The Magnificent Goldberg

Breakfast with Tchico - Afro festival - Namaco 1979 Tchico - Amie Clara - Namaco 1979 Abdoulaye Diabate - Bende - Mali K7 1998 Next Mango Santamania - All strung out - Columbia 1970 MG

Illinois was very nice the three or so times he recorded on bassoon. MG

What a nice sleeve!!!! MG

This afternoon Mango Santamania - Mas sabroso - Fantasy 1961 Milt Buckner - More chords - MPS 1969 Coupe Cloue & Toto Necessite - Cine records 1982 Lou Donaldson - Live at New Morning with Dr Lonnie Smith (radio b'cast) 2004 MG

He was in Lou Bennetts band in Barcelona for this album in 1992. Idris Muhammad was in the band, too, If I recollect aright. Very nice. MG

Goodness. Thanks to both of you. MG

The Mighty Sparrow - Boogie beat - Semp Productions 1978 Arsenio Rodriguez - Exitos - Tropical Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey - Determination - Obey 1989 Not even an image on Amazon and I bought it from there a while back MG

Gotta say, that's authoritative. Thanks. But where the hell did he get that audience from? MG

Well, it's just gone breakfast and no one's been listening to ANYTHING! Willie Bobo - A new dimension - Verve 1968 Carlyto Lassa - Africa na moto - Syllart 1997 Now Manu Dibango - Balade en saxo - Blanco Y Negro Pop 2014 next Mango Santamania - Afro-American Latin - Columbia 1969 I like this more than any of Mongos very many albums. Columbia CAN produce great records but don't like them much, so they kept this in the can for thirty-one years. MG

No doubt you're correct, but as consistently as Herb Hardesty. MG

I think that's Herb Hardesty honking live with Fats Domino. Fats had a great band. Big Jay wouldn't have had a white audience in the early fifties. MG

Great album! MG Finishing the day with Reuben Wislon - Lurve Burg - BN 1969 Bloody rotten sleeve And another - Blue Mode 1970 If it weren't for the music... Red Garland - a garland of red - Prestige 1956 Now Groove Holmes - Night glider - GM 1973 G'night MG

This morning's breakfast with Mildred Clark & the Melodyaires - God's got everything you want - Savoy 1979 Hal Singer - Soweto to Harlem - The Sun 1976 Superb stuff! Thanks Dan. Now Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis & Johnny Griffin - Ow! Live at the Penthouse - Reel to real 1962 OW!!! MG

I'd have taken the money and bought more records, of course MG Depends on what period Ruth was talking about. Once the company started having hits, in 1962, it was in the shit. The manufacturers for the vinyl, the album covers and inner sleeves wanted payment now; the big customers - supermarkets and whatever it was in the sixties - didn't give a toss about Blue Note, so they paid when they wanted to get the next hit. Blue note couldn't have a stream of hits like Chess or Atlantic, therefore shit hit the windows. And I'm sure you're right about there being no arguments between Horace and Alfred. But nonetheless, friends can say something like they've really GOT to have those royalties so... Re Prestige's mail order service; I ordered some albums direct from Atlantic in the sixties - got some US notes and put them in an ordinary letter, not even registered (!) - and asked for Chris Connor's 'Free spirits' and the new Otis Redding that had just been announced - 'The soul album'. I got a promo before it came out in the shops, but NO letter saying thanks or even a bill. Neither my first or second orders elicited anything more than the records I wanted. MG

It was issued on Old Town, but Verve won the deal - there's a whole album on Verve, three tracks on Old Town. And the CD of the Verve album contains the three tracks that were on Old Town. So you don't have to go looking for another album unless you really want to buy vinyl, in which case It's real cheap on Discogs MG

Just finishing Sali Sidibe - Syllart 1988 Next Thione Seck - Yow - Syllart MG

I think the point was that Lee and Horace wanted royalties from BEFORE the new deal. Alf and Frank couldn't just say, "OK we'll give you royalties in the future, lads." That wouldn't have gone down well at all. So everyone suddenly became entitled to back pay. I don't know about Jutta Hipp. Wasn't she away from it all for donkey's years or something? MG

BN was sold to Liberty because, when Horace Silver and Lee Morgan threatened to jump ship, they capitulated and agreed to a deal they couldn't really afford. MG

Oh good, it works. Yeah. Diz had two; Manteca got to #13 on the R&B chart and Salt Peanuts on Guild got to #22 on the pop chart even. Charlie Parker only had one - 'Barbados' got to #15 on the R&B chart. Bop was popular back in the day in the black community. 'Course, they weren't honking records MG

L'Ensemble Instrumental de Guinee vol 1 - Maikano L'Ensemble Instrumental de Guinee vol 2 - Maikano no image on web MG

I dunno if this is going to work, but for anyone interested, here's a list of all the honkers who got singles onto the R&B or pop charts from 1943 to 1954. It's an Excel 2010 file. MG Honkers & Screamers singles on R&B charts for Organissimo.xlsx

Yeah, Wild Bill Moore took the solo on 'Mercy, mercy me (the ecology)' last time I heard it. Or maybe another cut from that. MG

'I'm the Fat Man' doesn't have the original version of 'Rockin' with Big John', because it's compiled from RCA Victor masters. The Dusty Groove spiel says it's MOSTLY from RCA. The RCA version isn't a patch on the original version on 'Sittin in with'. I've found the tape of the 78 my mate made in the seventies and ripped it. Anyone want a copy? MG

Yeah, like many others aiming their music at the black market, they could sell in the R&B stores as well as in the jazz stores. I'm thinking that Gerald Wilson was doing well in those stores, too, and Groove's PJ albums. And people like Ray Bryant on Sue, Cannonball on Riverside. Probably Nat, as well, 'Work song' didn't get to be a standard with no one buying it but hardcore jazz fanz. And Mango Santamania, who ALSO had the Latin-American market on his side. As did Cal Tjader. He COULDN'T have made all those albums for Fantasy if they'd been selling the best part of fuck all. MG

Groove Holmes' 45 of 'Misty' was a big hit. It got to #11 on the R&B chart and #44 on the pop chart. The album 'Soul message' got to #3 on the R&B album chart and #89 on the pop album chart. Prestige had 23 albums on either the R&B or pop charts, or both. Gene Ammons - Bad Bossa Nova 1962 Jack McDuff - Screamin' 1963 Jack McDuff - Live 1963 Groove Holmes - Soul message 1966 Groove Holmes - Livin' soul 1966 Groove Holmes - Misty (this contained the 45 version or 'Misty') 1966 Willis Jackson & Jack McDuff - Together again 1966 Don Patterson - Holiday soul 1967 Houston Person - Goodness 1970 Gene Ammons - The boss is back 1970 Charles Earland - Black talk 1970 Charles Earland - Black drops 1970 Gene Ammons - Black cat 1971 Rusty Bryant - Soul liberation 1971 Charles Earland - Livin' black 1971 Boogaloo Joe Jones - Right on brother 1971 Gene Ammons - My way 1972 Funk Inc - Funk Inc 1972 Johnny Hammond Smith - What's going on 1972 Funk Inc - Superfunk 1973 Funk Inc - Priced to sell 1975 Patrice Rushen - Before the dawn 1976 Patrice Rushen - Shout it out 1977 Not an outstandingly big haul. Over the same period (to 1977) Blue Note had fifty-seven hit albums. But if we look at the period before BN was sold to Liberty, late in 1966, only ten. Prestige had seven hits in that period and remained an independent firm until 1971. Anyway, if we're thinking in terms of normal sales, we certainly have to exclude all of those Prestige albums and also: Midnight Special; Back at the Chicken Shack; Rockin' the boat; The natural soul; Prayer Meeting; Sidewinder; A new perspective; Song for my father; Cape Verdean blues, and Search for the new land. Signing up to the Liberty sale was very good for BN's hit performance. Just as it had been for Pacific Jazz/World Pacific. Neither of Richard Bock's labels had a hit album until after they were part of Liberty. Bud Shank's 'Michelle' and Buddy Rich's swinging new band album were their first hits. Argo/Cadet did a better than either BN or Prestige in this period. Ahmad Jamal's 'But not for me: Live at the Pershing made #3 on the pop charts in 1958 and stayed on the chart for over two years - really a mega-hit - and by the end of 1966, there'd been fourteen hit albums, eight of them by Ramsey Lewis, two by Kenny Burrell; one by Ray Bryant; and three by Ahmad. But don't we have to exclude those ARTISTS' other albums, too? Doesn't having had a hit mean that subsequent releases will sell more than the general run of albums? What I think we have to look at are people like Sonny Stitt. Sonny, from the early sixties on, didn't have a manager or a recording contract. He'd fix his own gigs, all over the USA and, when he'd turn up in Chicago, New York or (rarely) in LA, he'd get on the phone to the record company bosses he knew and fix up recording sessions. And Sonny only had one hit album - 'What's new' for Roulette in 1967. But he made so many albums! For Chess, Roost, Atlantic, Prestige, PJ, Roulette, even one for Colpix. Because their bosses all knew they'd all sell profitably. I can't find where I read it, but somewhere Michael Cuscuna said that normal sales for a BN album would have been about seven thousand copies... in the first year. As we know, sales didn't stop after that, and that was true for most jazz labels. I remember it being said (by an EMI rep) in the early sixties that Decca could sell ten to twelve thousand copies of an Atlantic MJQ album IN BRITAIN!!! He didn't specify the timeframe, but I dare say it would have been a few years. Atlantic got a good deal with London on their R&B singles, albums and, no doubt, their jazz material. I doubt whether PJ got a good deal from Vogue, then Philips, or Prestige from Esquire, then EMI, I don't remember any of the Chess jazz albums being made available on either London or Pye International until they came out on Pye's budget labels. Riverside was distributed by Interdisc - a Swiss firm. I vaguely recollect that Blue Note had some kind of arrangement with some European firm in the forties/early fifties, but by the time we're talking about, all BN albums and singles in Britain were imports from the US. That would have been good for the business, but the quantities were probably small because the price in the UK was about double that of the product from the other jazz labels. But you could get damn near everything here - even Baby Face Willette and Fred Jackson's 'Hootin' in Tooting'. So BN's sales figures would have included exports. Equivalent figures from the other labels would only have included exports of albums that hadn't been released abroad. In 1967, BN mono albums cost $4.98; stereo was $5.98. I don't have a Schwann earlier than '67, but my recollection is that, until a year or so before that, the other jazz labels were priced at a dollar less. Riverside still had the old price listed in '67. So that extra dollar would probably have paid for the two days of rehearsals that Prestige (and other labels no doubt) didn't pay for. What was MU scale for rehearsals in those days. Would $2,500 have covered it for a quintet, plus the supervisor - Ike Quebec or Duke Pearson? Related to this is BN's distribution. I've got a strong impression that BN did their own distribution direct to retailers. Francis Woolf said in an interview on BBC that, for their non-hit business, they knew all their customers and they were all good payers. If I'm right about that, BN would have got more money out of each sale than the competition and still have been able to sell to retailers at a very competitive price. I'd guess retailers paid half the normal price for a BN album, more than that for other labels. Blue Note also had a couple of fiddles going. Like ALL other labels of the day, it had its own publishing companies - Blue Horizon Music and Groove Music. It was normal practice for companies to insist that the composers sign up to their publishing companies (even Duke Ellington had done that). Eventually musicians, led by Donald Byrd, who went to law school, got wise. Are these royalties three cents per track, divided between lyricist, composer and publisher? My guess is half that royalty goes to the publisher. And if it's a tune with no lyrics, three quarters. Some also got wise to the fact that, unlike all other companies, BN didn't pay royalties; their contracts specified a single cash payment for the recording. When Jimmy Smith, Donald Byrd and Lou Donaldson went looking for the money they'd earned from their hits, Francis Woolf said in the interview I heard, Alfred would say words to the effect of - fuck off, you don't get no royalties; you were paid cash. Don't forget, to a junky, more money now (which they did get from rehearsal fees) was a LOT more important than maybe money later, IF you sell big numbers. So Smith, Byrd and Donaldson fucked off to Verve and Argo. Not paying royalties, and therefore no advances on royalties, meant easy exits for the musicians. So, putting all these numbers together, we can get an approximate income from new album sales (forgetting about juke box singles which were a fairly good business for them), assuming a couple of dozen releases a year, which seems about the right order of magnitude, though I haven't checked. That'd give about $280,000 in a year. PLUS income from the sales of all their previous albums, which would decline, though slowly. MINUS, the costs of running their office - no one knows how many staff they had, but Lion and Woolf were known as poor delegators, so not many.- and storing their masters, paying their accountants and lawyers and buying toilet paper and so on. And particularly, paying for the huge wastage rate as they only seemed to issue about half the albums they made. So all those guys had to be paid for as many albums as had been issued. I'd be surprised if they'd taken home more than a couple of hundred of K a year each. Probably good money in those days, but they wouldn't have been filthy rich. Phew! MG