B. Clugston

Interesting. Does Mr. Merlin turn up anywhere else? I'd like to read what else he has to say, because what he wrote about Miles' use of "coded phrases" to guide and transition the band was totally spot on. I've seen his discographical work in a lot of liner notes. Some of it appears at the end of Miles Beyond. He's Italian. He's got an incredible grasp of the minutiae of Davis' electric period--for example, he finds little snippets here and there in songs such as "Maiysha" that were first played by Davis back in the 1950s. I do find some of his song titling confusing and I prefer Pete Losin for that.

I stopped reading Running the Voodoo Down on page 2, where Freeman claims Sonny Fortune is on saxophone on Dark Magus. Apparently it gets worse: http://www.miles-beyond.com/freemanerrors.htm I do recommend the Tingen book. The 73-75 band tends to get ignored (the On the Corner box had very little documentation/interviews and no track analysis compared to previous sets), but Tingen interviewed almost everyone in the band. Mtume and Reggie Lucas, in particular, have some very interesting things to say. Chambers' book is pretty clueless on this period. He knocks Miles Davis In Concert, but so mangles the details it's as if he only listened to it once. I'm pretty sure Enrico Merlin isn't a pseudonym.

Just checked it out. Nice site, Allen!

Steve Lacy's Blinks appears to have two tracks missing from the previous 2-CD release. It looks like this release will only contain the quintet tracks.

Bob James. Well, he did do an ESP album.

There was this thread about the box: Otherwise most FMP talk went on in the Funny Rat thread.

1993 -- Soft Machine, The Peel Sessions.

Fun blog post about the "insanity" of the hoffman forum: http://robertmusic.blogspot.com/2009/04/insanity-of-steve-hoffman-forum.html

I thought Braxton was done with the GTM stuff, but then I noticed the dates (2003). He still performs GTM. The duos with Rhodes are actually from 2007. One more new release, a duo with Ben Opie: "In 2008, Anthony Braxton's music was celebrated in Pittsburgh with the "Braxton Plays Pittsburgh Plays Braxton" festival. One of the results of that festival is this double-CD session. Braxton is joined by saxophonist/clarinetist Ben Opie, playing extended performances on two works from Braxton's Ghost Trance Musics series. There are several lines blurred throughout: the division between composition and improvisation, and the differences between the two reed players. It's an intimate and exciting set of recordings." http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/braxtonopie

1200 CDs, about 200 LPs and 9 cassettes. Used to have more LPs until I purged most of my rock albums.

Barf.

Gyorgy Ligeti liked them.

Once saw Al Green playing percussion with Sun Ra on David Sanborn's Night Shift. I seem to recall Green was being a bit of a disrespectful ham--shrugging his shoulders a lot and changing percussion instruments. Speaking of Sanborn, he can sometimes turn up in avant garde settings. There's the Hemphill album with Tim Berne and he's sat in with John Zorn and Berne.

The hardest albums to track down that I own were the 8 CD box set Document: New Music From Russia-the 80s and the LP "New Vitality" by Vladimir Chekasin (both on Leo). I have one of 30 copies of a single made by singer-songwriter Natalie Rose LeBrecht. A few others I would probably have a hard time replacing would be The Ericle of Dolphi, one of the Sam River's Black Africas on Horo, Edward Vesala's Kullervo and Albert Ayler's Albert Smiles with Sonny.

Dave Brubeck and Bill Smith -- The Riddle

I like that version--it's a fun one.

"I hear the splice. Or maybe my guilty feeling..." Great stuff!

Saskatchewan 45.

So sorry about your loss.

It's a poor sounding audience recording. Great music though. I'm sure the CD sounds like a bootlegged download.

One of the collectors had 400 CDs and 35 LPs. I guess to some kid who just uses an iPod and has no CDs that would seem a lot. 400 CDs would almost fit in two IKEA CD towers--that's not going to take up a lot of room.

Included in the review of the Delmark quartet disc with Kevin Uehlinger on piano is another CD allegedly featuring the same quartet (Four Compositions (GTM) 2000). Penguin reviews it as if they had actually listened to it when in fact there is no such album. The CD has the same catalogue number as the "comedy" duet album on CIMP. AMG mistakenly lists the same line-up on that CD, so the inference is one of the guides is borrowing from the other. The Braxton Quartet Plays... is CD-835, which is called Anthony Braxton Quartet Twelve Compositions on the cover, Oakland July 1993 on the spine and Braxton Quartet Plays 12 Braxton Compositions in the Music & Arts catalogue. It does exist and it's a nice one with Crispell, Dresser and Hemingway despite the muffled sound.

It's a nice date, maybe not essential, but Rudd's inside-outside playing is always interesting. Don't recall how the saxophonists fare, but Kenyatta is always worth a listen. It was reissued on CD as Mixed along with the Cecil Taylor side of the Into the Hot album.

Nope--love it from beginning to end.

The earlier Penguin guides were great and were particularly knowledgeable about European jazz. Later editions have been sloppily edited, full of reviews that are either misleading or just rehashes of the liner notes, included a review of a fictitious Anthony Braxton recording and had some irrational swipes at Woody Shaw and Bobby Timmons, among others.