The Magnificent Goldberg

Absolutely right, it's not worth buying now. But 40 years ago, it was VERY difficult to pick up BB King records in England and we had to take what we could find. Too true. Even in the early '80s B B King Bihari material wasn't all that common over here. Ace had only just started up. And, much as I love B B King, there are about a hundred people I love more, so completing a collection has had to wait. MG

WHOA!!! Details, please! Yes, this is on the DVD THE BEAT Vol. 4. It's an expensive DVD compiling by Bear Family of many of the shows (maybe all) of the T.V. show THE BEAT, which was broadcast out of Dallas in the mid sixties. Shows include a lot of great stars and the backup band is headed each time by Gatemouth Brown! Freddie's on a lot of the shows and others include Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Joe Simon, Patty LaBelle, Frogman Henry, ect... a who's who of sixties blues and R&B. The best part is local redneck D.J. Hoss Allen who's a hoot and actually is too drunk to announce one of the shows so Otis Redding steps in to M.C.... We have this series for rent here at Waterloo Video (also for sale there) here in Austin. That said, don't think Blockbuster's gonna have this one. Is this the DVD? (I note to my dismay that it won't play over in Britain.) MG yes, that's it... I think there's 6 volumes so far. each has 4 shows on it i believe. Thanks, Soul Station. Now, how to get something that lets me play US DVDs is another bunch of technology I've got to get to grips with. At my age, there are diminishing returns from technology... MG I'm a tech idiot, but I think Bear Family is out of Germany...although I don't know anything beyond that. Thanks for that tip; I see Amazon Germany are flogging it. MG

Thanks very much, Steve. MG

WHOA!!! Details, please! Yes, this is on the DVD THE BEAT Vol. 4. It's an expensive DVD compiling by Bear Family of many of the shows (maybe all) of the T.V. show THE BEAT, which was broadcast out of Dallas in the mid sixties. Shows include a lot of great stars and the backup band is headed each time by Gatemouth Brown! Freddie's on a lot of the shows and others include Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Joe Simon, Patty LaBelle, Frogman Henry, ect... a who's who of sixties blues and R&B. The best part is local redneck D.J. Hoss Allen who's a hoot and actually is too drunk to announce one of the shows so Otis Redding steps in to M.C.... We have this series for rent here at Waterloo Video (also for sale there) here in Austin. That said, don't think Blockbuster's gonna have this one. Is this the DVD? (I note to my dismay that it won't play over in Britain.) MG yes, that's it... I think there's 6 volumes so far. each has 4 shows on it i believe. Thanks, Soul Station. Now, how to get something that lets me play US DVDs is another bunch of technology I've got to get to grips with. At my age, there are diminishing returns from technology... MG

Actually, I don't mind this; it's one of only 2 I've got so far from his Bihari period. The audience, though fake, is very good. If you're going to overdub an audience, at least let it be noisy and wild, which this is. It's much better than the fake audiences on most James Brown studio recordings. MG

My hardcopy Ace catalogue for 2005 only lists 6. I had a look on the Ace site, but it's hard to identify which are part of this series and which aren't. Would you mind listing them? MG

WHOA!!! Details, please! Yes, this is on the DVD THE BEAT Vol. 4. It's an expensive DVD compiling by Bear Family of many of the shows (maybe all) of the T.V. show THE BEAT, which was broadcast out of Dallas in the mid sixties. Shows include a lot of great stars and the backup band is headed each time by Gatemouth Brown! Freddie's on a lot of the shows and others include Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Joe Simon, Patty LaBelle, Frogman Henry, ect... a who's who of sixties blues and R&B. The best part is local redneck D.J. Hoss Allen who's a hoot and actually is too drunk to announce one of the shows so Otis Redding steps in to M.C.... We have this series for rent here at Waterloo Video (also for sale there) here in Austin. That said, don't think Blockbuster's gonna have this one. Is this the DVD? (I note to my dismay that it won't play over in Britain.) MG

Don't matter whose side he's on. having something to say and the articulacy to say it is what this is all about. MG No, that's wrong, because we're really all on the same side here. MG

Don't matter whose side he's on. having something to say and the articulacy to say it is what this is all about. MG

I'd forgotten Eddie worked on George's "Musart" - will get it out again tonight. Thanks for the reminder. MG

I think what people mean by Miles Davis being over-rated by the general population of popular music buyers is that they merely believe what they are told, that he is the greatest jazz musician. They have not heard enough of Miles' music, nor enough of other jazz musicians' music, to be able to make an informed judgement. Their view is, in essence, an act of faith. That does not apply to people like Celine Dion, whose music I am not conscious of ever having heard, so I'm unbiased as to her talent. There is little doubt that the average pop buyer HAS heard a large sample of her music and also of the music of her competitors and is therefore able to come to an informed judgement about her relative merit as a pop singer. So that, if indeed Celine Dion is generally ranked as the greatest in that niche of the market, it is not an act of faith and she isn't over-rated. Equally, if I, who have heard hardly any pop music for the last 40 years, were to accept that status for her, that would be an act of faith and I'd be over-rating her. MG

Aisha (sometimes spelt Aicha) is a very common name in West Africa. MG

Charles Kynard & Buddy Collette - Warm winds - World Pacific Don Patterson - Why not - Muse (with the sexiest cover ever - pity there isn't a decent copy on the web...) MG

MG

Ace has a 4 CD box called "The vintage years". But, as Dan said, there's a lot of duplication between that and the Crown LP reissues. The Ace issue I really love is one called (on LP) "King of the blues guitar" and (on CD) "Spotlight on Lucille". The album (with bonus tracks on CD) is a bunch of instrumentals that were never released until Ace got hold of them and they're fabulous! They haven't been issued elsewhere as far as I know. MG

Thanks. I'll start with that one, since it was the first to be issued by Ace and, one assumes, likely to be the first to be deleted. Though you can't tell; Ace deleted the middle of the three Slim Harpo CDs, leaving me with a hole. MG

Thirty-four years ago, I persuaded my pregnant wife to call our son Leon Spencer, after the organist - but we had a daughter. Call that a near miss... MG

AMG makes it sound as though B.B. was still signed to Kent in these years, and this a contemporaneous change in B.B.'s style. In fact, the label took tracks B.B. left in the can when he signed with Bluesway and punched them up with "contemporary" sounding overdubs, in hopes of continuing to get more money out of what they'd invested in B.B. years before. Anyway ... long live B.B. King and the Ace reissue series!!! I have little B B King RPM/Modern/Kent material. I've so far been put off buying a lot because of the very real danger of buying the same tracks over and over in different packages; I don't have handy access to a blues discography so I can sort out for myself what to get. Do all these 6 Crown reissues on Ace (plus "Spotlight on Lucille") cover the whole of B B's work for the Biharis' labels? What does one need to buy to cover that? MG

I never heard of Lineage records before. The Ray Appleton/Mel Rhyne and the Frank and Hank look good too. Cor! Where am I going to get the money from? I've got a Stitt Mosaic to buy. MG

I'm surprised you can find someone in Arizona to talk to about those albums... MG

Yah boo sucks MG

Yes, I do get the feeling that, if a chef had come in Club Harlem's room with a big birthday cake for a party in front of the stand, Lonnie and the band would immediately have swung into "Happy Birthday" without losing a beat. I have the same feeling about Jimmy Smith's "The boss" where it's clear that the band was hired to accompany the partying. There's much more of a concentration on dance grooves on "Club Mozambique", but that wasn't necessarily typical of that venue. Houston Person's "Real thing", done three years later, was very much a jam session, with all sorts of people sitting in. I think those are the only two albums recorded at Watts' Club Mozambique that have ever been released. (Grant Green did a session there in 1971 with Houston Person on sax but it seems all to have been rejected. Houston told a friend of mine that he thought the music was good, so maybe something went wrong with the sound. I'd love to hear it, though.) But, from those two albums, it's rather difficult to tell what kind of venue the club was. I've always assumed it was a straight organ room, in no way different from any in any other city at that time. If that's right, Lonnie and the band played that way because they wanted to. MG

MG

I don't think it's you; I get the same problem. The original LP was OK. From earlier comments, sounds as if the Japanese RVG is, too. Some investment needed to restore full enjoyment of the album. MG

"Not Quite Original Jazz Classics" MG