Shrdlu

The "Select" set did not include the whole "Hipnosis" session, but it's easy to grab on eBay on an LP - it's one of those BN twofers from the 70s. My copy, from eBay, is pretty close to mint, and it sounds great. For some reason, 70s LPs on eBay are usually in very good shape, compared with 50s and 60s LPs, which are normally very noisy. It's not just the age of the LPs.

Something like a U.S. Blue Note CD would be almost worthless secondhand - not worth the hassle of listing, getting payment and mailing, but if you are talking one of those rare Japanese CDs that were only available for 6 months, then it would have some value, especially if it was the only CD version of the album. I am glad that we are no longer in the early CD days when CDs like the JRVG of "Blue Train", and the U.S. CD of "True Blue" were going for $50 on eBay.

Apart from not having you on ignore, Allen, I mega love your dog. A highlight of this board.

Have a look at the other deep woodwind too: contrabass sax, tubax, etc. There is a very good video online of a guy playing a blues on a contrabass sax - he does a fine job with this ridiculous monstrosity, and makes it musical. Unlike the saxes bigger than the baritone, the deep clarinets are quite practical. This is because the clarinet's bottom note is that of a horn of twice the length. Even the regular clarinet's bottom note is D halfway down the bass clef, which is amazing for an instrument only 26" long. The Eb contrabass clarinet, which Michael Cuscuna persists in calling an alto clarinet, is a very practical deep woodwind, apart from its huge price. You can get one that goes down to its low C (concert Eb, a half tone below the bottom note of the bass fiddle), which is plenty low. Frank Foster can be heard playing it on a Duke Pearson date, as well as on an Elvin Jones session, where it was mistaken (at least by me) for the regular Bb bass clarinet when the LP first came out.

The 1954 R.C.A. record of the 1st Piano Concerto, with Artie Rubinstein and Fritz Reiner with the Chicago Symphony, is one of the finest performances in any genre, ever. Absolutely stunning, especially when you consider how hard that piece is to play and make it sound good (according to my late wife, who was a classically trained violinist and pianist). This was recorded in stereo too, which is very unusual for such an early year. It was originally only issued in mono, naturellement, and then Artie re-recorded the piece in about 1963 and that version was released in stereo and eclipsed the 1954 version. The stereo LP of the 1954 finally came out in the 70s. There is also a CD (by RVG, I think, hehe). Highly recommended for an evening with a date who also likes the music, sitting on the sofa with a log fire.

That panel discussion must have been great. Thanks for posting about it and including the pic. I vividly remember the 2 LP set first coming out. I had really enjoyed "In A Silent Way" from the word go, but I couldn't make head or tail of "Bitches' Brew" at the time, and I still don't like it. It just doesn't satisfy me as music, whatever label the genre might be given. Above all, I don't like the 8/8 beat for jazz, as it's like a strait jacket for phrasing when you are soloing. The 12/8 feel of the jazz 4/4 is wide open and allows a lot more freedom for the soloist. I also don't like the multiple rhythm section, which is kinda muddy and clumsy in my opinion. But all credit to Miles for being experimental. By 1969, there was no point in trying to continue with the 1964-68 quintet playing the same kind of stuff.

Not wishing to have a go at anyone, but hasn't this debate gone on long enough? I forget which year the BN board was stopped, but this topic was well worn out even back then. Next week, fox hunting in the U.K. (Shhh, it might come up in their boring general election this summer, the year of the airbrushed Tory "stud" - I guess Brown isn't considered worth airbrushing.)

Why does one specifically need an ipod, when there are lots of mp3 players and video players? My Nokia 5800 phone is superb for mp3 and videos. Is there something special that ipods do?

When I was about 19, a friend came around with "Judgment" and "Point of Departure". They stunned me right from the word go. Eric Dolphy's bass clarinet sure does add a lot to "Point of Departure". It's possibly my favorite album with him.

That's it, but it's only an excerpt, shorter than even the radio edit. The club version runs about 7 mins, though some of that is intro and outro. Good, isn't it.

$10 CDs aren't new at all. There hasn't been any money in CDs for ages now. The money (what there is of it) is in concerts and club dates.

Hee hee! This is what put me off getting the set when it was still available. Was it 16 or 60 CDs? I love Nat, but that's a bit much really, for the same format.

Kirkland Signature coffee from Costco. Hey, it's not bad at all, and very affordable.

Thanks for posting that, Lester! What a fabulous collection of videos, Sonny in his prime. I met him when he was touring with the "Giants of Jazz". Rabbit had recently died, and he said he was sad to see him go. That lineup didn't really gel (as predicted by Art Blakey), and these videos are far better.

I did my Ph.D. in Math in Adelaide, Australia, with a South African supervisor. When it was done, he offered a few of us jobs in the Math Department at Wits University in Jo'burg - he was going back there to be the Department Head. University jobs for Ph.D.s have always been hard to come by, and he and his family were close friends, so it was a fairly easy decision to make, though I was a bit concerned about it beforehand. No, I didn't like the Afrikaner Government, and I sure am not a racist, but I loved my 5 years there. The people were the friendliest I have encountered anywhere (Americans a close second) and the jazz scene was, to my surprise, awesome. We defied the Suid-Afrikaans Polisie and played with several great black guys from Soweto. Never did get arrested, for that or the Js. I'm glad I went there. Before the job offer, I would never have considered going there, and I would have continued to be as ignorant about the place as most people in the U.K. still are. All they know is that, hooray, everyone now gets the vote. That's great, but there's a little more to it than that. As just a quick example: pleasant, safe suburbs are now virtually unpoliced war zones. The sad reality is that the U.K. Government (especially the notorious Harold Wilson administration) has fucked up both South Africa and Rhodesia, and they are now terrible places to live. Talk to people who live in those countries, or have recently left; I do regularly. I keep getting them in telephone call centers, and the accent makes them easy to spot. We usually get off the subject of the call and have a long chat.

I seem to recall that Bob's surname was mispelled several times on his first few albums for BN. I even wondered whether the e was the original spelling, and later changed to the a.

Mike, that 2 CD set isn't all stereo. There are some tunes with several takes where some are mono and some stereo, suggesting that the set was assembled, at least partly, from whatever LP masters they could find.

I know it's naive, and already mentioned above, but all CDs should be like this. I'd love to hear these four new ones. But, I'm happy with the TOCJ of "Soul Sation", and all my (J)RVG's, and I'm certainly not going to fork out over 20 bucks to get any of these again. I guess "SACD" never really took off. I've never heard of anyone who has a player for it. I have one SACD disk - the newest version of "Gil Evans Plus Ten", which I bought because it was the first ever stereo issue of that wonderful album. It plays well on my ordinary CD deck. Re Michael Cuscuna/Blue Note/EMI, I hope the party isn't over, but the whole genre is getting a little old now, sad to say. We, here, love it, but how many young people even know about it?

I was dancing to electro house in a club about 6 months ago when an electro track suddenly went into Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman (1942), singing "Why Don't You Do Right?". It was a very nice shock. The mashup track is called "Why Don't You?", and it's by a Serbian dude called Gramophonedzie. I think it's superb, and the young 'uns love it. Nice to do a little Foxtrotting again. By the way, the BPM range (in the high 120s) is the same for both the Foxtrot and house. Give it a listen. It really works. I'd like to add Fats Waller doing "Christopher Columbus" (1936) (just as it is, without remixing) to a house set. Once again, the BPM is the same, if you count it in 2/2. It would go down a treat. There's a lot of scope for using old music for people who have never heard it before.

He always sounds great! A couple of favorite moments: (1) An intro he plays on the first Wilbur Harden Savoy session. A masterpiece of timing, on a par with Pops's famous "West End Blues" intro. (2) His peaceful solo after the horns on Kenny Dorham's "Trompeta Toccata". And to think that that fat bitch Ella Fitzgerald had the gall to criticize him. I would have walked. I guess he took the gig because it was a good income - can't blame him for that, but what a waste of his talent.

This is a good point. I never thought about it before. I don't think I have ever gotten into an artist because of this board, Organissimo excepted. Lon, I'm glad you like Opeth. My son got me into them.

Nice to see this come up again. Time to stick some Wilbur and Trane on. Very tasty stuff. The original tapes don't seem to have been very well looked after, as there is a mix of mono and stereo (even within one session) amongst the Savoy CD reissues, this material included. I also have a Curtis Fuller CD reissue, from about 1960, which is all mono, even though the CD of an earler Fuller session is stereo. (The Fuller sessions are also well worth tracking down, but tend to be hard to find, for some reason.)

That's true, and is the reason why very little new material was available when the CD reissues were produced. Same with Impulse, though there it was company vandalism rather than a fire. Ironically, the use of LP masters is one reason why the Japanese "Blue Note Works" CDs are the best CD reissues. That is partly because the more recent CDs (RVG, McMaster ad nauseam) came directly from the original session reels, some of which had deteriorated by the time they were hauled out of the vault to produce the new CDs.

I recommend Firefox - a free download. as you probably know. It's the BMI to Internet Explorer's ASCAP, lol.

Ludicrous, when compared with what they don't do with murderers and rapists. But not likely to be enforced. Reminds me of my time in South Africa (1972-76) when there was a 5 year rap for possession of one J. Chewy, that note on the LP coincides with the early days of cassette tapes, developed by Philips in the Netherlands. That was almost the only way in which most people could copy vinyl in the early 70s. I never got into it, because the cassettes sounded so poor back then, even with Dolby. I did have an open-reel tape deck, which sounded pretty good at 3 3/4 ips, which was for me the only economical speed. (The deck ran at 7 1/2 ips too, but it used too much tape at that speed.) But none of my friends and I made many open-reel tape copies. The tapes, even when new, suffered a lot from dropouts caused by loose iron oxide - even the top brands like B.A.S.F. were prone to do that.