Niko

I'd be interested to know which books you'd name under this heading. For me, the first that come to mind are Art Pepper's Straight Life and Hampton Hawes's Raise Up Off Me. still got to read the hawes bio... guess a huge difference between the two books you named and de valk's is that these are autobiographies... i really liked straight life, but somehow i don't feel an autobiography can really do justice to personalities like pepper or baker (after all - this generation of white musicians must have been the one of the most difficult group of characters in jazz history?(raney, getz, haig, marmarosa, and so many others) but what do i know, baker does not come across particularly troubled or unhappy in that book... btw, just out of a different world with all the difficulties that brings) it's just revealing to read the baker interview in de valk's book seeing he doesn't know about a good deal of the albums he releases, misplaces others by more than ten years, doesn't know the name of jean louis rassinfosse who had recorded six albums with him in the last few years... this type of thing wouldn't have made it into an autobigraphy... and then, i feel a complex person like that is much better described by the impressions of a few dozen others than by their own words... also de valk maintains an excellent balance between writing about the music, writing about the person and setting the two in relation (expect no deep musicology though) one excellent book which falls somewhat in between is aj albany's book about her father joe albany (we used to have a thread about that one) it's not much about the music and of course highly personal but still i'd say you certainly learn more about albany than in what i'd expect would have been in his autobiography... a particularly bad example concerning getting to know the person is buddy collette's autobiography... the book sure is informative but could hardly be drier - i wish (and am almost convinced) buddy collette is a more interesting person than comes out in the book...

Jeroen de Valk's Chet Baker Bio once again (while listening to the Rassinfosse/Baker/Catherine cd) such a great book, maybe of all the jazz biographies i've read the one that helps you get to know the artist as a person the best... somehow de valk figured out that he could write a great baker bio mostly by extensively interviewing people in the Netherlands who knew him from the seventies on - and i'd say he was definitively right... afterwards my two books of lovecraft stories that reappeared again (bringing the index of treasured but lost items in my appartment down to two...)

it rather is around 12$...

Jean-Louis Rassinfosse/Chet Baker/Philip Catherine (Igloo) fruitfull visit to my local brick and mortar... as i posted elsewhere - their selection is small, but for the only serious cd store in town they're beter than most i guess (and they're not specialized on jazz at all)... 8 euro...

Sean Levitt - Alone together (lastfm still waiting fot that order to arrive...

guess the one positive aspect about the miles/rollins box is that it shows concord aren't through with fantasy-prepared box sets yet...

at books.google.com you get all the old billboards and jet (which apparently is/was a publication targeting african americans with reports on billy eckstine, gene ammons...) and of course lots of books at news.google.com/newspapers you get the whole village voice (and other newspapers most of which which are pay-per-view or subscription only - maybe you can see them at the public library) haven't figured out yet how to search for specific issues but searching for keywords works fine with both... for instance http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=fNsOA...=charlie-parker

then you would have enjoyed today's conversation over lunch at work more than i did... (the subject was "when did you first realize that "michael jackson" (as read and pronounced in german) and "michael jackson" (as pronounced correctly on tv and on the radio) were one and the same person?" surprisingly many people could contribute their experiences...) Would that be pronounced something like "Mish-ale Yack-zen" in German? Been a long time since my German O level, and I've spoken very little since. "Mish-ale" is not bad i guess though ("ch" is of course not "sh" but one of the sounds that don't exist in english), maybe "Misha-ale" comes even closer... (it's a pretty common first name in german as well...) Yack is good (with the "a" pronounced like the "u" in cup), "son" is closer to "phone" (but with a short "o") then to zen, it's a true "o"...(guess you have to be a kid to find that an ordinary last name but then it might work...)

then you would have enjoyed today's conversation over lunch at work more than i did... (the subject was "when did you first realize that "michael jackson" (as read and pronounced in german) and "michael jackson" (as pronounced correctly on tv and on the radio) were one and the same person?" surprisingly many people could contribute their experiences...)

bookmark set excellent idea, have been missing your thread ... thank you!

reasonably interesting article about sholes from 1961 billboard... http://books.google.de/books?id=IiEEAAAAMB...nard+joy%22+rca suggests that frank walker, leonard joy and eli oberstein could be names to consider (though i doubt that especially the latter is black...)

here in bonn (300000 inhabitants) amazingly all the stores that were there in 2001 are still there (with the exception of one used cd store, maybe) despite the fact that only one of them deserves to be called decent (a medium-sized one which sells more tickets then cds it seems, they have many rvgs at ok prices and behind the scenes there must be someone reasonably knowledgeable of jazz who organizes small sales of stuff that's available cheaply from the distributors apparently, like a black saint/soul note sale, an esp sale... i don't buy much from them but they do deserve support...) , then there's zweitausendeins since last year so actually, the situation has improved... in cologne there are still three stores plus zweitausendeins that i visit regularly (two used cd stores and the huge saturn, they still claim they have the largest selection of cds in the world, don't know if that's true but they have definitely reduced the size of their selection in the last few years), guess there are two or three more places for vinyl... guess the situation is still ok (and much better than what i saw in the uk, these hmvs are real depressing) but some of my favorite stores went away in the last few years....

guess you'd have to turn billy upside down to put rolls below it... still doesn't sound like a good idea to me (but what do i know...)

Hipp is just Hip "J" is like "Y" in "Yes", the "u" is the same sound as in "cool" but short (that's what the double "t" means) (nothing special about the "tta" like in "odetta" i guess)

Sean Levitt Quartet - Sean Levitt Quartet

Eugene McDaniels - Outlaw

Booker and Brass (deezer)

happy birthday!!

those are percentages i believe - you need to know how the column on the right continues to say what sales of jazz cds did (but assuming that overall sales went down this mean that the drop in jazz cds is in fact even more drastic than from 2.6 * X to 1.1*X) (it's from 2.6 * X to 1.1 * Y where X and Y are the total sales in 2007 and 2008... for X=Y this gives a drop by over 60%, for X>Y it's worse than that) agree that categorizing might be a problem (like whether you count norah jones as pop or jazz...)

judging from the line-up it could be pretty good... who produced the cd? (rough guess: someone who downloaded it and has a nice printer?) Date: 1976 Location: Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL Label: [private recording] Woody Shaw (ldr), Joe Henderson (ts), Woody Shaw (t, fh), Slide Hampton (tb), Ronnie Mathews (p), Ron McClure (b), Louis Hayes (d) a. 01 Blue Bossa (Kenny Dorham) b. 02 Invitation (Bronislau Kaper, Paul Francis Webster) c. 03 Jean Marie (Ronnie Mathews) d. 04 Old Folks (Willard Robison, Dedette Hill) e. 05 'Round Midnight (Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams, Bernie Hanighen) Joe Henderson (ts) on a-b, e; Woody Shaw (t) on a-b, e; (fh) on c; Slide Hampton (tb) on a-b, d. Spoken introduction by Ron Modell precedes a. Spoken introductions by Woody Shaw precede other selections. Shaw plays only on the ending of 'Round Midnight. This recording of two sets is probably incomplete.

police records are the major source of pierre briancon's san quentin jazz band book - and since that book is based on relatively easily available sources (say, three interviews, 15 books, google and the prison newspaper) otherwise it can't be that hard to get them (though maybe you have to be a journalist?) the stories drawn from these records are usually pretty depressing, a bit confusing and a bit boring (say, released from prison, stopped by the police for driving too fast 10 days later (alternatively for stealing a piece of meat at the super market or for buglary), not showing up at the driving trial, thus searched by the police and caught with a bunch of illegal substances and back to prison... that's what the stories of nathaniel meeks or dupree bolton as constructed from their criminal records look like... not much music in there...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_etiquette Maybe over here in Europe (or is this a German phenomenon??) "classical music etiquette" really has such a firm stranglehold on expected audience behavior, but is this something that just GOT to be so? must admit i haven't been to many concerts, stadtgarten in cologne (where i heard most of the bigger names i have heard) has two settings, sometimes they remove chairs and get a good atomsphere... but they rather do that for, say, victor bailey, than for don byron or dewey redman (and those concerts severly suffered, imho...), from those concerts i knew what you meant, the subway in cologne was a little bit better but not significantly so... it's gone and i wasn't surprised, didn't feel welcome at all, maybe also an age thing) we had a great jazz club here in bonn for two years, mostly with younger local artists and a young audience and this always had a great, relaxed atmosphere... the loft in cologne also has a somewhat serious air but this is offset a good deal by a very family like atmosphere (notably because the audience is rarely more than 25 people) moers festival is much different, on the outside you have like 25000 people living in tents, smoking stuff, not caring much about jazz (most of them) - and while this does feel a bit odd it relaxes the atomsphere in the concert tent quite a bit... can't see any more hippies for a week or so afterwards though have to agree with bev - i don't blame the musicians for not being willing to do a "show" but i do wish they'd feel different (just, if i think how often i tell my students about the importance of "doing a good show" - and they're about to become mathematicians ... i can't really belive this is not an issue for so many jazz musicians, after all they're still standing on stages giving concerts at this point in the development of their art form... looking at them you get the feeling they think it's something of a transitional period and some day (with the next bird) it will be established that they can just play for themselves in their appartments)

wikipedia sums this up nicely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_etiquette another thing that article reminded me of is that in the 19th century it was still appropriate to applaude between movements of symphonies (and what i hate the most at classical concerts are those people who can talk for minutes about the idiots who clapped hands between movements...)

what i found disturbing was a trumpeter (sideman in a pianist's quartet) going to the front of the stage during the piano solo, looking carefully through the audience for like five minutes (looked pretty strange because he didn't try to be discrete and obviously had bad eyesight...) he should better have left the stage... (but, of course, from elsewhere he couldn't see people's faces as well) no problem with stage leavers here...

happy birthday