The Magnificent Goldberg

Jimmy Dawkins - Blisterstring - Delmark (orig I think, but how do you tell with a seventies Delmark?) Pee Wee Crayton - Great R&B oldies - Blues Spectrum (Blue Moon UK issue) Piano Red - Rockin' with Red - RCA Camden (US) MG

Well, that's an unexpected response! I really imagined a consistent system So what it means is that the price quoted on line doesn't include tax, so we're not paying it over here. We just pay (UK) VAT if it gets stopped in customs. Thanks folks. MG

I know there's sales tax in America. I know it's different in different states. So, when you buy something on line from say, Mosaic, or Concord or Amazon.com, does the firm add on the sales tax for the customer's state, or the tax for the seller's state, or no tax at all? The thing is, if the price to American addresses is the same as it is to British ones, and includes sales tax, we're paying taxes to some US government (which?). So I want a vote I don't really; what I want is cheaper records, of course. MG

Funny, my experience is exactly the reverse. I suppose it's genuinely a matter of chance. MG

Steve Jobs Reggie Workman Boss Hogg

Germaine Greer Pam Grier Big John Greer

I got the 2CD set of the band's recordings for Columbia and Victor last year and I must say, it's very cheerful music. I always enjoy listening to it. MG

Very uneven article. She starts by talking about the whole history of the whole world, then pretty suddenly jumps to America in recent times (post Industrial Revolution) as if all there was to say could be encapsulated within that measly framework. In present day West Africa, among the Mandinke and a number of other peoples, a man may have up to four wives. The first economic catch is that he has to bear the entire costs of the family and children. If one of the wives works and earns money, that is HERS, not the family's. She cannot be compelled to use it for any family purpose. (And we say Islamic countries treat women badly.) (And the second economic catch is that a man's property is not inherited by his children but by the son(s) of his sister(s).) The end result of these arrangements is that there are fewer children, since there have to be a lot of men who don't get wives; one man with four wives can afford fewer children than that man and any three other men with one wife each. (And the inheritances of the single men go to other men's kids.) And arranged marriages are common there. And so are non-arranged marriages. So? MG

Stick to straight porn, is my advice, Evan MG

I also love the Credit Crunch Cereal pic. Is it a coincidence that the guy in that pic looks (to me, anyway) like the guy at the head of the Economist article? Is this Bernanke? Yes that is the great and powerful Oz er, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke . Thanks Chas. I wondered if it was C W Gilbertson, whoever he is. MG

"Low fidelity!" I love it! Great spoof on the cover and the title! And the graphics, too - the way "Stereo" is shown is very (perhaps exactly - can't find one at moment) like the design on late fifties Atlantics. MG

I couldn't disagree more . The Fed is taking their customary hair-of-the-dog approach : an economy drunk on cheap money needs...........more cheap money ! The Fed's move was acknowledgment , if any was needed , that the U.S. economy and the consumption which drives it , are now structurally dependent on unbounded credit expansion and concomitantly rising asset values. In such a debt-saturated society inflation is tacitly welcomed while deflation is openly fought . Given that the business cycle is a function of an unchanging human nature , attempts to abolish it are misguided , and what's more , are downright dangerous . Forest rangers know that if occasional small fires are always extinguished , the risk of a forest-destroying conflagration grow enormously . Likewise , small tremors relieve some of the pressures that cause devastating earthquakes . The economy is like this too . The Fed is in effect trading the current economic pain of the few for the future economic pain of the many . That the Wall Street tail now wags the economic dog is reason aplenty for gloom . I'm very inclined to agree with you, though I've never been clearly convinced that there is such a thing as a business cycle that operates, so to speak, independently of policy, as if it were the waves of the ocean that Canute couldn't turn back. I also love the Credit Crunch Cereal pic. Is it a coincidence that the guy in that pic looks (to me, anyway) like the guy at the head of the Economist article? Is this Bernanke? MG

Change and progress are different things. Change is with us all the time; the world changes; each society changes; each person's life changes. Music relates to this, and artistic innovators are those who, in their chosen media, can capture the essence of the new needs of their society and of individuals within it, because they're part of that society and subject to the same changes. The idea of progress is that all these changes make things better. If you look at the history of the entire human race over the past ten thousand years, that's undoubtedly true in the macro sense. But to believe that everything is getting better all the time everywhere is nonsense. Sometimes, in some places (and sometimes everywhere) things get worse. And artistic innovators have to follow and capture even those changes, because they can't be real any other way. Scientific progress is an abstraction related to the volume of knowledge. We know more about how things work and can use that knowledge to do things that couldn't be done before. Artistic efforts aren't about knowing how to do things but about knowing WHAT to do (in the changing circumstances). So this seems to me a silly comparison. MG

From the point of view of the Brit getting the package (and if you want more business, maybe this is a point to think about) Fedex seems to provide a better service; quicker but also seems not to get caught in customs so much. If the difference isn't much, maybe you could offer the choice to yor customer? MG

The *big* ones anyway... Indeed. One doesn't actually see small ones scrambling, does one? They either sink without trace or are sufficiently sure of their constituency (perhaps eg Delmark, HighNote/Savant) to manage to get along. MG

Indeed! Mory Kante was probably the first guy to try to bring the use of the kora "up to date" and was very successful indeed in the eighties. I believe he's still active but his innovative years are well past. Djoeur Cissokho, from Senegal, is another; he is developing a melding of Mandinke and Mbalax traditions there. He's the son of the great kora player Soundioulou Cissokho. You can't get his records in the west. Djeli Moussa Conde and Djeli Moussa Kouyate are regular session men in the studios used by the Guinean record companies. Only occasionally amplified, but still bringing the kora into contemporary contexts, there's Djeli Moussa Diawarra; I greatly enjoy his recordings under his own name, as well as those where he's part of the Kora Jazz Trio. As a general rule, I think it's terribly important for a musician to be seriously commercial within his/her own social context, otherwise the music lacks a framework of social/political/cultural need to inspire its creation, which, in my view, reduces its value outside that context to that of music specifically created for the pop market, eg Britney Spears & co. MG

Good guitarist but probably no better than Joe... MG

Jerry Jemmott Truman Thomas Bernard Purdie

If you like "Sabolan", which is getting on for five years old now, you may well like his more recent release "Electric griot land" (Tobolo records), which was previously released (in 2005) on ABC in Australia. Funny thing about Ba Cissokho; for a guy who's supposed to have a great reputation in Guinea, it's strange that he hasn't made any albums for any of the local record companies - not ever. It's like in the early sixties, if you'd found this bluesman with a great reputation in Chicago but who hasn't ever recorded for Chess, Vee-Jay, Miracle, Cobra, Artistic or Delmark, but only for companies in Paris and London, you'd kind of think, "what gives, here?" Last May, in Paris, I shared a dinner table at a Guinean gig with a couple of middle class liberal French ladies. And they thought I was really ignorant not having heard of Ba Cissokho. I have a couple of albums of Sekou Kouyate - they're OK. MG

Decisions, decisions - shall I have Lou Donaldson or Grant Green? Jackie Ivory The Ivorys Ismail Merchant

Odell Brown - Odell Brown - Paula orig Howard Roberts - Color him funky - Capitol orig Houston Person - Stolen sweets - Muse promo MG

Oooo! Do they do old BBC comedy shows like "I'm sorry, I'll read that again"? MG

You heard Reuben Wilson's "Set us free"? I've got a lot of this stuff (but not "Set us free" any more - flogged in disgust), little of it's very good. Some is good, some is quite nice and most is acceptable to someone who's already a fan. Very good examples Grant Green - Visions (though some don't like that kind of thing, it's great of its kind) Lou Donaldson - Sophisticated Lou (as above) Bobby Hutcherson at Montreux (but Butler wouldn't have had much say in that ) MG

Interesting clip. Swung very well that band. MG

Incorrigible! MG