Ken Dryden

Art Tatum O'Neal Spencer Freddy Martin Denny Zeitlin

My retirement wasn't forced but bribed. Those of us who took the university's offer of 6 months pay to retire by June 30 were amply rewarded. They also paid me for two months of unused annual leave, plus I had a total of 9 months of other annual leave and accumulated sick leave that added 9 months credit to calculating my pension. I've been retired for six years and love it!

Sorry to see you have to sell so much stuff because of your forced early retirement. All the best!

Generally I think you can credit both the composer and lyricist when the song is initially published with a lyric. Oscar Hammerstein Il wrote the lyric before his collaborators wrote the music. But when an instrumental has a lyric added later, there is no need to credit the lyricist unless there is a vocal on the track. That said, Marian McPartland always introduced her ballad “Afterglow” as “In the Days of Our Love” after Peggy Lee wrote a lyric for it, even when she performed or recorded it as an instrumental. Bill Evans, Carol Hall and Jim Hall are all credited on “The Two Lonely People” on the CD that I mentioned. There are often inconsistencies in the credits to an album, some songs include lyricists, others omit them, even when all songs are instrumentals.

Japanese collectors pay insane prices for many first edition Blue Note LPs from the 1950s. I don't care what pressing it is as long as it in good shape and relatively clean. I'm not about to invest $2000 in one vintage LP.

Graphic designers who not only use a tiny, hard to read font, but also use all lower case for the text. That combination made reading Neil Tesser's liner notes for the Bill Evans Trio: On A Friday Evening an endurance test. Not to mention, who is responsible for crediting Jim Hall as co-writer for "The Two Lonely People" on that CD? Evans wrote the music, though Carol Hall later added a lyric.

Bob Brookmeyer stated during the event honoring him as a NEA Jazz Master that he thought about "...not accepting the award, because George W. Bush's name was on it." I always found that to be ironic, since President Bush was the one who appointed Dana Gioia, the man who asked for and got more funding for NEA Jazz Masters during his time in that position... I was present in the auditorium when it happened, so it's not an anecdote I heard from someone else.

I had a chance encounter with her during a Denny Zeiltin gig at Kitano, probably in 2011. I think that I took a picture of her with another vocalist whose name is escaping me at the moment. I've admired the recordings of hers that I have purchased.

There has never been any logic to the awarding of NEA Jazz Masters. You think that it would go to deserving artists in their seventies and eighties who have long since proved themselves without any doubts, while they are still with us. I too, am underwhelmed with the choice of Cassandra Wilson.

Great music, with some noticeable deterioration in the source material. As for graphic design, the wrong person was hired for the job. A tiny, all lower case font is extremely tiring to read. Also, someone didn't do proper research. Jim Hall had nothing to do with writing Evans' "The Two Lonely People," though Carol Hall did add a lyric later.

Very nice, I'll try to look over your playlist. I imagine nearly all, if not all of the music is long out of print.

I am listening to the second LP of this five record set.

A vocal track on an otherwise instrumental album is no big deal, unless the vocalist or lyric is sub-par. That reminds me of a phone interview I did with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen when Those Who Were was due to be released. I asked him about how he discovered the vocalist Monique, who I had never heard of at all, who sang on one track. His response was priceless: "It was a funny thing, I was sitting on the toilet and heard her on the radio in my daughter's bedroom."

I remember Gus Statiras from his days selling CDs at various jazz parties. He had some stories...

James Byrnes Matthew Fries Chet Baker

Brubeck told me that he was blocking the reissue of The Last Time We Saw Paris because of his issues with Paul Desmond during that tour. As for Compadres, it is a mystery to me why the owners of Columbia haven't put out a boxed set of Brubeck's recordings with Gerry Mulligan. Maybe the original LPs didn't sell enough copies...

I received a publicist email about these reissues, but no CDs so far. They will probably arrive after I buy some of them.

Michael Constantine Nero Wolfe Benito Mussolini

Oldies is bad about selling CDRs without labeling them as such.

I am rarely a fan of electric piano on most recordings, I've never been a fan of its sound and in many cases, a grand piano would have been a better choice, especially when there are no other electric instruments. One of the worst is having to put up with Bob James' rinky-dink Fender Rhodes on the Mulligan-Baker Carnegie Hall concert.

Glad that Hal Galper made a clean break with his Fender Rhodes by dumping it into the Hudson.

I'm always amused at record stores, which file Kenny G under K rather than G (though I have one friend that always moves everything of his out of the jazz section), put all Benny Goodman in big band, jazz vocalists in easy listening (regardless of the content), etc.

I just go ahead and file all of Hyman's work together in jazz, even the soundtracks... It may not be a perfect system, but it works for me. I don't really have a Moog section, though I will have to check to see where I filed that Beaver & Krause CD with Gerry Mulligan.

I file all my jazz by artist, then by label and catalog number within the artist. The big challenge is when there are two co-leaders and they tend to alternate who gets top billing. Usually I give preference to the first name listed, but there are exceptions, like all the Dick Hyman/Ruby Braff albums are filed under Hyman. Various artist anthologies are filed the same way, by label and catalog number. I think I finally got this system underway in 1990 after 18 years of collecting and I am glad that I started back then when the collection was far smaller. I do the same with other genres, though classical has its special challenges, with multiple composers or a prominent soloist or conductor. I file all of David Grisman's stuff together, regardless of what styles that i might label it. The beauty of this system is that I usually find any recording in seconds, unless I made a shifting mistake as I added new arrivals/purchases, which tend to get shelved as CDs are moved to the next row. Sometimes I lose track of which stack to load next and it can take a few minutes to find something. Large boxed sets, cubes and long boxes are filed separately. Those too big mini-LP CD sleeves get sorted on separate shelves once they start to overflow on my prefab shelves in the center of the room, as they are too tall to fit on them.

Hopefully that means I will get serviced with this CD.