The Magnificent Goldberg

Bobby Ellis & the Professionals meet the Revolutionaries - Black unity - Third World Junior Parker & Jimmy McGriff - Chicken fried soul - United Artists Willis Jackson - Neapolitan nights - Prestige Gene Ammons - Night lights - Prestige MG

Tangent: How scarce are hens' teeth? Why is that a metaphor? Any chicken farmers here? I'm a city boy. Hens don't have teeth. MG

Horace Parlan - the whole set this morning (and a good chunk of this afternoon, I imagine). MG

Illinois Jacquet and his tenor sax (his complete Aladdin sessions) MG

See how impressed I was? MG

Best news I've heard all day. Me too - thanks for that very welcome piece of info, Chuck. MG

Best news I've heard all day. Me too - thanks for that very welcome piece of info, Chuck. MG

These two LPs are available on one CD from Fantasy - oops Concord Juan Amalbert's Latin Jazz Quintet - Hot sauce" Prestige PRCD24128 VERY NICE STUFF. MG

What an interesting thread. Not too many have looked at Soul Jazz musicians. Here's my list of my most played jazz musicians. GRANT GREEN – COMPLETE QUARTETS WITH SONNY CLARK HOUSTON PERSON – UNDERGROUND SOUL DAVID NEWMAN – DAVEY BLUE HANK CRAWFORD – THE WORLD OF HANK CRAWFORD GENE AMMONS – GROOVIN’ WITH JUG LOU DONALDSON – ALLIGATOR BOGALOO LES MCCANN – SWISS MOVEMENT CHARLES EARLAND – LEAVING THIS PLANET WILLIS JACKSON – BAR WARS SONNY STITT – JUST THE WAY IT WAS: LIVE AT THE LEFT BANK STANLEY TURRENTINE – ROUGH ‘N TUMBLE JACK MCDUFF – THE HONEYDRIPPER JIMMY SMITH – HOME COOKIN’ RICHARD 'GROOVE' HOLMES – ON BASIE’S BANDSTAND JIMMY MCGRIFF – THE STARTING FIVE (just pipping The main squeeze) JOHN PATTON – THE WAY I FEEL LONNIE SMITH – TOO DAMN HOT DON PATTERSON – BROTHERS FOUR RAY CHARLES – GENIUS + SOUL = JAZZ LIVE PHAROAH SANDERS - REJOICE JR MANCE – BLUE MANCE SHIRLEY SCOTT – SOUL SONG SONNY CRISS - CRISSCRAFT KENNY BURRELL – MIDNIGHT BLUE JOHNNY 'HAMMOND' SMITH – BLACK FEELIN’ KING CURTIS – LIVE AT SMALL’S PARADISE TEDDY EDWARDS – BLUE SAXOPHONE DEXTER GORDON – AT MONTREUX NAT ADDERLEY – WORKIN’ ILLINOIS JACQUET – THE SOUL EXPLOSION JAMES BROWN – PLAYS JAMES BROWN TODAY & YESTERDAY RED HOLLOWAY – THE BURNER JIMMY PONDER – TO REACH A DREAM BLUE MITCHELL – SOUL VILLAGE JOHNNY LYTLE – PEOPLE & LOVE RUSTY BRYANT – FIRE EATER HANK MOBLEY - WORKOUT CHRIS CONNOR – CHRIS CRAFT HORACE SILVER - & THE JAZZ MESSENGERS EDDIE 'LOCKJAW' DAVIS – COOKBOOK (can I have the set?) CHARLES KYNARD – SOUL BROTHERHOOD PUCHO & THE LATIN SOUL BROTHERS – GROOVIN’ HIGH MELVIN SPARKS - SPARKLING ART BLAKEY – A NIGHT AT BIRDLAND FRED WESLEY – SWING AND BE FUNKY MONGO SANTAMARIA – MONTREUX HEAT JOHN COLTRANE – LIVE AT BIRDLAND GERALD WILSON – YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT BOOGALOO JOE JONES – SNAKE RHYTHM ROCK MILT JACKSON – SOUL BELIEVER FREDDIE ROACH – ALL THAT’S GOOD IDRIS MUHAMMAD – BLACK RHYTHM REVOLUTION JIMMY FORREST – SIT DOWN AND RELAX MACEO PARKER – LIFE ON PLANET GROOVE JAZZ CRUSADERS – LIGHTHOUSE ‘68 BOBBY TIMMONS – CHICKEN & DUMPLIN’S ROOSEVELT 'BABY FACE' WILLETTE – (all of them, but...) BEHIND THE 8 BALL HAMPTON HAWES – AT THE PIANO REUBEN WILSON – THE SWEET LIFE CORNELL DUPREE – TEASIN’ ARNETT COBB – SMOOTH SAILING WES MONTGOMERY – BOSS GUITAR WILD BILL DAVIS – THE ZURICH CONCERT BERNARD PURDIE – SOUL TO JAZZ VOLS 1 & 2 IKE QUEBEC – HEAVY SOUL CANNONBALL ADDERLEY – MERCY, MERCY, MERCY GEORGE FREEMAN –GEORGE BURNS PLAS JOHNSON – KEEP THAT GROOVE GOIN’ (with Red Holloway) CURTIS AMY - KATANGA ABDULLAH IBRAHIM – WATER FROM AN ANCIENT WELL ETTA JONES – MY BUDDY SONNY PHILLIPS – MY BLACK FLOWER JOE HENDERSON – CANYON LADY LARRY YOUNG – GROOVE STREET DONALD BYRD - BLACKJACK GEORGE BENSON – BEYOND THE BLUE HORIZON PEE WEE ELLIS – 12 AND MORE BLUES RANDY JOHNSTON – WALK ON GENE LUDWIG – SOUL SERENADE DON WILKERSON – (all of them – OK) THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTES GROVER WASHINGTON JR – MR MAGIC BILL HEID – WET STREETS HAROLD MABERN – KISS OF FIRE JOHNNY GRIFFIN – GRAB THIS MEL RHYNE - CLASSMASTERS DUKE ELLINGTON – PIANO IN THE FOREGROUND BOOKER ERVIN – THE BLUES BOOK MILT BUCKNER – GREEN ONIONS WINARD HARPER - FAITH LEE MORGAN – SONIC BOOM WYNTON KELLY – SMOKIN’ AT THE HALF NOTE DIZZY GILLESPIE – SWING LOW SWEET CADILLAC PAUL BRYANT – SOMETHIN’S HAPPENIN’ BILL DOGGETT – WOW! HORACE PARLAN – US 3 FUNK INC – HANGIN’ OUT FREDDIE MCCOY – LONELY AVENUE CHARLES MINGUS – AH UM BENNIE GREEN – WALKING DOWN BILLY BUTLER – NIGHT LIFE MG

MG

Lou Donaldson - Blowing in the wind - Cadet Wild Bill Davis - One more time - Coral (UK edition) MG

There are DOZENS of unavailable Rhoda Scott albums, originally recorded by Barclay, now owned by Universal. Yippeeeeeee! MG

Inez Andrews & the Andrewettes - The need of prayer - Disques Vogue Bishop Jeff Banks & the Revival Temple Mass Coir - The righteous - Savoy Milt Buckner & Buddy Tate - Midnight slows vol 4 - Black & Blue MG

Thanks for that link Chris. Interesting. MG

I haven't loaned out anything since I lent someone at work the first Fatback Band LP in the '70s and got it back scratched. MG

And there's the wonderful "Hog maws, false start" on Lou Donaldson's "Lightfoot", which has a lovely argument and was included in the original issue of the LP. I've never heard that Lou was on drugs, however. I doubt if they're a necessary precondition to an argument. MG

Do you know if his mama is? Do you know anything about this? What about the players that have deals that paid them only for the session? Does it change the dialogue when the benficiary is a shrewd & opportunistic producer? [Not you, Mr. Nessa. I am talking about Lomax-level deals.] Not only Lomax. Francis Wolff visited Europe in the summer of 1970, to produce Hank Mobley’s “The Flip” in Paris, and was interviewed on the BBC’s jazz programme one Sunday night. He explained what happened at Blue Note in the '60s. Blue Note was a company with high standards. (Normal first year sales of their albums were about 7,000. The breakeven point was about 2,500. But only about half the albums the company recorded came out at the time. Clearly, the company was profitable, since the records would sell for years, or decades, but not spectacularly so.) Alfred and Francis wanted to record the musicians they thought were best. To manage that, they needed to offer the musicians something they couldn’t get from other companies; and to do so within very tight budgets. They came up with the idea of a cash payment that would be greater than the standard Musicians Union scale. The kick was that there were to be no royalties. All went well until Jimmy Smith, Donald Byrd and Lou Donaldson got LPs onto the pop album charts. Not having read their contracts, they went to Blue Note and asked for their royalties and were told, and I quote, “fuck off, you don’t get no royalties; you were paid cash!” MG

I worked out in 1959 that some record copanies were particularly good at making records I liked; Atlantic and Chess to start off with. I couldn't work out why that should be so and guessed that the proprietors were fans. But I suspect that what you saw may have been a local phenomenon, because as I've read more biographical material on these guys (almost none on Bob Weinstock, however), I found out that at least as many of them were not fans as were. Herman Lubinsky was reckoned to have no taste in music - went mad when he heard Phil Guilbeau's Bebop solo in Paul Williams' "The hucklebuck". But others say he had good taste in Gospel music and, indeed, though it was the market leader for Bebop in the '40s, Savoy is more to be revered as the greatest Gospel label, with Malaco and Rev Milton Biggham continuing where Lubinsky and Fred Mendelson left off in the late '70s. The same appears to be true of the Chess brothers, who weren't great fans and treated Muddy Waters like shit - Sid Nathan, owner of King records (another who wasn't a fan) records that he visited Chess to find Muddy painting the house because, "Mr Chess said if I do a good job painting the house, we're going to eat tonight". It's also true of Art Rupe, who owned Specialty; The Bihari family, who owned Modern; The Mesner brothers, who owned Aladdin; and Don Robey, who owned Peacock. I think it's noteworthy that none of these others (apart from Lubinsky) was based in the New York area and perhaps the fact that the New Yorkers did all know each other and swapped 78s (which I never knew before) contributed to the initial impetus for each to start up a record company. They also all had before them the example of Milt Gabler at Commodore. I guess that was a place where they all bought records. I do agree with you that they earned their bonuses when they sold their companies (those that did). All of them, fans or not, were pioneers in something that, on the face of it, was highly risky in the '40s; black music of one sort or another. The world would have been a very different place had it been left to Decca, Victor and Columbia. MG

I answered "yes" to the first question, although I've never done it with CDs - but I did do it a bit with LPs in the seventies. I've subsequently purchased almost all that I taped; though there are still a few things that, even after a couple of decades, I'm still looking for. It's clearly illegal but I'm not convinced it's unethical to tape recordings that you can't buy legitimately. Over the last fifteen/twenty years, I have bought illegal tapes of Senegalese music. It is common practice in Senegal for legitimate retailers to retain a copy of a K7 that is about to be deleted so that they can tape further copies for customers who want the recording. K7 runs have a fairly limited life there, partly because BSDA - the Senegalese copyright office - makes the producers pay royalties in advance on the numbers manufactured, not on sales. Consequently, deletions invariably occur before the market has been fully supplied, since the risk to the producers, which is thereby greater to Senegalese producers than to those in the US, mounts with every duplication run. If the industry in Senegal were not prepared to put up with this, they could pretty soon prosecute and close down all the legitimate retailers in the country. I have to say that a market response to a deliberate commercial decision by producers not to sell their goods any more is not unethical. Indeed, I'd argue that ethics don't enter into it. As to the third question, I don't undertand it; I don't know about these things. MG

I'm most grateful to Chris & Chuck for that illuminating little discussion. I think we pay far too little attention to the people who do whatever it's called to get recorded music out into the world. People like Bob have always fascinated me. MG

Thanks - that's roughly what Ira Gitler noted in "The happy blues". But did that mean he thought the records produced by Esmond, Ozzie Cadena, Cal Lampley, Bob Porter & Don Schlitten were in some way inferior because they didn't have that approach? MG I am not aware of how those producers' approaches varied from Bob's "supervision". Porter produced a lot of organ albums - did he tell the musicians what to play? Were those sessions any less of a jam than a lot of the dates that had Weinstock's name on them? He certainly decided on who was going to play - many of the leaders he produced didn't have working bands, or their regular people weren't up to much (eg Rusty Bryant, Boogaloo Joe Jones), so he put them with one of his standard rhythm sections - which changed over the time he was producing at Prestige - depending on who he thought would hit it off best together - eg Pretty Purdie with Boogaloo Joe Jones. I'm pretty sure that some of the popular material on those albums was included as a result of his suggestions. But, of course, the originals were either brought to the session by the musicians or written on the spot. Sometimes that happened to the popular material; Bob wrote the sleeve note for Jones' "My Fire" and said: ""Take all"... is not the tune as written but more or less an adaptation. Harold Mabern, when asked to dig up a lead sheet could only find a copy of the record so this was transcribed for use on the date." It seems clear that Bob asked for the tune to be included. But he was still credited as "supervisor" on the sleeve. I can't say I know the difference, if he was picking at least some of the material, between supervising and producing. And of course, I would say that many of those albums are Soul Jazz classics. I still wonder what Bob W thought of them. Course, quite a few made big money for him... MG

Thanks - that's roughly what Ira Gitler noted in "The happy blues". But did that mean he thought the records produced by Esmond, Ozzie Cadena, Cal Lampley, Bob Porter & Don Schlitten were in some way inferior because they didn't have that approach? MG

Yeah, it's 'cause I'm an "old guy". Home taping means you can make your own copies for your own use - like a cassette to play in your car. Time to grow up. See, to me there's a big difference between buring a copy of a friend's CD and illegally uploading that same CD to the internet via a file sharing service. We're talking about friends sharing the music they enjoy with one another (Remember sharing? It was an important concept back in Kindergarten), not sharing it with the entire world. Illegal downloading is bad because it is illegally *distributing* someone else's music (accross state lines and all that). What I'm talking about is *one* guy making *one* copy for himself. To play in the car, so to speak. How about this one: A good friend of mine is a music theory professor. He makes copies of copyrighted music available to his students for use in his class. They can borrow the (burned) CDs from the library and make their own copies. I believe he also makes sound files for them to download. Is this bad too? The copyright thing in a classroom has some very specific differences with copyright laws out in the real world. Even though I'm a teacher, I still haven't figured it all out. But even if I don't follow the letter of the copyright law, I like to think that I follow the spirit of the law. If your friend, the theory professor is putting one burned copy on reserve in the library for the students to have access to, that doesn't seem to be too much of an offense. I would hope that his policy would be to discourage his students from making more copies. Just as if he put his original on reserve, he should tell his students not to make illegal copies. After that, the responsibility is on the students (and I'm sure the students would do the right thing ) Another difference is with regard to sheet music. Most public school band directors I know NEVER distribute original parts to kids. They always make copies for distribution (I believe the copyright laws have specific guidelines for copying for educational purposes). Likewise, if they purchase a piece for thier band and the piece comes with 8 clarinet parts, but thier band has 27 clarinets (clearly a different kind of problem) they make enough copies to give to each kid. Getting back to the original situation of two friends copying music for each other, yes it's illegal. Yes, to some extent it's immoral. But the world of music distribution is in such a profound state of flux that I think ultimately new laws, policies and procedures are going to be enacted to account for the digital/internet kinds of issues we're facing. When we were talking about making a cassette dub of an LP or CD, it was generally understood that the cassette would entail a compromise in sound quality. Usually if someone gave me a cassette, and it turned out to be music that I wanted to listen to, I would seek out an LP/CD original of my own. With digital copies the difference in sound quality between originals and copies is minimal or non-existant, so it's a different matter. Bottom line is the bottom line. People are trying to make a living in the music bidness. If copying means that one less sale is made, then that's a bad thing. Not to mention the karmic debt one my incur... I agree. But I recollect, in relation to home taping, that the record industry did a bit of market research and discovered that the people who did the most home taping were the ones who bought the most records. following that, I gather the industry tended to soft pedal on home taping - after all, they ran the risk of pissing off their best customers - and concentrate on real pirates. Does the industry yet know what the effect of new technology is on all this? I doubt it. MG

So, do you know what he was thinking, then? MG

Bob ran a great record company - the greatest in my collection - but actually, I don't think he was all that great a producer. Basically, his production technique seems to have been to ensure that the requisite musicians (or subs - see "The happy blues" sleeve notes) turned up at Rudy's and let them play more or less what they liked. Some fabulous albums were produced that way but, long term, that was a limited approach. I find it interesting that Bob stopped producing just at the point where the company's main direction was changing to Soul Jazz; Esmond's first production occurred just after Bob had produced the first two Shirley Scott albums and Jaws' "Cookbook" vol 1. I wonder if Bob thought that type of music needed a more "hands on" production style? MG