Big Beat Steve

All your praise really is prompting me to pull out some of my Bob Crosby vinyls to give them a spin again. And BTW I was really unaware the Bob Crosby band was so much of a comparatively unknown quantity with that many seasoned jazz collectors.

Now I'm beginning to understand what the OP meant by "playing versions".

I guess I'll have to search high and low among my LPs by Sir Charles Thompson to see if he is on organ there somewhere so as to find out what you mean by that "roller rink" sound. Sorry if this sounds blunt, but that's a connotation that does not mean much over here in "Yurp". Fairground organ sounds, maybe?

I am not quite sure this would really be all that comparable style-wise with the late 30s/early 40s swing-cum-dixieland big bands similar to the Bob Crosby band that Ghost wondered about.

I have Spanier's studio big band recordings (there weren't not many) on a Decca Ace of Hearts LP, and I have an LP's worth of airshots of his big band (all that were ever discovered, at least as of the vinyl era) that was released on Jazz Archives (JA-30).

The Crosby band likely was #1 in this field. At least on this level of presence on the big band scene. OTOH there were the short-lived big bands of Jack Teagarden and Muggsy Spanier, for example, that had their share of N.O. jazz influence too. But compared to the prominence of Bob Crosby and his band they were also-rans, much to the chagrin (and financial hardships) of their leaders.

Unfortunately I do not have the e-mail exchange with TYQ anymore in my e-mail folder (all this happened in 2024) so I cannot check now. And it may also be that the mail I received was sent ON BEHALF OF M. Steyaert. I remember his name figured in the mail somewhere. I can only say that I inquired at TYQ as I intended to place an order and wanted to find out about the total including shipping because the TYQ prices DID seem very correct to me. So I really was taken aback when I received that message that VAT had to be added on top of it. Following your explanation (the way it has been explained to you by TYQ) it now looks to me that there will be NO VAT added to the list price + shipping costs by TYQ. I therefore retract my earlier "statement" and stand corrected. @Everyone else from the EU on this forum: Please disregard my earlier post.

That's what I did. IIRC the reply came from Mr Steyaert himself. I asked him about the total cost including shipping and he told me VAT at that rate of some 20% would be charged too. Was I surprised? Yes!

Worth mentioning in that context is that TYQ will add nationally applicable VAT (some 20%) to the purchase price when shipping to another EU country. At least this is what I was told directly by the TYQ customer service people when I inquired about a different Mosaic set several months ago.

Yes, this does make sense if his Prestige contract was maintained even during his prison sentence in the 60s.

Was on a Ammons listening trip a while ago too, so my curiosity was piqued by your post, and I checked your titles on Discogs. So it lookls like the "House Warmin'" LP on Argo credited to Howard McGhee was the original release. An odd one - though. No line-up on the sleeve, no Gene Ammons mentioned anywhere (maybe omitted because he was doing time at the time?) "Nothin But Soul" - the 1969 reissue - was on a budget label that looked budget-ish (Crown lookalike?) from a thousand miles away, and anything with artist credits can happen there. My guess is it was credited to Gene Ammons because after his prison release and signing by Prestige he was fairly hot at the time - at least comparatively speaking vs. Howard McGhee. "Heavy Sax" on Olympic (Everest!) from 1974 looks just as budgetish and may have been credited for similar reasons. Howard McGhee had nowhere near the LP presence on the jazz market that Ammons had in the late 60s/early 70s during his final years. This reissue must have been distributed widely - I distinctly remember seeing it in the shops way back, but never picked it up because the back cover blurb did not tell anything about where or when it came from exactly. And Everest (or its clones) was notorious (at least in my impression) for mixing its musical contents haphazardly. This reshuffling of album titles and covers (and leader credits) does not strike me as particularly odd - just highly annonying. And confusing for the collector - when you're in the receord shop this kind of mixups makes it hard to remember in each and every case what you have and what not. Happened to me more than once. A blatant example: Last spring I pulled a Woody Herman LP titled "All Star Session" on the Accord (huh??) label from the special offer bin of our local #1 brick-and-mortar record shop. Nondescript cover artwork and liner notes, but the presence of Eddie Costa mentioned on the back cover told me this must come from a time frame of interest to me. So I took it home, only to discover upon checking that this in fact was an 80s reissue of the 1959 "At The Roundtable" LP on Roulette - of which I already had picked up two copies from the Special Offers bin at different moments way earlier; a stereo copy with the original cover artwork (but on the Forum label - an early 1961 reissue) AND a mono copy on the (UK) World Record Club label (with a totally different cover and no mentioning of the Roundtable club). Oh well ... another one for the fleamarket vinyl crate ...

I never dug his Passport period recordings too much but have accumulated most of his 60s Philips albums through the years. Saw him being interviewed on several TV jazz documentaries, and he always struck me as down-to-earth, factual, open-minded, easygoing and a pleasant character in every respect. No big-shot allures, no show-offiness ... RIP and thanks!

Thanks, Fernando! That clarifies another snippet of the history immortalized in this book.

This price difference betwen hardback and paperback versions seems to be an increasing trend these days, at least in the "special interest" non-fiction sector. Is there ANYTHING to warrant such differences with the hardback version? Particularly since it is not likely this can be recouped anywhere once these books hit the secondhand market. And production costs cannot really be THAT different.

Ouch ... You're right . My error may have come from the fact that in German "customs office lingo" the VAT levied on these imports is specifically referred to as "import VAT" or "import sales tax" (literally translated). It's been a while since I imported stuff from outside the EU that I had to go and collect at the local customs office (and pay for ). But all the time the bottom line was and is that the prices of the imported goods do increase by not so small an amount for the buyer. So one tends to lump all this together, particularly since VAT is applied to the total INCLUDING the shipping costs (which the German customs offices do not tire of pointing out in their info leaflets). And the shipping costs cannot be "played down" on the customs form. So this is one major reason why personal importing of smaller quantities of LPs, CD, etc. (particularly in view of the high shipping costs from the U.S., for example) is hardly ever viable anymore. BTW, it still does occur, though, that smaller shipments in lightweight parcels slip through (I had such a case last spring), with no VAT levied at all. But of course you can never count on it.