The Magnificent Goldberg

Brick Brass Construction Vogon Constructor Fleet

Earlier Bill Hardman - Politely - Muse now Sonny Stitt - My buddy - Muse next Erskine Hawkins - Swingin' in Harlem - Vocalion (Tax Sweden) MG

Not really trivial, Steve. Though I DO wonder what the album's like MG

Some VERY belated input as I had been made aware of this thread only now: There is at least one other LP by him: "The Feminine Sax" - The Dayton Selby Trio featuring WiIlene Barton (Design DLP 37).. recorded some time in the late 50s (so the discographies say). Will have to give it a closer listen again ... According to discographies, four more tracks by Dayton Selby (org) and Willene Barton (ts) were on an RCA Victor LP in 1957. UPDATE: Ha - just checked that RCA Victor LP online, and it is one I actually have: "Teenagers Dance" (Victor LPM 1540, a compilation party-type LP to cash in on the teen r'n'r craze, also featuring studio (?) group obscurities "The Kids" and "Jimmy Sedlar"). Not earth-shaking but a nice document of its times that goes fairly well with the "Big Beat" R'nR of those years. The Selby-Barton tracks come across like the RCA in-house version of Bill Doggett and the "Big Beat" sax blowers like Sam The Man Taylor, Plas Johnson, Al Sears, etc. Goodness, now you mention it, I seem to remember my friend had an EP from that RCA LP, just featuring the Barton tracks. And, to pinch a phrase from James Brown, 'Good Gawd!' - never HEARD of that Design album! MG

Don't know if you saw it at the time, but this thread covers some of the R&B/Jazz nexus. MG

Oh, please do! MG

I remember the name J Pinkerton Snoopington. Must have seen that film back in the days when I watched TV. But I don't remember Filthy McNasty. MG

Wow!!!!! Bloomin' 'eck, Tucker! Horace would have been of the right age group to have got Fields in the immediacy of his popularity, I guess. Illumines the important point that great artists are, usually though not invariably, as human as the rest of us. MG

I don't search at all. But I think I'm eccentric MG

You must have corrected it while I was writing I was referring to the 120th arrondisement. MG

Mrs Jones Jimmy Forrest Al Grey

Ho ho, you've corrected it now MG

Yeah, I LOVE that title! What makes this all hard to classify with any precision (for me at any rate) is that I see the history of popular black music as being a continuous set of developments intertwining three threads - jazz, gospel and blues - in different ways and proportions over time (and adding in a bit of Reggae later on). So, if we say that the mainstream of popular post war black music is 'R&B', with contributions from gospel music and jazz, we have so many important people with feet in (at different or the same times) more than one camp - Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Illinois Jacquet, Clyde McPhatter, Louis Jordan, James Brown, King Curtis, Wilson Pickett, Tommy McCook, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Fred Wesley, Lou Rawls, Sonny Stitt, Milt Jackson.... (add at your convenience) that the whole scene resembles a mish-mash. Where does X stop and Y begin? Er... well, it doesn't, really, it's just pop music (black, that is). I was, a few years ago, considering putting together a BFT entirely consisting of bebop and hard bop tunes played by very hard core soul jazz musicians. It was gonna look like this: Johnny 'Hammond' Smith - Billie's bounce (That good feelin') - 1959 Les McCann - Sonnymoon for two (Soul hits) - 1963 Three Souls - Milestones (Dangerous Dan Express) - 1964 James Brown - Headache (Grits & soul) - 1964 Jackie Ivory - Freddie the freeloader (Soul discovery) - 1965 Gene Russell - Now's the time (Takin' care of business) - 1966 Ramsey Lewis - Django (Dancin' in the street) - 1967 Freddie McCoy - Mysterioso (Soul yogi) - 1968 Charles Kynard - Delilah (Professor soul) - 1968 Houston Person - Blue seven (Soul dance) - 1968 Mickey Fields - Straight, no chaser (The amazing Mickey Fields) - 1968 Jimmy McGriff - Yardbird suite (Fly dude) - 1972 Groove Holmes - St Thomas (American pie) - 1972 Rusty Bryant - A night in Tunisia (For the good times) - 1973 Waymon Reed - Blue Monk (46th & 8th) - 1977 The point was not to show that these were great versions of those tunes but that soul jazz musicians - AND their audiences - had a strong appreciation of what one might think are not songs for 'entertainment' but which fitted very nicely into an entertainment context. I think one could, if one were so inclined (and I'm not), construct a similar BFT in reverse, featuring soul jazz/R&B material performed by musicians normally thought of as boppers or hard boppers (eg 'Money honey' by Dizzy Gillespie; 'My Cherie amour' by Joe Henderson). So, it's an effin' mess and there's probably little point in doing much more than noting that the music goes round and round and it comes out everywhere, and not necessarily the way you'd expect it to. If, therefore, one were trying to write a book about the history of this mess, one would run into so many inconsistencies that probably half the readers would chuck it on the bonfire before they were halfway through. And yet the music is, in my view, wrongly neglected and systematically so, because the music educators and critics of the world have a need to demonstrate value and have come up with the formulation that art is valuable, entertainment not, to justify their salaries. And it works! So I do want Bob to write his book, even if many copies are chucked after purchase. MG

I'm glad he hasn't (?) given up on it. I contacted him at WBGO because I thought no one could write as good a book on soul jazz as he. MG

This book was announced on US Amazon in about 2004. After a few years, they pulled the announcement. Bob and I talked a bit about the project when I visited Newark in 1997 but we never really got together on it. He persuaded me, though, that any history of Soul Jazz that didn't cover the early material of Jug, Jacquet, Ike Q, Arnett, Jaws, Wild Bill Davis and their lesser known contemporaries would be starting with a need to explain how you got to Horace Silver & Jimmy Smith - NOT from nowhere - and why Silver and Smith were going in a different direction from Jack McDuff and Willis Jackson (or vice versa if you prefer). Indeed, the more I've thought about it subsequently, the more I feel that one really needs to start with the big bands that played mainly for black audiences in the late thirties/early forties - not Ellington's & Kenton's, but those of Buddy Johnson, Erskine Hawkins, Cootie Williams, Lucky Millinder, Andy Kirk and seldom recorded territory bands from the plains between Omaha and San Antonio. (As Peter Sellers used to say on the Goon Show, 'and this is where the story REALLY starts'. Though of course those bands didn't come from nowhere, either, did they?) MG

Oh, I see a typo in BBS' post, so here's a link to their website http://www.parisjazzcorner.com/en/index.php?LANGUE=uk MG

Paris Jazz Corner is a very nice shop with about a trillion albums. Prices are reasonable, (but best if you go in sale month July, I'm afraid) unless you're looking for super deep groove LPs, I guess. Stuff that's in demand everywhere is expensive there. Look for stuff no one wants and you'll get interesting bargains. Ground floor - LPs Can't find a pic of the CDs downstairs. Google Paris Jazz corner for address & phone number. MG

Dr Lonnie Smith Doctor Jeckyll Doc Ross

And a fair number of Prestige albums were pressed/distributed by Saba in Europe. My copy of Don Patterson's 'Soul happenin'' says, at the bottom; 'Prestige records im Vertrieb der Saba-Schalplatten' etc. MG That was before Mikulski, ZYX and others came in. And probably after Metronome handled the distribution/pressing of Prestige records here. Saba also did some recordings of their own before that line of "Black Forest" recordings became MPS. To sum it up in an oversimplified manner, quite a few 60s SABA recordings/productions are "MPS before there was MPS". Oh yeah, sorry I didn't make that clear - these are LPs from the 60s, a LOT earlier than Mikulski or ZYX, which I only know from CDs. These were issued around about contemporaneously with the US albums. And for a firm with one foot in the avant garde, were pretty unexpected material for them to issue - I think I'm remembering rightly a Billy Butler, and definitely Frank Foster's 'Soul outing'. These were late sixties/early seventies pressings. MG

Yes - 8:27 it sez on my wife's album. But was the 45 the same as the LP version? Deodato's '2001' is 9:01 on my CD of 'Prelude', but was the single the same length? I just don't know. James Brown's 'Ain't it funky now' was 9:28, but was that the 45 or just the LP version? Dunno. Also his 'Make it funky' was 12:45. Ditto, Fred Wesley & the JB's 'Doin it to death' was 12:09 on LP, but what was the 45? MG

Yeah, he does seem to have been a decent businessman, according to Wiki, owned several restaurants in his early twenties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Revere_%26_the_Raiders I have the feeling 'Like long hair' might have done better on Cash Box than Billboard. Cash Box was the chart a nice girl in a record store in Bond Street used to get for me in those days. (Cash box was a lot more focused on indie record companies so they probably organised their chart surveys differently.) MG

Earlier Junior Parker - Sometimes tomorrow my broken heart will die - Duke material first on LP on Bluesway now Lou Donaldson - Back street - Muse next Al Grey/Jimmy Forrest - Live at Rick's - Aviva MG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=DIeY7J9kjg0 Smiley Lewis George Smiley The Beach Boys

And a fair number of Prestige albums were pressed/distributed by Saba in Europe. My copy of Don Patterson's 'Soul happenin'' says, at the bottom; 'Prestige records im Vertrieb der Saba-Schalplatten' etc. MG

Yes, I have those, ta! MG