Teasing the Korean

Let's discuss. As a Morricone freak, I had discovered them via the score for the giallo "The Cold Eyes of Fear." I just picked up their 1960s RCA LP "The Private Sea of Dreams." I have not spun it yet. Any fans?

I just picked up the Chronological 1947-49 CD, containing 24 tracks recorded for Blue Note. I have the brilliant "Tales of Manhattan" also. What else is worthwhile? I know little about Babs.

If you are a fan of exotica, Drasnin's 1959 album "Voodoo" is one of the absolute best in the genre. It was recorded for a budget label that wanted a Martin Denny knock-off. It became a cult classic beginning in the 1990s with the re-emergence of exotica. I was there when Drasnin conducted the album top to bottom, from the original scores, to a packed house in 2005. Everyone brought copies of the LP for him to sign. He must have been around 77 at the time. He seemed absolutely over the moon that all these younger tikiphiles knew this obscure album. I spoke to him at length and he was a real sweetheart of a guy. "Voodoo" is available on CD as both "Voodoo" and "Exotic Excursion." The former contains all 12 tracks, but is mastered from (pristine) vinyl; the latter has 10 tracks but comes from the master tapes. In 2007, Drasnin released a follow-up, "Voodoo II." He revisited the sketches for the original 1959 album and plucked some of the unused ideas for the new album. Drasnin, along with Gerald Fried, was one of the main composers on "The Man from UNCLE" seasons two and three. Four tracks written by him are on the "More Music from The Man from UNCLE" RCA album by Hugo Montenegro. RIP.

http://variety.com/2015/music/news/robert-drasnin-dead-dies-twilight-zone-voodoo-1201497751/ http://www.dionysusrecords.com/home/exotica-tv-music-legend-robert-drasnin-passes/

Didn't Charles Ives sell insurance also? The great poet Wallace Stevens also sold insurance, out of Hartford, CT no less. Any chance Allen works in the same office as either of them?

Didn't Charles Ives sell insurance also?

My suggestion would be to make it law that if an indie wants to license a recording they should be able to providing they meet reasonable costs. That would end the cheapo editions and ensure any reissues were of decent quality. Lots of Mosaic-style companies or lots of Real Gone Jazz-style ones? I know what I'd prefer and I'd pay extra for it. It comes down to idealism versus realism. In my ideal world, every record ever made - even the lousy ones - would be available as a high-quality reissue from the master tapes. If they threw in a free ice cream cone, all the better. But the fact is, the market for these rapidly aging recordings is shrinking, not expanding. If they haven't released these albums by now, they never will. So I will always come down on the side of availability and preservation. If better versions are not available, I support these cheap sets, even though I own exactly one of them.

Oh, that's right. Copyright protection covers only recorded works, not written works. Thanks for reminding me. Steady. I was just pointing out the comparison isn't like-for-like. OK. But I believe it is a very valid comparison. You couldn't have cheap Dover editions if the works of Shakespeare and Lao Tzu were still under copyright protection. And it is much cheaper for an orchestra to program Bach than, say, John Corigliano. So there's something incongruent about expecting to get classic pillars of culture for cheap, but then getting bent out of shape over cheap editions of 60-year-old jazz albums by dead artists who've been ignored by their own labels. Mickey Mouse and the Beatles keep getting copyrights extended, and I think that is a bad thing.

Oh, that's right. Copyright protection covers only recorded works, not written works. Thanks for reminding me.

Because it has a stultifying effect on art and culture when entire centuries are held under lock and key. If this is the preference, why not make copyright law retroactive and give the descendants of Bach and Shakespeare their slice of the pie? Because Bach is nearly as important as most jazz musicians.

Those of us who are selling our own music know that we are losing money. It is very helpful, though, for us to be put in our place by people who know how things should work in theory. Thank you for advocating for us.

The good twofers reproduce each album cover in full on both sides of the insert, so you choose which one you want facing out. Seems like a fairly straightforward concept to me. Bad enough that LP sleeves are shrunk to CD dimensions; why they have to deliberately make them even smaller is ludicrous.

I have exactly one of these sets: The Arthur Lyman set. It sounds like it is professionally mastered from a tape source, not vinyl. My impetus for buying it was that I already had all 8 LPs, and I wanted to burn the money cuts from a digital source onto a single CD. So I bought it for cheap and it was worth it. My main reasons for not buying more of these sets are packaging/aesthetics and, with some collections, sound quality. (Some are most certainly lifted from vinyl.) As for the philosophical arguments, in most cases, the artists are dead and the sessions are long since paid for. It doesn't break my heart when perfectly legal reissues may be depriving giant corporations from royalties on recordings they don't even know they own. As I wrote in a similar thread, the majors saw the European public domain law coming down the pike, and they could have either preemptively reissued recordings, or worked with the independent labels on producing high quality reissues. I saw some of the former and barely any of the latter. So, in summary, while I do not love these sets, I can certainly understand why they exist, in light of the realities of the major labels.

I know a guy with one of these and, interestingly, he claims that it has a harder time playing brand new, shiny, mint LPs than it does LPs that have been played several times.

Thanks Mike. I am listening now to a Verve double-LP collection of the the MGM stuff. The sound is really good. I guess I will get that box. I am not familiar with the trio sessions from that era, but some of the solo tracks are outstanding, like "Summertime" and "Tenderly." I was also listening to his (I believe) first Capitol LP, The Shearing Spell. That is a really solid album in terms of presentation, arrangements, song selection, improvisation, and, of course, Capitol's superb 1950s mono recording technique. I wish he had done more albums like this.

Bumping this thread I started a while back. Thanks Mike and Steve for the replies. There is also this set, a four-CD set of covering 1939 to 1958: http://www.amazon.com/Collection-1939-58-George-Shearing/dp/B006T307NW/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1430611743&sr=8-4&keywords=george+shearing+box I would assume that it is not as complete as the aforementioned set in terms of the quintet stuff for MGM, but I wonder about the sound. I guess I will get around to picking up that other set one of these days...

That is a reasonable guess. But at the same time, Ira continued to write new lyrics to "I Can't Get Started," and in fact wrote some stanzas specifically for Sinatra's recording on the No One Cares album. So I can see this one going either way.

Sinatra famously opens this version with the bridge, with the following lyrics: "There are many, many crazy things that will keep me loving you And with your permission may I list a few?" Did Ira Gershwin write these lyrics, or did Sinatra or someone in his camp write them? Assuming Ira wrote them, were they written for Frank? Did these lyrics appear in any previous versions?

When Mundell can write and/or arrange albums as good as Satan in High Heels and TV Action Jazz, his playing ability isn't really all that important to me.

My friend was a student of Billy Bauer, and Bauer told him that Mundell Lowe was a very talented writer and arranger who came up with great ideas and arrangements on the fly. For whatever that's worth... sgcim, is that version of "Lake in the Woods" you recorded available?

TV Action Jazz! Volume 2 is even better than Volume 1!

My parents were in the biz and worked quite a bit with Mundell in the 1950s. His TV Action Jazz! album was in our house, and as a kid, I felt very adult listening to it. It contains the definitive version of "Riff Blues" from Mike Hammer, with Tony Scott on clarinet:

The greatest album ever made:

Do you mean on-demand?

Of course. All I meant was that the 32-bar form had been a fairly common - though by no means exclusive - format for pop tunes. Pop tunes had generally organized themselves into 4- and 8-bar phrases. Probably one more example of humans naturally gravitating toward even numbers of beats and groupings, because of footsteps.