Larry Kart

I'm afraid that Hewitt, not Bach, is responsible for the sameness you detect.

Just bought the three CDs you mention. IIRC the old Prestige LPs had good sound, may even have been engineered by RVG, but the CDs that repackage those Prestige dates sound terrible. Wish someone had warned me before I dropped some $50 down the Amazon rabbit hole.

Check out especially the performance of Harmonies poetiques et religieuses, the seldom recorded original piece of that name from 1834. Great piece, great playing, and very well recorded too. Don't miss the way the very end of the piece trails off into outer space.

Yes, the new site pretty much still sucks: I've cut way down on my BRO purchases (almost to zero) out of sheer frustration.

Yes, those are the ones. But as I said above, my memory is that the original LPs sounded just fine, may even have been engineered by RVG.

Recently bought all three CD reissues of the mid-1960s Chet Baker Prestige dates with George Coleman, Kirk Lightsey, et al. Don't have the old LPs any more, which is why I bought this material on CDs, so I can't perform an A/B test, but my memory is that the old LPs had perfectly reasonable sound (were they even RVG dates, I don't recall), but these CDs sound like garbage. In particular, Lightsey is made to sound horribly brittle, as is drummer Roy Brooks at times, and the balance between Baker and Coleman wavers from track to track and even within tracks. The music itself still has value (some of Brooks' solo spots bring Wilbur Campbell to mind), but someone sure screwed this up. Perhaps the ghost of Richard Carpenter was at the controls.

http://dantepfer.com/blog/?p=424 Amusing snippet: DT (pianist Dan Tepfer): You felt like you were going to live a long time when you were young? LK: Oh, I don’t know that exactly, but I never planned on leaving.

First -- bootleg or pirate tapings of classical concerts and opera performances abound and readily make their way onto commercial recordings or videos that are then sold for good money. You must not hang around websites like Berkshire Record Outlet, where such recordings can be found in abundance; they're on Amazon and similar sites too. Second -- you are aware that Mutter is a commercial recording artist whose recording of, say, the Beethoven Violin Concerto will sell so many units, for which she probably will be paid so much per unit sold; she also might be paid a sum up front/in advance, but that sum would be dependent on the label's expectation of how many units she will sell down the road. Obviously a recording made by an audience member of her playing that same work that then makes its way onto a sold in broad daylight bootleg release will cut into the number of units of Mutter's legitimate recording of that work that are sold, and, one way or another, this will reduce the amount of compensation she has received or will receive for her work. This by you is OK? As for Mutter punishing an entire audience for the actions of one person, it was that person's actions, not Mutter's, that led to a halt in the performance. No clearly forbidden recording by the audience member, no problem. BTW, as someone I think inquired about above, I would love to know what that entitled audience member said to Mutter in an attempt to justify her behavior. Finally, your assumption that such an audience recording must be "shitty" is mistaken. For one thing, it depends on the quality of the recording device, not its size; for another, it's quite possible, and frequently done, for two people in cahoots, seated in appropriately separated seats, to record the same performance and then combine the two recordings to yield a perfectly good stereo result.

The issue isn't only whether the woman was interfering with the performance. It's that she was, in effect, stealing Mutter's music making for her own use -- potentially, as has been the case countless times, to sell (i.e. "pirate") her recording of Mutter's performance. Surely you can see how that injures Mutter or anyone else in her position.

I had a chance to observe Russell teaching/interacting with several of his students at the NEC at what must have been an end of semester summary of what they had done/what he wanted to say to each of them (and he did have specific pointed remarks to make to each student). There was a certain tension in the air, it seemed to me, and some sense of push back from at least one student, saxophonist Rob Schoeps, but this took place, again so it seemed to me, within an atmosphere of mutual respect. P.S. Make that Rob Scheps https://www.smallslive.com/artists/1334-rob-scheps/ Clips can be found on YouTube

It's a matter of taste or opinion, plus what is habitually done or not done. Das Lied von der Erde versus The Song of the Earth? The Four Seasons versus Le quattro stagioni? Gotterdammerung versus Twilight of the Gods? Jeux versus Games? Le Sacre du Printemps versus The Rite of Spring?

Heard "Airegin" on the radio this morning. Stan sounds quite frantic and discombobulated -- at that tempo on that night, he's not making much sense IMO.

How about just plain Les nuits d'été?

When I bought that LP more than 60 years ago I thought those were the actual names of the works.

Chicago TV used to have a very good Sunday morning gospel music show, the Jubilee Showcase, featuring very good acts, including the likes of Clara Ward. I'd tune in fairly often and one morning I heard an ecstatic teenage saxophonist who sounded quite but like Albert Ayler. Yes, he could have listened to Ayler, but I'll bet not, that instead they both came from the same gospel sources. If so, there must be a good many guys like that around. Also of course, though he sound quite a bit like Ayler, his playing was greeted by the audience with much approval. A typical Jubilee Showcase clip: Interesting profile of Sid Ordower, the guy who mounted and hosted the show: http://www.jubileeshowcase.com/about_sid_ordower.html

Try on this one below for size (tenor and piano version, with master of French declamation Hugues Cuenod): P.S. from composer Robin Holloway: 'It might seem strange (he is referring to the recording below] to record the vocal score of "Socrate," but in fact there are many advantages. While Satie must intend his instrumentation to make a sound as carefully neural as his notes, it doesn't really work; balance is odd, individual timbres will not be repressed, and the overall effect is surprisingly coarse. Whereas the piano is the ideal medium -- the accompaniment can all be played without loss of detail, and its solemn simplicities realised with uniformity of touch and rhythm.' 'Similarly, to used one voice rather than to "dramatize"the work seems to me entirely in the spirit of its particular stylization. Also that it is a single man's voice rather that four women's: and this man's voice is so singular and un-singing! In 'Socrate' not a vestige of hedonistic pleasure remains; it is not merely paradoxical to say that the effect is enhanced by the lack of gratification..... Satie's miracle here is to make his listeners live totally on water alone. 'He does it by employing a harmonic range entirely without dissonance or suspension. Not literally of course -- he has 'suspended the suspension,' frozen anything tense and cadence-needing in his chords so that no move is needed after all, and fixed his added notes so that every chord, whatver its constitution, is 'common.' This norm established, exceptions to it are all the more telling.'

Lew's solo on the title track is darn good. Guess I'll have to get that album.

A fine date, all (Bags, Hawkins, Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, Eddie Jones, Connie Kay) on very good form. And very well recorded, at least in its Koch incarnation -- I say that because some Atlantics of that vintage (1959) were a bit on the dead side IIRC. Wonder who put together/shaped this date in the musical sense -- many nice touches there, e.g, the intro to "Stuffy." Bags? Bean? Neither man is someone I think of as imposing his will in the studio, as someone seems to have done here. Nesuhi? He was there for a lot of excellent recordings, but was he that type? BTW, anyone who doubts Hawkins prowess on the blues should listen to the next to the last track on this one (see post below).

The 2-CD "Kiity Kallen Story" (Sony). Previously just a name to me, but what a lovely singer -- warm distinctive voice, much feeling, great time. Not a jazz singer per se, but she sang with the bands of Teagarden, Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, and Artie Shaw. ("The greatest guy I ever worked for was Harry James. He was THE most talented. An orchestration would be submitted at rehearsal, and he would decide if he was going to keep it in the book. He would read the score once. That night if we were doing a remote, and we usually were, hd would have the score there and never again. I never, never heard him warm up. He could play great drums..." "Jimmy [Dorsey] was a very hostile man, and he lived in a constant state of envy of Tommy. I did not enjoy working with Jimmy. And when he drank, he was a different person. He had to have a bodyguard with him all the time." On one of her favorite recordings, "If Someone Had Told Me," she was accompanied only by the trio of Jim Hall, Richard Davis, and Mel Lewis. When she joined Dorsey, he told the band that there would be no more four-letter words on the bus because now there was a young lady [age 20] here. Wanting to be accepted as one of the boys, Kallen felt this wasn't going to work. The next day she got on the bus and announced, "The next guy who uses a four-letter word, "I'm going to cut his balls off." That definitely broke the ice. She was pretty darn cute too. 08kallen-obit-web-jumbo.webp

The three Chet Baker Prestige CDs w. George Coleman.

For 50 cents I figured why not, even though two of these cantatas, from the Stalin era, supposedly left DS so humiliated by what he'd done that after their premieres he wept with shame and got drunk. (The third, the celebrated "The Execution of Stepan Razin," from the post Stalin era, is something of a work of protest.) I already have an excellent fiery "Razin," with Kondrashin, but the made to order for Stalin cantatas, one about post-war reforestration, one an ode to the motherland and its glorious leader, when listened to without the lyrics (not provided here), are rather thrilling in their marshaling of vast choral-orchestral forces. Yes, the musical language is rather simplistic by DS's normal standards, but I'm not left with the impression that he's working in a mechanical manner. May change my mind on this, but if you turn the volume way up, you may feel like salaaming to Uncle Joe.

My second Jack Parlabane novel from Christopher Brookmyre. A bit too much Scots dialect in the first one, "Country of the Blind," for my taste -- the setting is Glasgow -- but otherwise quite good, excellent political hugger mugger. The second I've tried/am trying is "Dead Girl Walking," which initially has a rock world setting. Parlabane is a semi-scrupulous investigative journalist whose career and life have gone all to hell after a frame up but who still possesses his old skills. Brookmyre, himself a former journalist, has a shrewd sense of what can be gathered from responses in the course of a seemingly normal interview.

There's also one for two mandolins ... and another for two mandolins, a kazoo, and Le Petomane.

Just asking -- what was cringe-worthy in Woods' reminiscences? The alleged behavior of others or Phil's personality as reflected in what he says? Or something else?