The Magnificent Goldberg

Shoeless Sam http://brownencyclopedia.tumblr.com/post/48364897997/the-case-of-shoeless-sam The Crutched Friar Tomas de Torquemada

You're right. However, the West Coast labels didn't produce 10" LPs in large numbers. Contemporary produced the largest number and most of them were on the Good Time Jazz label. I'll readily admit to there being a hole in my taste, as I like West Coast Jazz hardly at all - Hawes, Criss and Edwards are about as far as I'm prepared to go in that direction and their music is notably unlike that of Pepper, Brubeck, Mulligan et al. So I don't listen to the main West Coast players. And none of those three first mentioned players was recording albums in the early fifties. So I guess some of the West coast labels' albums COULD have been important in the development of the album concept, but I've never heard the stuff and, even if I had, couldn't form a valid judgement about it, except in terms of how quickly it sent me off to sleep, which is probably unhelpful I did mention this in my original post, of course. And yeah, Prestige's 10 inch covers are really antiquated. But I do love the photo on the three Gene Ammons 'Tenor Sax Favorites' LPs and it's much better presented on vol 3 than on 'The 78 era'. Of course, every company wanted its own 'look' and Prestige definitely had that But they were no worse than Mercer, were they? And the reverse of the sleeves was just a list of the complete catalogue, and you can see the reason for that. I don't think any label had inner sleeves in those days. At least PART of the object of selling an LP was to sell another LP. MG Bet they had nicer sleeves, too MG

Very interesting essay! I am and have always been fascinated with the early days of LPs and 10" albums in general. Regarding your first point, I would completely disagree. The fact that any album may be a compilation of sorts does not necessarily matter to the listener who experienced it in that particular presentation. The folks who bought those early 10" albums may not have known that they were compilations, and may not have had all the individual tracks from 45s or 78s or whatever. What formulates the idea of an album in someone's mind is a combination of the music, the presentation, the cover art, and how they experienced it. Discovering artistic intent after the fact does not necessarily reverse the original experience. Regarding your second point, I would argue the early Verve/Clef/Norgran issues of Afro-Cuban jazz, including recordings by Bird, Diz, Machito, and Chico O'Farrill, very much at the "cutting edge of contemporary jazz at that point. Yes, the very act of putting a bunch of singles together in a compilation is creating a programme and the label manager would do his/her best to get something that would sound good. The point I was trying to make was not that those compilations had no value beyond the greatness of the music itself to people back in the day but that there's no point NOW in reissuing them because there are loads of other and arguably better ways of listening to the music. But on the other hand, music that was deliberately produced and organised to carry an intrinsic coherent quality to the listener, does have value now, because it's from albums like those that the music business got the idea of what an album could be. So albums like 'Is it because I'm black?', 'Pet sounds', 'Sergeant Pepper' and 'What's going on' are in their different fields, direct descendants of Jug's 10" albums. Norman Granz' Latin material is very good - probably better than that, actually - but he was several years behind RCA's recordings of the Dizzy Gillespie big band; and indeed less celebrated Cuban bands who recorded for RCA in the forties. Chano Pozo didn't get to New York and suddenly discover this new stuff and say to himself, 'Hey JAZZ! I must get into this and find out what it's all about and make a name for myself.' The real cutting edge of that music happened in Cuba, not America. Americans didn't find out about it until later. MG

This is the problem, Steve. People are taking info for PRLP171 from what are legitimately assumed to be authoritative sources, but those sources don't agree with the label scans we looked at earlier. So, are those label scans that don't agree with the authoritative sources scans from second (or anyway different) pressings or are they pirates? And what pirate in his right mind would pirate this stuff anyway? So that's laughable. We know those people who've put the images on the web aren't lying, because they were trying to sell those LPs and using fictitious label scans is a sure route to trouble, so the only rational explanations are that the whole of the Prestige/Fantasy data is cocked up, or that Fantasy didn't realise Prestige had done two pressings, because no one who knew about them was around in 1979 when Ruppli did his research into the Prestige discography. The only way we can catch this is to find someone who has a copy of the LP as Ruppli/Fantasy/Jazz Disco Org says it was. According to Wiki, Joe Holiday is still alive... somewhere. MG

Thanks Jim, but Prestige 10" sleeves seldom had the correct track listing. And this is a different LP anyway - it's PRLP135, a various artists compilation, not either of the Joe Holiday LPs. MG

Struth! The world may come to an end MG

It occurs to me that, because there are pressings with different colour labels, the two pressings might actually have different content. Fantasy Records themselves, when they issued Joe Holiday's OJC CD, thought that the three track B side was correct and I dare say had some documentation to show that. If indeed those three tracks were never issued on PRLP171, the CD would have been their first issue after the original 78s came out. That seems to me to be a point they would not have missed picking up and mentioning in the sleeve, to attract buyers. Of course, there can always be mistakes, but this seems such a gross error that it's scarcely credible. I wonder how we can resolve this. MG

Never heard of it. Looks interesting. Thanks. MG

You're right! Thanks very much! So it's Jazz Disco org and the Ruppli Prestige discography that are wrong - also the sleeve notes on the OJC CD, which all say that side B is just three tracks by Joe Holiday, not 4 by Billy Taylor. How could all those organisations get it wrong? Or did they just repeat the same mistake? MG

Well, I hate to say this, but I've NEVER experienced a problem buying a record by mail. However, when buying an LP right there, live in the shop, in Harrow in 1969. I managed to acquire Al Casey's Swingville LP 'Buck jumpin' only to find, when I got back home to Brighton a few days later and played it, that the LP had a hairline crack right through. When I played it, I could hear sixty-six clicks per minute, worked out where it was and found it after close examination. After a few years, I got a tape recorder and taped it, because it was sounding more obvious by then, and just played that. And then a CD in due course. It wasn't a lot of money, as I recall; I was on the dole then and couldn't afford big money and had visited Dobells earlier in the same trip. But it was... how the bleedin' 'ell could you do this to yourself, you cretin!!!!!! But it's still one of my favourite albums ever. MG

Thanks for the hint, Jazztrain. Never knew I could do that before. Actually, it looks as if that is side A - the length of the words seems to fit with Sleep Besame mucho I don't want to walk without you Fiesta So I seem to be no farther forward except I can eliminate that image as being helpful. MG It seems pretty strange that the same LP would be pressed with blue and red labels. Surely this LP couldn't have sold out of its first pressing run and gone into a second? Or could it? MG

It seems important to realise that, throughout the whole history of the recording industry, technological developments have had a great impact on what music was recorded. What has always been presented to the public, in every field of music, has been a combination of the music that performers created, what was possible for the contemporary technology to reproduce and what seemed like it would sell; these three broad factors operating a kind of feedback loop driving ideas. Most of the technological developments, and all the big ones, were made by hardware engineers, but a few, for example the development of the echo chamber (and no one used that so effectively and so beautifully as Gene Ammons), were made by software engineers; the people who ran the recording studios. Records and record players were the world’s first precision engineered mass consumer product. Guns were earlier, of course, but guns are supposed to be used by people trained in their use, care and maintenance, not amateurs who’d complain if they couldn’t make the thing work and change their purchases to the goods of a rival. Soldiers don’t have any say in what guns their army buys, or in whom they point them at; but consumers of these products had to be cosseted. The engineering of these products itself formed another kind of feedback loop; an improvement at any point requiring a host of other changes to ensure that the whole thing worked together in a way that consumers could operate without skill and gain some kind of satisfaction thereby. Unfortunately, jazz historians (and probably historians of other kinds of music) pay little attention to considering the impact of engineering development on the music that is produced; what is or becomes successful as a result and attracts adherents, influences other musicians and imitators; what is or becomes unsuccessful, loses adherents and drops out of sight. It’s too easy to think of great musicians purely as great men, thinking great thoughts and causing revolutions. But that isn’t what real life is like. These thoughts were prompted by the recent thread on the reissue of a series of ten inch Blue Note LPs. It seemed strange to me that so many of them were not really albums but compilations of (admittedly great) singles, which were intended to stand alone and not form parts of a programme. Programmes in those days were things put together by DJs, selecting music reflecting partly what they thought suitable for the time of day their broadcasts went out, and partly the needs of advertisers, the preferences of radio station bosses and the payola they received from record companies (all real life is compromise). It was not something that had ever had to be thought about by recording managers. So most of the early LPs were no more than LPs; not ALBUMS. So those LPs were and remain only worthwhile for the individual tracks they contained, not as things that have intrinsic interest in themselves. And since the individual tracks are available in plenty of other formats, I didn’t think the companies reissuing the material now have much idea of what they were doing, and particularly, what they were missing. The concept of the ALBUM was not brought into being automatically by the development of microgroove records. The word album relates back to the first collections of music issued in books of 78s. Most of them were compilations of 78s but some were indeed ALBUMS. Classical music albums were mostly ALBUMS, as were albums of original cast performances of songs from Broadway shows. No creative thought about how you put them together was required on the part of the recording managers; that thought had been done in advance, by Tchaikovsky or Rogers and Hammerstein. So too had the few early albums of live jazz concerts, such as the JATP concerts that were reissued on Stinson twelve inch 78 albums, and the sermons of Rev C L Franklin recorded on three and four record albums by Joe Von Battle. Long play microgroove LPs began to come out in 1948, and initially the market was mainly for the ten inch variety. By the end of 1952, Mercury was selling 10 ten inch LPs for every one twelve inch. This situation lasted – for the majors anyway – until the end of 1954. During 1955, the ten inch format almost completely lost favour relative to the twelve inch. By the end of 1956, the ten inch format was pretty much dead. Most of the jazz companies started making twelve inch LPs in 1955. However, we have this interesting period from 1948-54 when the ten inch LP was king. Almost all the main jazz companies were issuing ten inch LPs. Like the majors, the jazz indies don’t seem to have known what to do with this revolutionary new format. The majors seem to have contented themselves with making LPs that were compilations of singles. And a great number of LPs were issued by the indies using that formula. The LPs sold well – there’s much great music in them. But some of those companies, many of which were at the cutting edge of jazz development, tried to experiment and see what could be done with this new long play microgroove thing. It seems strange – or ought to seem strange – that not all jazz companies experimented because jazz had been in a ferment for five years and it obviously hadn’t worked itself out yet. So there was definite scope in the market for new ideas. So which were these labels documenting as they could the new developments in jazz in this period? Four were on the West Coast, exploring the music of new musicians who were soon enough dubbed ‘West Coasters’; Contemporary, Discovery, Fantasy and Pacific Jazz. Several were in New York; Roost, Bethlehem (though these two labels made fewer than 60 ten inch LPs between them), Blue Note and Prestige. Chess in Chicago didn’t make any LPs until 1955, and issued them in 1956 in the twelve inch format of their new label, Argo. Verve, Riverside, Atlantic and Savoy were issuing ten inch LPs, but in those days were hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary jazz; Charlie Parker with strings was the nearest Norman Granz came to making developmental albums. Riverside’s ten inch issues were mainly compilations of very interesting material from Paramount. Atlantic was mainly interested in reissuing old material and in lounge pianists and singers like Mabel Mercer. Savoy was mainly reissuing material, Jazz, Gospel and R&B, as well. However, it seems that Herman Lubinsky made a mistake in relying too greatly on Kenny Clarke to look after contemporary jazz albums; Clarke’s conservative, very musician-like, way of doing things was exactly what wasn’t needed in a time of experiment. The West Coast labels were new labels and issued relatively few contemporary jazz ten inch LPs, though Good Time Jazz issued a good many Dixieland albums, but it’s not clear to me what thought the label bosses put into their programming, as I don’t like that West Coast Jazz. So, in the end, I see the significant jazz labels in this period as being Blue Note and Prestige. Blue Note issued 100 ten inch LPs; Prestige 140. Blue Note Thirty of Blue Note’s LPs were Dixieland recordings, reissued on the 1200 series. A good many of the 3000 series were also reissues, or material licensed from other producers, mostly in Europe. It would be heart-warming to think that Alfred Lion paid great attention to the selection of tunes on his material that was probably produced bearing the new format in mind. The first of them was Miles Davis’ ‘Young man with a horn’ (BLP5013), but Mr Lion showed his true interest when he reissued this, with other material and alternative takes on two twelve inch LPs, messing up any potential feeling of the material having any coherent order. I’ve got to say the Horace Silver’s ‘New faces, new sounds' (BLP5018) does actually sound as if someone was in control of the coherence of the album; it plays through very well indeed. But again, Mr Lion destroyed that coherence in the twelve inch reissue. One has to ask, if it mattered to him in 1953, why it didn’t matter any more a couple of years later. And there’s no real answer to that except to assume that, despite appearances, it didn’t matter in 1953. BLP5034, the follow up, suffered a similar fate. However, the reissue of the two LPs on CD has put the story the right way around, keeping the two original running orders. And the story was repeated on the Lou Donaldson-Clifford Brown LP, ‘New faces, new sounds’ (BLP5030) which was only incompletely reissued on BLP1526. As was Clifford Brown’s own LP, ‘New star on the horizon’ (BLP5032). It’s easy to argue that the material wouldn’t fit onto twelve inch LPs, so Mr Lion did the best he could, under the circumstances. I think the answer to that is that he did the best he could, given his fanatical attachment to the music itself, rather than any particular interest in albums as carrying specific messages in themselves. The story changes when we get to February 1954 and the live recording of the Art Blakey Quintet at Birdland. Ideally, one would programme a live album in the same order that was played on stage. However, time constraints prevented this, so Lion had to arrange the tracks the way they’d go. Just or fun, yesterday, I ripped the 1987 CDs to my hard drive and rearranged the tracks into the take order, as per the Ruppli discography. Well, I THINK if makes quite a nice session, but four announcements of the next song have been edited into the end of the previous track, so the announcements for ‘Quicksilver’, ‘Once in a while’, ‘If I had you’ and ‘Night in Tunisia’ appear at the start of four other tunes! This is somewhat disconcerting. It doesn’t matter, of course, when you’re listening to the Blue Note track order because, although each of the 4 editions of the session has got its tracks in a somewhat different order, in every one, ‘Once in a while’ is followed by ‘Quicksilver’ and ‘Once in a while’ always follows ‘Split kick’. That didn’t apply to ‘Night in Tunisia’ or ‘If I had you’, however, which have had to have their intros reassigned! A bit of thought, or care and attention, in the editing of the CD tracks would have placed the announcements at the beginning of the relevant tracks so that, when someone wanted to listen to the music in the order played at Birdland (not TOO eccentric an ambition), the result would be seamless. That applies to Pee Wee Marquette’s intro, which should have had a separate track listing, and to the seque into ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ at the end (instead of appearing at the end of track 3). The intro, as I expect everyone has noticed, is not for the first set, as Pee Wee said they were bringing the band BACK to the stand. Was there no intro for set 1? Anyway, whatever the running order, this was a ground-breaking recording and one has to say that Mr Lion did good work in organising this kind of live session as early in the LP era as he did. Of course, there’d been live jazz recordings before, but this was the world’s introduction to hard bop; the real thing. What was clear was that the LP, notwithstanding the constraints applied by the limited time of the ten inch format, was very suitable for this type of work. As far as studio material was concerned, he obviously knew he had to do something, or he wouldn’t have bothered juggling the tracks around at all. But the secret of making money is knowing what to do and how to do it and Lion was far too concerned with the quality of music to give much attention to the quality of albums. Prestige Prestige was, by comparison with Blue Note, a pretty new kid on the block. But Bob Weinstock had had experiences Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf hadn’t had, because he’d been brought up in a time and place in which jazz records (good, indifferent and pretty bad) formed the majority of the most popular records, and even jazz records that were very good indeed were best sellers. As a result, he was always looking for big selling records. During the ten inch era, he had two big ideas for albums. The first was to create good programmes of music that listeners could play and feel comfortable with. The second was music for house parties; specifically two track albums geared to not terribly spectacular, but pretty enjoyable for the participants, dancing. On the first idea, the prime exponent of the jolly nice programme was Gene Ammons. Miles Davis was his main man for the second, and later Ammons once more. Prestige reissued a bunch of mostly pretty famous singles by the Ammons/Stitt band under the title of ‘Battle of the saxes’ (PR107), probably in 1951. They’d all been recorded in 1950, for release as singles. Gotta say, this doesn’t really play all that well when you assemble it from CD compilations; there’s a bit too much of one thing and comparatively little of the other; no balance, in other words. Tenor sax favourites vol 1 (PR112) is a very different kettle of fish. This one, too, was assembled from sessions held on several dates in 1950. But boy, it’s a lovely album when you reassemble it. So, too, is vol 2 (PR127), which came out in 1952, except that a tenor battle with Sonny – ‘New blues up and down’ – was included. The rest of vol 2 is a compilation drawn from two 1951 dates. It would have been better to have included the whole of the January date – Jug’s vocal on ‘Round abut one AM’ was replaced by the tenor battle. But it’s still pretty nice. Vol 3 (PR149) from 1953 is the best of the trio. The complete contents of two sessions in August and November 1951, this album represents Jug at his best and doing the work for which he deservedly became the most loved jazzman in the black community. Even ‘When the saints go marching in’ comes out as a true Jug performance, complete with ‘I dream of Jeannie’ quote! Gene equalled this album fairly frequently in later years, particularly between his two prison sentences, when he consistently made the best recordings of his life, but never bettered it. The first experiment in one track LP sides was by neither of the musicians who came to dominate the field; it was an album by Zoot Sims; ‘Swingin’ with Zoot’ PRLP 117. Recorded in August 1951, with only two tracks: ‘Zoot swings the blues’ (8:43) and ‘East of the sun’ (11:05). It probably issued in 1953. By April 1954, Weinstock had the confidence to make two Miles Davis albums with long party tracks; ‘Miles Davis quintet’ PRLP185, featuring two short and one long (‘I’ll remember April’) tracks, recorded on the third, and ‘Miles Davis’ (PRLP182) featuring ‘Walkin’’ and ‘Blue ‘n boogie’. A two album session in December 1954 followed: ‘Miles Davis All Stars’ vols 1 (PRLP196) and 2 (PRLP200) issued in 1955. In June 1955, the first of several Gene Ammons jam sessions ‘Gene Ammons All Stars’ (PRLP211) was recorded, featuring ‘Juggernaut’ and ‘Woofin’ and tweetin’. This was one of the last 10 inch LPs Prestige issued, a bit past the prime period for those LPs, but it must have sold well, as Weinstock only recorded Gene Ammons in jam session settings after that date until his first prison term. Until the ‘Juggernaut’ session, Jug had been dealt with by Prestige as a singles artist and his first three albums as a sole leader had been collections of previously issued singles (though, as noted earlier, the last two sessions before June 1955 had clearly been planned to work as an album, which they do). The sleeve notes to Ammons’ ‘The happy blues’ by Ira Gitler, gave Weinstock’s game away. He was looking for a pure, unplanned, wild improvisation such as he got at the end of ‘Madhouse’. Miles was really the wrong person for this; a very deliberate musician, Mr Davis. Jug could do it – though actually, I don’t think it was really his thing and that those jam session albums don’t show the real Jug, as “Tenor sax favorites’ vols 2 and 3, and almost all of his recordings between his two prison terms, do. But all of those albums, it seems to me, would be really useful to reissue in their original format. They record major components of the development of the jazz ALBUM, and eased musicians’ and companies’ thinking away from singles to albums. In contrast, of the ten inch Blue Note LPs recently reissued •Milt Jackson - Wizard of the Vibes •Fats Navarro - Memorial Album •Miles Davis - Young Man With A Horn •Miles Davis - Vol. 2 •Miles Davis - Vol. 3 •Elmo Hope - Elmo Hope Quintet •Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music Vol. 1 •Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music Vol. 2 •Hank Mobley - Hank Mobley Quartet •Horace Silver - Horace Silver •Jutta Hipp - New Faces, New Sounds from Germany •JJ Johnson - Jay Jay Johnson •Gil Melle - New Faces, New Sounds •Clifford Brown - New Star on the Horizon •Sal Salvador - Sal Salvador Quintet Only a couple SEEM to have been planned as albums but, in the light of subsequent events, can be seen as practically random sorting into the tracking order on the discs. No doubt the music is great, or at least very interesting but, given the randomness of the selections, one’s forced to the conclusion that the real meat of the LPs resides solely in the quality of the music. But, if that’s all that there is of interest in them, there are plenty of other ways to listen satisfactorily to them. End of rant. MG

Michael Flanders Donald Swann Marcel Proust

Auntie BBC Cousin Joe Uncle Funky

I'm just about to rip my Joe Holiday CD, which contains Joe Holiday - New sounds from Newark - PRLP131 4 tracks from Various artists - Mambo Jazz - PRLP135 Joe Holiday and his band - PREP1305 Joe Holiday and Billy Taylor - Mambo Jazz - PRLP171 What I'm looking for, for PRLP131 and 171, are the track listings, so I can reassemble the original material into it's correct running order. But someone's made big mistakes somewhere on 171 (and I can't find a scan of the label for 131 side B). So does anyone know of a proper authoritative source? This is what I've got so far. Ruppli's Prestige discography (and the Jazz discog project on line) say that tracks on 171 are: Joe Holiday - 9 Dec 1953 Sleep Besame mucho I don't want to walk without you Fiesta Joe Holiday - 25 Aug 1954 I love you much Chasin' the bongo It might as well be spring And these are the tracks on the OJC CD. This should be an authoritative list. Here's a scan of side A of the LP So that's the 9 Dec '53 session OK. However, the sleeve of the LP has eight titles listed - as frequently happened at Prestige, not in the correct order. Yes, the four tracks on side A are in there, along with Candido I love the mambo Early morning mambo Mambo azul Which, according to both discographies, are 4 Billy Taylor tracks from 7 May 1953, which were included in PREP1327 and (12 inch) PRLP7071. Here's the EP And Popsike has this image of PRLP171 - with a RED label! Unfortunately, it's too small to read the label. So, what's actually on side B of PRLP171 - 3 tracks, as per the discographies, or 4 that are supposed to be elsewhere, as per the LP sleeve? Anyone know? And anyone know how to see a scan of side B of PRLP131, so I can get the running order for that one straight? MG

Yeah, I've got it It's about as crummy an album as one could possibly imagine four great musicians making with the inimitable assistance of Claus Ogerman and Creed Taylor. And GOD ALMIGHTY, it cost me fifteen sodding pounds!!!!! MG Just noticed the sleeve doesn't mention the sidemen who are: Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb. I hope they were paid well.

Johnny Rivers Little Niles Mississippi John Hurt

EL Manisero Moises Simon Ol Man Mose

Painting by Gustave Moreau. Read 'Against nature' by Joris-Karl Huysmans for a scorching review. Here's the composer standing in front of another version of the painting by Moreau, apparently the US issue of the LP. MG

Archduke Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria Princess Stephanie of Belgium (his Missus) Baroness Marie Alexandrine von Vetsera (his mistress, with whom he died in a suicide pact in 1889)

Tito Rodriguez Tito Puente Pooh

Noel Gordon General Gordon of Khartoum The Mahdi

They don't own our local beer (Yet.) (It doesn't travel well. It's even crap in London.) MG

Fun and funny. MG

Tiny Grimes Phil The Greek Filthy McNasty