Face of the Bass

Just heard a Smith recording from the mid 1950s, and damn, I can't keep going back to the well to get yet another Mosaic set, but I can already feel the pull...

Cool. Thanks for checking.

No interest in the Rich set, but the Johnny Smith has me curious, but no audio samples on the Mosaic site?

I only have this music from the Atlantic box set, so I don't have the original liner notes. If someone does have them and wouldn't mind looking it up for me, does Coltrane or the author of the liner notes provide any specific reason behind the name of the tune Dahomey Dance? I know this is when Coltrane was starting to become more interested in Africa, but I was wondering if there was a particular reason that title was chosen. Thanks.

Yeah, I've noticed this too. On EBay now part of the problem is that a lot of the Mosaic boxes get posted with only a "Buy It Now" option and the price tends to be ridiculously high, like $285 or something like that. It's somewhat rare when a box actually goes to auction. Still, I feel I was lucky to score the Lee/Christy set for just $90, not really much more than it cost when it was in print (and possibly less once you factor in shipping) but in that case I think the seller made the mistake of not putting the word "Mosaic" in the title. I usually do a "Mosaic" search to see what boxes are out there, but in this particular instance I was specifically looking for the Lee/Christy, so I did that search and the box came up. But I imagine the seller lost a lot of potential page-views by not putting the word "Mosaic" in the title. That said, it kind of makes sense that the prices would come down. The market for these kinds of niche sets is not unlimited.

Some of the lineups are intriguing, but the samples on the Mosaic web site leave me cold.

I've been mildly curious about this set for awhile, but there's nothing in it that really makes me want to have it. I'd hate to pass it up now only to decide a few years from now that I really want it and have to pay 1 1/2 times the current cost (if not more). On the other hand, I just scored a Peggy Lee/June Christy set for a total of $93, including shipping, so steals can be had even after a set goes OOP.

I think collecting is a beautiful activity, and jazz is perfect for it. It's almost like, through the act of collecting something, you aren't just acquiring objects but you are coming to identify a small part of yourself through those objects, and to tap a little bit into the idiosyncratic by-ways to happiness in life.

Well I've been listening to this set regularly for the last week or so, and I'm definitely glad I went ahead and got it. There's something about having all these performances together that just makes Parker--as well as some of the other players on the set, from Miles and Dizzy to Howard McGhee and Curly Russell, to name a few--stand out. Anyway, I'm going to listen some more. But thanks to all those who chipped in with their input. I may springboard off this set to get the Mosaic Benedetti box. I don't think the poor recording quality will be an issue for me. Someone in another thread implied that the Benedetti recording quality is a bit like the Bird on 52nd Street from Fantasy records. Well, I've heard clips of that and if there's more like that, I'm all over it.

So I've got a bit of a want list of CDs right now. I can get most of these through other avenues and I may well do that for some of them, but I wanted to put out this list to see if any has these and would be willing to part with them in exchange for something else, or as a straight sale. If you do have any of these and would be willing to make a trade, send me a pm or respond in this thread. I've got them organized by label: Verve: Wynton Kelly - Comin' In The Back Door Wynton Kelly - It's All Right Wynton Kelly - Undiluted Gil Evans - The Individualism Of Gil Evans Wes Montgomery - Willow Weep For Me Joe Henderson - Four Atlantic: Harry Lokofsky - Stringsville Bethlehem: Frank Minion - The Soft Land Of Make Believe Contemporary: Hampton Hawes - Bird Song ABC/Impulse!: Quincy Jones - This Is How I Feel About Jazz Mercury: Jimmy Cleveland - Cleveland Style Bob Brookmeyer - Jazz Is A Kick Riverside: Bennie Green - Glidin' Along Savoy: Cannonball Adderley - Discoveries Hank Jones - Hank Jones Quartet Sahib Shihab - Jazz Sahib, Jazz Is Busting Out All Over A.K. Salim - Pretty For The People Blue Note: Clifford Jordan - Cliff Jordan Sonny Clark - Standards Lee Morgan - Rajah Prestige: King Pleasure - King Pleasure Sings Bennie Green - Blows His Horn Hal McKusick - Triple Exposure Red Garland - Rediscovered Masters, Vol. 1 King Curtis - The New Scene Of King Curtis Sonny Criss - Portrait Of Sonny Criss Sonny Criss - Rockin' In Rhythm Richard "Groove" Holmes - Get Up And Get It! Barry Harris - Bull's Eye

I was just writing along those same lines, when I saw you responded! I've read posts where Mosaic has said that the Boxed sets (not Selects) are sent out in numerical order. However, I was looking through my sets and I ordered the Lionel Hampton set in Feb. 2010 and that number is 4082/5000. Okay, now we have definitive proof that they don't go out in chronological order. I got the Hampton set two weeks ago and my number is 2481. So, the next time somebody says they put them out in the order they are shipped, just link to this thread and we can dispel that impression once and for all.

I don't believe it because we get these threads every few months, with somebody reporting a numbered box near the limit, but that doesn't seem to lead to the box moving to Running Low status. I don't believe it is just straight chronological order.

Probably about 2,000 CDs and about 10 LPs.

PM sent on the Toshiko Trio disc.

In something like chronological order, in terms of when I encountered them in my life: 1. Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland. I think I first heard this when I was 16 years old. I remember I went on a trip with my sister to Ocean City, Maryland, and something about the sunshine and the breezes off the ocean triggered a desire to hear Hendrix. To be honest, I don't think I ever really understood the power music had to be transformative until I heard the opening few minutes of 1983: A Merman I should Turn To Be... 2. Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde. Listening to Hendrix sort of naturally led me to Dylan, first through his greatest hits packages and then the individual albums. This is the first one that really blew me away, and I think the full effect of it came when I was around 17 or 18 years old. For me, there are few lyrical performances as wonderful as Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. This music not only changed the way I thought of music, it changed the way I thought of language. After hearing this I became more interested in poetry and in becoming a writer. 3. Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain. Today this is nowhere near my favorite Miles album, but at the time I heard this I was absolutely blown away by the orchestration and the lyric expressiveness of Miles' trumpet playing. I didn't really encounter this music until I was about 25 years old. It snapped me out of a musical boredom that had been created by listening to too much Dylan, too many songs based on guitars and simple chord structures. This is the album that turned me on to jazz. 4. Cecil Taylor - Jazz Advance. My journey through jazz history was an accelerated one, and I think I decided to listen to Cecil after he was crudely dismissed by Ken Burns in his infamous documentary. The brilliance of this recording, which I first remember experiencing sometime around 2003-2004, shocked me. His truly percussive approach to the piano made me feel like I was hearing for the first time the way the instrument was, in some respect, meant to be played. This recording really made me realize what avant-garde jazz, at its very best, was all about. 5. Lee Morgan - Leeway. This is an odd choice, I admit. I could have gone another direction and picked Keith Rowe and John Tilbury's Duos for Doris, which had its own impact on me. But I'm going with the Morgan because it was listening to this for the first time, around 2006 or 2007, that made me realize what an absolutely brilliant bass player Paul Chambers is. After listening to one of his solos on this record, while I was driving on I-97 between Baltimore and Annapolis late at night, I decided I was going to seek out every recording with Chambers on it that I could get my hands on. That solo was what made me truly appreciate the bass, and led me to seek out other great bassists like Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Blanton, etc. It reshaped the way I think about (and especially the way I listen to) jazz music. When I was spending a year away from home doing research in Africa in 2009, I made his solo on this album my ring tone. My Namibian assistant grew very fond of hearing it every time I had a new message and so I got to tell her about who Chambers was. And finally, listening to this led me to the perhaps foolish decision to buy my own bass in January 2010, which I did, and start practicing on it in my own humble way, which I have.

You guys convinced me. I went for the 8 disc box.

My parents got me the Lionel Hampton Mosaic set, my brother-in-law got me the John Carter/Bobby Bradford Select and the Art Blakey Hard Bop Mosaic single, my sister got me the Dylan Witmark Demos, and I am spending some Christmas money on the Charlie Parker Savoy & Dial Studio Sessions box.

The thing about the Benedetti (which I don't have yet) that I find appealing is precisely that the sound quality is inferior and the larger context for the music is missing in many cases. It gives the whole project this unpolished romanticism that you can't get from a more traditional set. The only reason that I don't own this set already is simply because I know it isn't a limited edition. It would be interesting to see how many sets they could sell if they suddenly put the Benedetti recordings on "Last Chance."

So I'd like to spend a little bit of Christmas money that I ran into on a jazz box, and I was thinking of upgrading my Charlie Parker collection. I currently have just the three-disc Savoy & Dial Master Takes box, which I really like, but after reading a bit online I'm wondering if it might not be worth it to upgrade to the full eight-disc Complete Studio Sessions Set. I was wondering if people who have the larger box can comment on whether all the extra outtakes are worth it, or if I should just stick with the three-disc set. Is the extra material worth it?

I don't know if this new format will be for everyone, but I can definitely say that it's much more thought out than some of the early posters in this thread seemed to assume. I've been reading through it a bit tonight, and I'm only up to the 1920s, but what strikes me again is the wonderful quality of the writing. Morton (and Cook when he was alive) are both very good writers, and I feel that this really got lost to some extent in the more recent versions of the Penguin Guide.

I just picked up a Kindle copy of this for my IPhone, and have been reading through it today here and there. I have to say, I think making these changes was a really smart move. The more recent editions of this book had been plagued, IMO, by hopeless attempts to cover everything superficially. Inevitably they couldn't cover everything (or even close to everything) and what they did cover was usually very truncated and somehow lacking. Now they've reorganized the book so it reads more like a history of jazz on record, with recordings organized chronologically instead of alphabetically. The writing for each entry is much more thorough, and even more awesome, they've added these pretty interesting quotations from the musicians themselves, or sometimes from other musicians about each musician. These quotes are also unique sources: they all come from Brian Morton's personal collection of interviews, so it's not just a reprinting of something that was published somewhere else. The result, for my money (and the e-version of this was less than $18), is much more of a "book", much less a "reference guide." Given how many recordings there are out there now, I think this is a shift in the right direction. Only 1001 recordings are covered in this version, but reading through this I will have much better information, and much better writing, about those recordings than I had for the 14,000 recordings that were touched on in the ninth edition. Also, I'm glad they got rid of the star rating system, which really obscured more than it enlightened. I have to say, I'm liking having a version of this book on my cell phone. No, I can't just randomly start flipping the pages as easily as I could a physical book, but I can carry it with me when I go to record stores or I can pick it up and read it easily for a few minutes when I have the time. Plus, I save a lot of shelving space. One continuing source of annoyance, though, is their categorical refusal to include anything by Mosaic. Their reasons (that the sets are targeted to a niche audience, that they go out of print after a few years) just don't wash. The same could be said for a lot of recordings that they do cover.

Oh, believe me, I'd buy a seven or eight disc set, too! I just have amassed lots of Rivers' music over the years... but I quite agree about the Braxton and Threadgill being an exciting new turn (still have to get the Threadgill one though). I'd be all for more similar releases! I don't have nearly enough Rivers, but generally love the stuff I've heard. To me the shifting of focus to the avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s is a natural direction for Mosaic. They've just about gone through everything there is to go through on Blue Note from the 1950s and 1960s, and the reissues from the earlier eras are nice, but are also (generally) retrospectives of music that mainly is available from other places.

Well as a jazz fan who wasn't alive when most of this stuff was happening in the 1970s, this is the kind of Mosaic set that gets me most excited, and I would hate to see the material sloughed off as a three-disc select. The Braxton and Threadgill sets were some of the best Mosaic has ever done, IMO, and a Rivbea set would fit well in that lineage, I think.

Yeah, I understand the whole business side of things, but I'm not sure I could care less about another Mosaic set of Ellington material, whereas the Studio Rivbea stuff could potentially be genuinely "new" stuff, or at least stuff that hasn't been released on "official" compact discs before.

Thread bump...does anybody know if Mosaic is still planning on releasing this set?