Ken Dryden

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.

Somebody forgot to double check the songwriters for Bill Evans: Behind The Dikes. Irving Mills is listed as M. Irvin and Evans is credited for the second version of Denny Zeitlin’s “Quiet Now,” an error likely repeated from the bootlegs of the same name. At least they got everything else correct.

Open Strings was reissued on Promising Music in Europe, which was licensing MPS titles for a short period. Some of the Trio HLP music from this LP was not included on the Dreyfus 2 CD set. I bought a copy during a visit to London in 1983. Neither "Cantaloupe Island" nor "3+2=1" from this LP appear on the Dreyfus release. I wonder if "Garters" Grady is a pseudonym for Dick Hyman? He made similar records as Knuckles O'Toole.

A friend on the west coast recently told me that John Handy is almost totally blind and not really active.

B. Bopstein - Dizzy Gillespie Rollo Phlecks (photographer) - Hank O’Neal (Chiaroscuro owner)

Yes, for 1962… built on a concrete slab with cinder block walls.

I am saddened by this unnecessary loss of life and damage. I grew up in South Florida and there are sections of Dade and Broward County that were reclaimed by digging canals. The single story home my parents built in 1962 was about 5 to 6 feet above the water line. It seems insane that anyone would build a high rise condo building on reclaimed marsh land, or that building codes allowed it to happen.

Thanks, Chuck!

Since ASCAP and BMI revamped their web search engines, they no longer seem as thorough as in the past. Given that the data is either incorrect or incomplete on so many releases, what are some reliable alternatives when trying to verify song titles, composers or lyricists? An example, I found this listing on a Cory Weeds CD I was playing today: Nancy With A Laughing Face, credited to Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke Someone obviously didn't do any research...

The performances, audio and packaging are all excellent. One thing is odd is having several ballads back to back, I wonder if they were played that way or someone decided to resequence the set list, omitting some songs?

Wasn't there also a problem with Columbia releasing recordings without his approval that caused him to leave the label? I would imagine that his estate probably would honor his wishes and block the reissuing of any of the music that he didn't authorize for release.