Ken Dryden

Mostly clothes, no music. I'm at the point where my wife would more likely purchase a duplicate of something I had.

I have an extensive McCoy Tyner collection and the only real disappointment for me was the Columbia LP Looking Out, a dud compared to the rest of his discography. I feel like the Milestone years were particularly strong, especially the live albums.

I finally got the files uploaded. If any Toshiko Akiyoshi expert can identify track 3, please let me know its title. I have a lot of her LPs and CDs, but haven't had any luck so far. https://archive.org/details/Toshiko-Akiyoshi-Las-Vegas-May-25-1992

Eastwind Import is having a 50% off sale through January 3, here is the link. http://www.eastwindimport.com/product-info.asp?CategoryName=Venus+Records&PG=5&ProductID=353 I have been very satisfied with my purchases from this mail order importer.

If you still have interest in Christmas jazz, here is a link to a program that I aired on December 19, 2021. All of the music is taken from compilations/anthologies. https://archive.org/details/timeless-jazz-12-19-21-christmas-jazz

Enjoy the music, glad to share it.

This program is hosted by Gary Larson and features special performances by Laurindo Almeida, Jim Hall, Bill Frisell, Charlie Byrd, Mark Whitfield and John Scofield, all recorded especially for this broadcast. I think it is NPR sourced, but I don't remember. The songs were recorded in 1994 and 1995. I located the CDR of this satellite feed that I taped in December 1995. The is a rtf file with song titles and track credits labeled AJC2.rtf. Sorry for not having the songs labeled, but they can be downloaded as wav or mp3 files. For some reason, a few of them also appeared as FLAC files. Enjoy and Merry Christmas! https://archive.org/upload/?identifier=A-Jazz-Guitar-Christmas-2 I would love to find a copy of A Jazz Guitar Christmas No. 1...

I am in the process of ripping a cdr to upload to archive.org. I will post the link when it is available. If I have time and locate A Jazz Guitar Christmas 2, hosted by Gary Larson, I will share it, too.

For something a little off the wall...

A terrific final chapter by the pianist.

I am hoping for a replacement cd that works to avoid that step.

I recently purchased the Sunnyside CD Todd Cochran TC3: Then And Again, Here And Now. I've had an issue with an extraneous skipping like sound in tracks 12 & 13, not sure if it is a mastering defect or a manufacturing defect. The replacement sent by the label had the identical issue in the same spots. Has anyone else noticed this problem?

When I got Neil Swainson to sign my copy of the original CD, he said, “Oh, you’re the one who bought it!”

CTI was never a label I explored in any depth, the dominant music on the label just didn't interest me. I have never been a big fan of electric piano, in most cases, I feel like it is a poor substitute for a grand piano. Bob James' electric piano in the Mulligan/Baker Carnegie Hall Reunion is a major disappointment for me. But there are times where the softer sound of an electric piano fits the song or arrangement better. But then again, when I started reviewing jazz, I didn't review CTI stuff, even if some CD reissues were sent to me. I always thought of a review as something to help me decide whether or not I wanted to check out the recording, nothing more. I am not expecting somebody to write 1500 words to describe a single disc, though I used to get a laugh out of those worthless one incomplete sentence AMG reviews by their first jazz editor ("Trio recording live at the Village Vanguard") that were worthless. Norman Granz quoted Freddie Hubbard in a conversation they had at an English jazz festival where the trumpeter mentioned that he wanted to record with Oscar Peterson, "To get back to playing some real jazz and not this shit I'm into now," as it appears in the liner notes to the Pablo albums Trumpet Summit and Alternate Blues, all music from a session on March 10, 1980. The rest of the musicians included Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Joe Pass, Ray Brown and Bobby Durham.

My copy arrived today and I am nearly through reading it. I am glad that Joe finally completed it, I’ve enjoyed it.

When I was in grad school at the University of Georgia from 1976-1977, I had a lot of luck finding a lot of Milestone twofer promos at a newly opened used LP store called Wuxtry, which later opened a store near Emory in Atlanta. But aside from Peaches, before their decline and closing in the early 1980s, the selection of new jazz LPs in other stores wasn't all that great.

The only time I found many of the Columbia jazz LPs issued in the late 1970s when I was living in Atlanta was promo stamped copies in a used record store. They never seemes to reach regular record stores.

I would rather hear a frequently played standard in a live setting or on a record date than some dog-assed piece of crap like "Feelings" any day. Marian McPartland told me she hated "the fucking song" after I interviewed her the first time in 1988 and said that the label she was on insisted on it. I suspect that is the case for a number of musicians, but what Milt Jackson or Monty Alexander saw in it, who knows?

The problem is that many books these days are not edited well at all and full of typos and outright factual errors. My favorite was an author of a jazz book who liked to throw in trivia, like one subject “born in Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Jack Daniel’s.”

I do a great job at avoiding Wikipedia, the same way I avoid Google.

Pardon my cynicism, but that All Music review is nothing more than purely sucking up to the record label and I have no idea who wrote it. I reviewed the awful Classics in the Key of G for them when it was released, panned it, got paid and it was never posted. Instead, an editor wrote a fawning review of that obvious piece of crap.

This guy asked for the attention, it didn’t come by accident.

Margarine sax….

I recently uploaded excerpts of sets by Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams as heard on NPR's Jazz Alive! recorded at the 1978 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival. Evidently there was at least one more show that included other artists but I missed it or was working the night that it aired. You can stream or download it here: https://archive.org/details/Kansas-City-Womens-Jazz-Festival-1978 One number features Marian McPartland leading an all female band that includes Mary Osborne, Janice Robinson, Dottie Dodgion, Mary Fettig Park and Lynn Milano playing "Now's The Time."