Shrdlu

To Aggie, I understand your surprise, but rock music is not my cup of tea, and I haven't listened to much radio since the late 1960s, and none of my friends were into rock. I have concentrated on playing and listening to jazz, plus, my late wife was a classically trained violinist and pianist. Eric Prydz is scarcely a "niche" muscian. His mix of The Wall is just as big a hit as Pink Floyd's original. I am just as surpised that you have never heard of him as you seem to be that I had never heard of Pink Floyd. Anyway, when I heard Eric's hit, my son, who plays rock guitar, told me about Pink Floyd. They are quite good, tbough that genre is not for me.

I had never heard of them until Eric Prydz (Swedish house composer) made a house mix of their Brick On The Wall piece, which he called "Proper Education". It was a big hit. An earler attempt, called "The Wall", has a nice groove.

Kevin Bresnahan mentioned "Crescent With Love". Back in the 90s, I was in a record store browsing and I heard this Trane piece playing. I had most of Trane's records and I thought "What's this?". I asked the guy at the counter which new Trane album it was, and he said it was Pharaoh. I have never heard a tenor saxophonist sound as close as that to Trane. At the time, I had never heard Pharaoh play without a lot of screeching. Very beautiful.

I would never tolerate some engineer or producer putting us in boxes. We need to see each other. They would probably rabbit on about audio spillover from mike to mike, but there is nothing wrong with that. I read an interview with one of the Columbia 30th Street engineers, Frank Laico, I think. He described the setup for Miles's 60s quintet. They were all out in the open together. There were just 5 mikes: one each for the piano and bass, two for the drums (one low, one at cymbal level) and one that picked up the trumpet and tenor saxophone. That worked fine.

Recommended: "Message From Home", an excellent album. It has the vibe of Pharoah's Impulse albums from the late 60s.

I saw those two together at Ronnie's in London in 1972.

Also recommended: The bio of Nica, by her neice. My copy is borrowed, so I can't post the title here, but it's easy to find.

They were obviously thinking of "Confirmation".

To Hardbopjazz, yes, that pic is in her book. (The title of the book is "Three Wishes")

In case anyone hasn't read it, check out Robin Kelley's bio of Monk. I only became aware of it a year ago. It is the finest bio of a jazz musician I have ever read, though I hasten to add that Diz's book is also outstanding. We all enjoy Monk's recordings, Blue Note, Prestige, etc., but Monk's life (apart from his loving family and friends) was a misery until his Columbia contract in 1962. Of course, that damned Manhattan cabaret card issue is well-known. No need to go into that again here. One sample: Monk was delighted to start recording for Columbia. He found a freshly-tuned piano and some sandwiches at 30th Street. Very nice. Then, he was billed for the tuner and the tuna!! Disgustingly cheap of a huge company that made tens of thousands off his albums. Meanwhile, struggling Blue Note provided free food and Rudy never charged the musicians for tuning his piano. Anyway, get the book. This might have been mentioned before, but I'm not going to go through 292 pages hunting for it.

That pic was, of course, taken by Pannonica at her house in Weehawken, NJ. I have a book with many of her pics. I understand she had a cat.

Although the fundamental tones of these instruments are not very high frequency, there are harmonics that go beyond 11,000 cycles per second, and ideally, one needs to hear them. Nowadays, drummers wear ear protection. Apart from the toms, a loud ride will damage the top end of the player's hearing. I have a very loud ride: it's a 22" Istanbul Agop 30th Anniversary model. (Supposedly, a limited edition, but still available.). The original owner purchased it in Manhattan, after a day's search. It comes with a nice leather bag. He took it, in the bag, to a jazz performance, and the drummer, Bill Stewart, saw it and asked to play it, and was highly inpressed. This series of cymbals are made in Turkey, and are the closest you can get to the old Turkish Zildjian Ks that the top guys used to have back in the 50s and 60s. As you may know, Zildjian moved to the U.S. (in the 70s, I think) and their cymbals are not as good as the Turkish ones. Their "K Constantinople" rides are good, and I have three of them, but they are not in the same class as the old Turkish Ks that Bu and the rest had. I also have the 30th Anniversary 18" crash and 14" hats. I would love to have shown those hats to Jo Jones: he would have loved them.

I saw Diz and Monk when they toured Australia (where I lived then, though that was coming to an end) as part of George Wein's "Giants Of Jazz" in 1971. Realizing that that was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity, I went to Melbourne to catch them, as well as at Adelaide where I was living. I flew back to Adelaide with them all, and my Dad took pics of us all leaving the plane. In those days, you went down a ladder off the plane and walked across the tarmac. No security zones, and I wasn't X-rayed in the nude like they do now in the U.S. For those who don't know, the lineup was Diz, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Monk, Al McSkibbon-Vouty and Bu. They had Jaki Byard there, in case Monk couldn't play, but Monk played at all the concerts and Jaki did a set of piano solos. The lineup was a good idea on paper, but, as Bu said, it was a bad idea. But, as many of you know, it did produce that excellent Monk session for Black Lion in London. Three whole CDs' worth. Bud Freeman, Jimmy Rushing, Buck Clayton and Pee Wee Russell were touring Australia with an Eddie Condon group. Others in the group were Dick Cary and Jack Lesberg. I don't remember who was on drums: maybe George Wettling. My uncle took me to see them. I was a teenager, into Bird and Trane, and I didn't like a single minute of it, to be honest. I had just been given a copy of Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews's "Pictorial History of Jazz", and I was keen to talk with Eddie about Bix. I only got a couple of minutes and then was told to clam up. I wish I had then known that Buck was in the classic Basie band. I saw him in the hotel and said to him that I had heard him on a Benny Goodman album: the Decca "Benny Goodman Story", Vol 2, album, where he isn't credited, but appeared in a picture on the cover of the Australian issue of the album. Bud and Jimmy Rushing were both extremely friendly.

What this set does show is that Bird was way superior to anything else Savoy recorded in the forties. I would describe this set as an academic bore.

This material is easy to find elsewhere, and there are even videos from the 1964 visit to Yurp, including an amazing bass clarinet solo on "Take The A Train".

Diz, Bu, Monk, Buck Clayton, Charlie Mingus, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Rushing, Jo Jones. Got to chat with Bud at length (as a teenager) and I was tickled that he used the same reeds as me: Rico #2, brown box. Jimmy Rushing's hand was very flabby. Monk was really out of it, poor guy; no motor control. Birks was looking after him. (I didn't see Nellie.)

I should add that it was dead easy to execute my late wife's will, which overlaped with her mother's will to some degree. I just grabbed the hardware mentioned and gave it to the recipients. She had an investment in a Canadian bank and some money for our children (from her mother's will), so I had to have the will probated here to clear that. That one issue took a couple of months to settle. And that was it. Ironically, she willed our (ca. 1910) Heintzmann upright grand piano to my elder son, but it was very difficult to get into this house and virtually impossible to remove. It has a fantastic sound, e.g. if you play the "Maiden Voyage" riff on it: starting on the D below middle C, voice it as D A D G C D. No tinny upright this. So, don't be scared of executing a will. And think of all the lawyers' or bank fees you will save.

Tom and Dan, I sympathise with you both. I think the practical suggestions have all been well dealt with above. Re wills, I strongly recommend that the executor NOT be a bank, or an attorney. Rather, it should be a family member. Then, the executor can go ahead and dispose of the estate without interference. I have had some horrendous experiences with family wills. My father-in-law (dead before I met my late wife), in Canada, had a one-page will. It looks dead simple. He left a clay drain tile factory in SW Ontario worth at least a half mill. Unfortunately, the will was administered by a crooked outfit called the Canada Trust, who managed to drag the whole thing out for a staggering forty years! During that time, the "Trust" and the Canadian Feds helped themselves to over 50% of the estate, with "fees" and Federal taxes. Things were not helped by the fact that my mother-in-law died in 1994 and left another one-page nightmare which was like an addendum to her husband's will. When my wife died in 2002, she nominated me as executor and the complications of her parent's wills were still a problem. No longer having any patience with all the bull, I acted quickly and disbursed everything very rapidly. This drew a nasty letter from the Ontario Attorney-General. My sister-in-law (in the Toronto area) had accused me of stealing money that was willed to my children. It was a lie, and I wrote to the Attorney-General with the evidence and soon cleared the matter up. (Of course, not living in Canada at the time, I could have told him to get stuffed.) So, I strongly advise that executors be family members. I hope that this is of some use.

Not quite the point of this thread, but Ed Blackwell was from New Orleans. His drumming on the Trane/Cherry Atlantic album is outstanding, including some fine mallet work. Listening to it, I felt sad that so few drummers vary their work and seldom get the sounds that Ed got there. Ding ding-da ding (or, as Prez called it, ricky-tick) is fine, but that is what we mainly hear and we are losing a lot. I even use mallets on my tumbas. Yes, you are supposed to use your hands, and I do, but the tumbas belong to me, and I will do whatever I like with them. They cost me a staggering price. They are the Giovanni Hidalgo Galaxy tumbas http://www.lpmusic.com/products/congas/lp/galaxy-giovanni-signature-requinto which exist as requinto, quinto, conga and tumbadora. Latin Percussion does a super tumba in their "Palladium" range. I have lobbied them to do a Galaxy super tumba, but they don't seem to care. If they did a Galaxy version, that would be the only tumba series in the world with five sizes. (The Palladium range does not include a requinto.)

"Here's Dodo on the piano .... You better bring me a double order of reetyvooties with a little hot sauce on it - that'll just about fix it ... " As a teenager in Australia, I had never heard of burritos, and "Slim's Jam" was my first exposure to Voutarooney.

Art Blakey used to tell his soloists not to go on after peaking. Good advice. It's partly a matter of taste. Recently, I was playing "Relaxin' At Camarillo" by Bird (March 1947) and that copy was in B (as Allen mentioned, for another item). The piece was played in C, of course. Jazz performances are never in B. I could fix that by inserting the disk into one of my Pioneer CDJ 1000 house music players and recording it. Those have a speed control. So, it could be speeded up to C. If that turned out to be the wrong speed, it could be burned onto another CD and reinserted into the CD player. They have a pitch lock (mysteriously called Master Tempo) which allows the user to vary the speed without changing the musical pitch. Of course, that is vital when mixing. The result could be recorded and then burned onto another CD. But, it would be time-consuming. The famous 1957 video of "Fine And Mellow" (Lady Day) is at the wrong speed and is heard in E, which they would never have used. So, was it in F or Eb? You can see Gerry Mulligan playing a top E* (concert G), so the key is the baritone's C (concert Eb). __________________________________________________ * The keys for the top E are on the coiled neck, so you can see them clearly.

Getting the site to accept an avatar pic is tough. The upper limit for the filesize is very low. After a struggle, I got the pic on the left uploaded, but it wouldn't accept any others. Nothing to lose sleep over, though.

What a delightful plan. Well done, Ken!

I must add hearty agreement with Rooster's post. It has been exciting to hear all these many "new" tracks, but the extra take of "Mode For Joe" is worth more to me than the total of all the other previously unissued tracks put together. Like Rooster, I have known the original album for decades, and it is very special to me. The originally issued take of that track is superbly atmospheric, especially during Ron Carter's solo. When I heard that there is an extra (later) take, I was really keen to hear it. It is, as Rooster said, very different from the first attempt. Ha ha, the players had not memorized the first take. Hearing that new take has been one of the most enjoyable experiences of the last few months. It isn't right that it isn't readily available. Lobby Don Was.

This album has now appeared as UCCQ-9414, 2019, with the extra take of "Blues March".