather better job of it, though it goes on too long). The other Holmes on Fly Dutch is "Theme from the $6,000,000 man". Haven't heard that. I saw a copy in a cheapo cutouts shop in Soho many years ago and thought it looked suspiciously like total crap that I couldn't afford (in the light of what else was in the shop), so I passed. Ah, the Lamont Johnson, I think, may have been reissued last year in Japan on P-vine, with all those other Mainstream funk efforts. I'll look into that. MG

I wholeheartedly agree! If the world is going to electronic transmission of music, covers and liner notes are the components still missing. A CD-ROM almost certainly doesn't have enough room for all those pics and sleeve note scans as well as the info. Maybe a DVD does, but I guess price is also a consideration. MG

That's the famous one, but do you remember Gene Russell's (founder of Black Jazz Records) BFT from, like, 72, 73, somewhere in there? He made the same claim and pretty much nailed the results, down to saying that Thad/Mel sounded like "an integrated band". I find it interesting that everybody who cares remembers Eldridge's BFT but not Russell's... Indeed. But what's even more interesting is that there's one guy, who's documented, once, with a specific bunch of records, as having managed this and there's another guy, who's documented, once, with a different specific bunch of records, as not having managed it and people think that either of these events demonstrates something. MG

Walter Trout Frank Pike (Don't tell 'em your name, Pike!) Edgar Codd

To your fishtank? MG

Jessie Hill - Ooh poo pah doo pts 1 & 2 - Minit 45 orig B B King - There must be a better world somewhere - MCA promo Charles Brown - Sunny road - Route 66 Randy Crawford - Now we may begin - WB UK Shirley Scott & Clark Terry - Soul duo - Impulse promo MG

I've only read one - but it was from the Onion. MG

Well, you can't go wrong with Giant Steps, can you? Especially for a fiver! Have you tried Manchester's Vinyl Exchange? Hundreds of used jazz CDs there, despite the store's name! (Welcome to the board, by the way.) Hello Bill, I've never bought jazz CDs at Vinyl Exchange - haven't been in there for years. I very rarely venture into Manchester these days, used to go about once a month when Decoy was still open. So Vinyl Exchange has a good selection then? Richard Yes, get in there before it closes! You know how it is with the record trade these days! Virgin, Decoy, Polar Bear - where are they now? Spillers in Cardiff - the oldest record shop in the world - is still open. Move to Cardiff MG