Christiern

These just came in--I'm listening to the 1st of 24 Wilson tracks. Sounds good, so far.

Ranking high, The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

I received them today. Have yet to listen.

MartyJazz, does the name Jane Welch mean anything to you? She worked for Down Beat and was my link to the JAPM. Somewhere, in a messed-up drawer or closet, I have interesting, pertinent observations written by Rashied Ali, that she brought me. I'll try to dig them out.

I have 4 desktops and 1 laptop, all of which I use with some regularity. I also have 2 older Macs (I use Macs exclusively), but they are here strictly for software that is outdated yet still useful, or fun. I generally only use my laptop (iBook) when I travel or do outside research. My main monitor is a 22" Cinema, so small screens feel a bit cramped. I bought my first computer in 1979, so I can really appreciate today's machines. Anyone remember running cassette-based software? Getting excited at the mere thought of acquiring a 32 K memory card? Looking forward to "true descenders" and lines exceeding 40 characters?

"Did JazzCorner ever change their wretched software? It was just behind the Branford Marsalis board in it's crappiness. That not to say the boards are crappy... just the software."--B3-er In case you haven't looked, JC is now ahead of the game when it comes to software. It's really nice and flexible--check it out.

In the late 1960s I bought my first telephone answering machine. It physically lifted the receiver off the hook and held it over a speaker. One advantage was that one's message started as soon as the phone was picked up, which made it easy to trick people into identifying themselves. The worst thing was that if one wished to pretend not being home, one had to shut of TV, stereo, etc., and sit in absolute silence until the machine put the receiver back on the hook! Going back even farther (to 1948), my first tape recorder was a device, with very small reels, that sat on top of my turntable and was driven by it. Of course the speed changed as one reached the end of the tape, so it couldn't be played on an ordinary machine. The machine was a Danish Magnavox, and it used any radio as an amp.

I lifted this from the Fantasy on-line catalog. It's an album I did in 1961, apparently augmented by some Wellstood sides from another set. Anyway, Gene Sedric is on the session I did, which was an attempt to reunite the Waller band, with Dick at the keyboard. The Snowden tracks (I originally had the Snowden and Wellstood tracks back to back) feature him with Ed Allen, who played that memorable solo on Bessie Smith's "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," Tommy Benford on drums, Rudy Powell, clarinet, Abe Bolar, bass, and Floyd Casey on washboard. I don't have a copy of the album, but I remember the Wellstood tracks being to my satisfaction--at least back then. DICK WELLSTOOD & CLIFF JACKSON Uptown & Lowdown Prestige PRCD-24262-2 ~ $16.98 The spirits of such great jazz pianist-composers from the 1920s and '30s--notably those of James P. Johnson and Thomas "Fats" Waller--permeate these performances by Dick Wellstood and Cliff Jackson. Jackson (1902-1970) and Wellstood (1927-1987) were themselves strong musical spirits, representing, respectively, the first generation of Harlem stride giants and the gifted young revivalists of the 1940s who revered the masters' works while at times giving them a more modern spin (as Wellstood does with some Monkish chords on his own slow blues, "Blook's Dues"). Wellstood is spotlighted on 11 of this set's 15 tracks. The first three are from a 1961 LP on which his group, the Wallerites, shared billing with Jackson's Washboard Wanderers. These find him leading a quintet in which Waller's wonderful front line of trumpeter Herman Autry and reedman Gene Sedric were reunited after 18 years. On the next eight, from an extremely rare 1954 10-inch LP, Wellstood strides artfully, backed by the unobtrusively whisking brushes of Tommy Benford, Jelly Roll Morton's former drummer. Jackson's four cuts are lividly trad jazz with jug band overtones, as banjo and washboard supply the rhythmic kick. Jackson, banjoist Elmer Snowden, trumpeter Ed Allen, and clarinetist Rudy Powell all excel. Yacht Club Swing, Brush Lightly, Blook's Dues, Old Fashioned Love, Mule Walk, Closed Mouth Blues, The Shout, Toddlin' Home, Alligator Crawl; Oh Baby, Watcha Doing to Me; Liza (All the Clouds'll Roll Away), The Sheik of Araby, I Found a New Baby, Wolverine Blues, Blues in Englewood Cliffs with Ed Allen, Herman Autry, Tommy Benford, Abe Bolar, Floyd Casey, Gene Sedric, Milt Hinton, Rudy Powell, Zutty Singleton, and Elmer Snowden. This photo shows Al Casey, Herman Autrey, Arthur Trappier, Gene Sedric, Cedric Wallace, and Pat Flowers salute Fats Waller at WNEW's "Second Annual American Swing Festival," 1945:

Perhaps Allah thought she was English.

Wishing you a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY! ...with tons to come, each better than the previous!

Outrageously unrealistic asking price, even if Dizzy did sign the book.

Brandon, this link will tell you all about the new G4 iBooks.

He left out of the book that backstage incident where he became so obnoxious that Val Wilmer had to give him an upper cut! T-Bone Walker eventually stepped in and broke up the fight.

The new powerbooks are out.

I have a white iBook and am very pleased with it. My main computers are a Mac Cube and a dual CPU tower, but I have traveled with my iBook and put it to some pretty rugged test. Two friends of mine have the 12" powerbook (with superdrive), and I must say that it is impressive--yes, the screen is relatively small, but this is a fine machine.

The only vocalist named Feather I know of is Lorraine Feather, a very bland singer whose father was Leonard Feather, a very disingenuous writer/critic.

Karl K told me that Raben had completed another volume, but he couldn't afford to publish it. A real shame that mediocrity floats to the top.

Did anyone mention Shirley Clark's 1963 film, "The Cool World"? It was a pioneering film that included several unknown black actors who would go on to fame. It also featured music written by Mal Waldron and played by a Dizzy Gillespie quintet with James Moody and Kenny Barron.

Years ago, to improve the sound on longer-playing LPs, one of the companies introduced "variable groove," where the lathe varied the distance between grooves according to the sound (of course there is only one groove per side, but you know what I mean). I recall that it helped, but so many new "techniques" were introduced by the various record companies back then, so one was always a bit skeptical. Some of the fancy names were just that, and any improvement one heard was strictly in one's mind. B)

A thirty minutes side invited distortion, but LPs were not necessarily short on running time because anybody worried about the sound; the AFofM contract defined a "session" as either 15 minutes of usable recording or three hours of studio time. Exceed either and you go into another session, even if you only record five more minutes. Thus most recordings were done in two sessions (i.e. 30 minutes of music). Of course there was always a little give and take, but an inflexible union rep might show up. When I recorded in New York or at Rudy's studio in Englewood Cliffs, I never saw a union rep, but one showed up when I did a series of New Orleans sessions for Riverside. He kept looking over my shoulder, at my recording sheet, but I have to admit that I fooled him by keeping notes in Danish, writing out the real recording time while noting a lesser one in digits. Not ethical, but fudging was common practice and without it fewer albums would have been produced. Musicians were generally aware of this but they also knew that we were a low-budget label, so they made it a priority to get a good album out there. Some record companies played it by the book and issued LPs with 15 minutes per side.

Yes, and, unlike son, a very nice person.

Delaunay also published supplemental volumes--I don't know how many there were, but I have Vol. 3 (El - He) from 1952. I also have a few volumes of "Jazz Directory," a multi volume discography by Dave Carey and Albert J. McCarthy. They changed publishers around Vol. 6 (1957), which is where the series ended, prematurely. The books were slim with page numbers continuing from one vol. to the next; No. 6 goes from page 927 to 1112. McCarthy picked it up again in 1960, but with a different approach--the concept was to publish a series of discographies, each of which would cover a year's releases. Now called "Jazz Discography," it started with 1958, which I have. Another early jazz discographer was Orin Blackstone. His first volume comprised 118 pages, from Ben Abney to Will Ezell. The period Blackstone sought to cover was 1917 to 1944, the idea being to expand on Delaunay's work and supplement it with data found in magazines and newspapers, and furnished by collectors. Blackstone planned 4 volumes, but I'm not sure if he finished them. I have Vol. 1. I guess all these early efforts were relegated to a back shelf by Rust's monumental "Jazz Records 1897-1942, which remains the standard for that period. Jepsen's Jazz Records series picked up where Rust left off and Erik Raben's "Jazz Records 1942-80 was to have been the update/replacement, but he only reached Vol. 7 before Tom Lord introduced competition. Unfortunately, my friend, the late Karl Knudsen, who published the Jepsen and Raben discographies never established an efficient distribution of the books, so Lord was able to cut into the business with a discography that owes much to the earlier works of others, but is weak on original material and, frankly, sloppy. Do you agree, Mike?

For something Jonah Jones did.

For a while, his sister, Blanche Calloway, had a more interesting band.