Niko

the music industry has changed... I've never been to London for record shopping... I believe I got to know FOPP in Cambridge in 2008 or 2009... Relaxez-Vous Avec Jack Diéval Et Son Quartette never replaced my fairly beat-up vinyl copy of this one by a better one because the music really isn't that great... got this for René Thomas of course, who plays on half the tracks... the other half are Beatles covers played by Diéval and his trio... and Diéval is not my first, second or third choice for a French pianist in that period (early 60s) ... to his defense, nobody in the early 60s could quite predict just how worn out songs like Yesterday or Michelle would sound 60 years later... still, there are some nice solos by Thomas

yes, I remember FOPP from UK visits... for me, that OJC sale was really a transformative life event... I was jazz fan before, attending concerts sometimes and being happy with my 50 or so jazz cds... but over the course of about half a year in the middle of 2006 during that sale I bought one or two new OJCs every day (3 Euro a piece), becoming far more seriously interested, joining this fine community and turning into, well, a collector of jazz records ... Lou Bennett - Pentacostal Feeling more Rene Thomas... (and what a weird cover... they forgot the word "Pentecostal" but it's added on the original backcover... I have the Jazz in Paris CD)

more Rene Thomas...

didn't know he posts here - just read your article back then and got three of his less collectible albums which are quite nice as well (same with Dikker and with the de Graaff / Vennik group - luckily all three albums on that label are the beginnings of longer discographies with easier to find albums)

I've been buying there since the 90s but what I really remember is the huge OJC sale about 15 years ago... nowadays the regular shops have all vanished (at least those that I knew), only some shop-in-shop branches within bookstores seem to be left, saw one in Münster fairly recently, but the "magic" (=great cds at great prices) seems to be gone just like everywhere... René Thomas - Guitar Groove hadn't played this one in ages, even stronger (and far more mellow) than I remembered it

That one and the one in Düsseldorf for me... walking by there still hurts after all those years... Those were formative places

didn't mean "free" in the sense of "free jazz"... for live Rene Thomas from the early 60s, there's now also a nice double cd from Fresh Sound which duplicates some of the contents of the elusive Guitar Genius 2 ... like I said, for later Thomas, the things I really like feature Eddy Louiss at the organ like here or here

indeed, a compilation of the Eardley album, the St Tropez album and possibly others was also issued in Finland without any identifying information (besides some of the song titles), here, but apparently Dirne was so fond of some of the titles that he reused them for unrelated compositions as well... tunes named "Extended Play", "Try for satisfy" [?] and "Subtroyan Influence" [??] also appear on this fairly awful piano album that was variously released as "Walt Lemon – Dreamin' Piano", "Robert Stenway Plays Piano Cocktail" and "Walter Berns ‎– Piano Party" (possibly others, too) but the compositions have nothing to do with those on the Eardley album

Thomas - Jaspar Quintet

I only got the Guitar Genius CD relatively recently (and still haven't found Volume 2) and I think I'd rate it somewhere in the middle of my Rene Thomas albums... to be more precise: the Louiss/Thomas/Clarke Trio CD is one of my all-time favorite jazz albums and I'd place that one in a different league... I like Thomas' early sessions (like "The real cat" which Peter Friedman posted above), they're more focused and maybe a bit less free - hard to compare... there's some great stuff from the early sixties which strikes a pretty good balance imho e.g. the Italian quintet album with Jaspar or the Riverside album... There is still amazing stuff from later though, like the organ bands with Eddy Louiss (including Stan Getz' Dynasty) or Lou Bennett... The later live recordings can be a bit incoherent at times, a tiny bit like Tony Fruscella at the Open Door or so... the best minutes are genius, the weaker minutes might be somewhere in the middle of a bass solo by someone who wasn't born to play super long bass solos (but still did it from time to time). I'd say that the Guitar Genius CD is one of the better collections in that category (others include the albums on Vogel and Timeless which I like but which I would put behind Guitar Genius)... The Ronnie Scott's album is also a somewhat rough live recording... but all four guys in the band (Jaspar, Thomas, B Quersin, D Humair) are great and, in particular, I think this is one of the place where one can hear what's the big deal about Bobby Jaspar - imho this album has one of Europe's brightest tenors in one of his brightest moments (and on flute on some tracks that I sometimes skip) - and for that reason (Jaspar) I'd put it ahead of Guitar Genius... I have less of an overview when it comes to Jaspar, but of the stuff I know I'd put only Modern Jazz Au Club Saint Germain ahead of The Ronnie Scott's album.

re Moulin / Placebo, it's too long ago so I wouldn't want to make a differentiating verdict about the three albums... I think if you like one, you probably like the others as well... I started with a compilation which was fine musically but I never really got to know the albums separately... I'd say the albums are slightly better than the music in the video and I also like them a bit more than Sam Suffy... but both are nuances and I haven't really checked in a while... re the billing on that album: Tony Dirne who produced these two records among hundreds of others apparently just recorded music and then invented song titles, a name for the artist, found some photographs to go with the music... and sold the stuff to different labels... That he had the good sense to actually reveal that this album was a Jon Eardley album instead of inventing a name was quite unusual ... (next level would have been to use a photograph of Jon Eardley on the cover instead of some random guys... that all songs were composed by Dirne's wife Jacky is probably inaccurate as well, especially since there is some overlap with material that Eardley recorded for Prestige in the 50s... never got around to ordering the guy's autobiography but I might at some point...)

a funny thing about "Jazz goes Swinging" is that the "St Tropez Jazz Octett" is basically Placebo, the Belgian answer to Soft Machine... these were professionals who would play any style... just remove the trombones, replace one of the trumpeters and the bassist and you have the band that can be seen playing fusion a few years later, starting around 32:30 in this video (the other bands in that video are also interesting, a Fats Sadi Quartet and a Rene Thomas Trio)

sorry, should have made clearer that I was replying to Peter Friedman... I meant the Eddy Louiss Trio and the Bobby Jaspar / Rene Thomas album on Mole Jazz ... (without actually counting the beans) I'd argue that it's hard to justify a top 5 of albums featuring Rene Thomas without including those two (or a top5 of albums featuring Bobby Jaspar without including the latter)

Gijs Hendriks - Stan Tracey Quartet ‎– Live Recordings to close the circle of "before lunch listening"... for this 1981 album on Loek Dikker's Waterland label, Hendriks, van Erk and their then regular drummer Michael Baird got Stan Tracey from the UK on piano, quite different from Loos but also excellent, obviously... Tracey played on no less than four Hendriks albums around that time (two of them with a larger band though)

Ellington is missing... for me that's Game Over right there... I mean, I see that the rule he made is "my definition of a genius is an artist whose playing was so innovate and influential that it created a new jazz style and spawned many imitators" and I guess he would argue that Ellington was not influential in this sense... but I disagree plus the definition doesn't convince me either

yes... those three albums on that label all look quite tempting... for me, the first looks most promising, Soulbrass Inc at the Bohemia Jazz Club... every cover seems to look different here (check discogs) and it's a progressive organ group with a good organ player (Herbert Noord) and Hans Dulfer on tenor... luckily, the later stuff on the Waterland label is easier to find... Gijs Hendriks-Beaver Harris Quartet ‎– Sound Compound almost bought a second copy of this one but then rightly suspected that I already own it... so playing it now to let that sink in... Hendriks (reeds) and Bert van Erk (b) had a long standing group with varying guests on piano and drums, the number one jazz group in the city of Utrecht... for this 1986 album, it's Beaver Harris on drums and the excellent Belgian pianist Charles Loos

the cover is indeed one of the album's biggest selling points... (I also like Gerd Dudek a lot, and I like how the bio for one of the violin players says that he usually plays "schmalzy semi-classical music") guess I'll have to order the companion album now, if only for the cover (this one)

went through the big city (Amsterdam) in something of a rush on Saturday but ended up buying some pretty cool things like the Schönfeld album, a bottle of that British trappist ale you mentioned recently (excellent, definitely near the top of the more recently established trappist beers - haven't tried the Italian one though), and also this album which is up next Loek Dikker Waterland Ensemble - Tan Tango Dutch free jazz meets third stream, I guess this is comparable to what someone like Willem Breuker did at the same time (mid 70s), played by a medium-sized band with three reeds, four brass and two violins

Friedhelm Schönfeld got this last weekend, inspired by that Euro modernism thread even though it's from a bit later (1978), I just felt like I needed more of those Amigas in my life. It's a nice free album with the leader on reeds + flute, the virtuoso Aladar Pege on bass, a drummer and on one track an additional cello...

what I especially like about that compilation is that it's not limited to incredibly rare stuff (even though there is some on there) but also some tracks from albums that are super easy to find once you know that they are actually decent jazz records (with somewhat short tracks though)

The two albums with Rene Thomas (#1&3), the latter existing with various covers, would be in my top extremely few list of Euro jazz albums that fit the bill...

Yes, I mentioned it above, it's great!

the book's promotional website is still up btw https://sites.google.com/site/sqjazzband/ (for some reason it's in English even though there is no English edition afaik)

Let's say it like this: I don't regret getting it at all even though my French is so poor that I wouldn't want to really judge the book... the author went into the records of the california prison system (and similar sources) to dig up what they had about a group of musicians who were active in a prison band in San Quentin in the early 60s - and they had a lot. Trumpeters Nat Meeks and Dupree Bolton, altoists Frank Morgan, Art Pepper and Earl Anderza, pianist Jimmy Bunn all get a chapter and there are also some general chapters... at 350 pages it's a sizeable document and the type of information (endless cycles of arrests, releases, probabation violations...) I haven't seen in this (or a comparable) level of detail in other books about the era - even though they evidently were an important part of the jazz life at the time... Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz book is certainly the more essential book about this period (because it's broader and says more about the music) and there are, of course, also quite a few autobiographies which touch upon similar topics, addiction and the jazz life in California ca 1960 (Art Pepper and Hampton Hawes come to mind, two of the big autobiographies in jazz, also Roy Porter...)... but I would still say that this book has a lot of unique information and gives you a perspective that the other books don't have, looking with information from both sides at the interactions between the jazz musicians and the legal system edit: reading a bit in it, maybe the image I give above slighlty one-sided... it's not just legal records but also concert reviews from the prison newspaper that went into the book - and various other sources for the times these people spent out of prison....

Amazon.com would be an option