Big Beat Steve

Oh come on. This was no MIddle Age. Even then the companies were in contact all over the world and had their representatives both ways. Take a look at the (U.S.) ANGEL label from the mid-50s, for example, and wonder how THEY ever got hold of THOSE European jazz releases for release in the USA. This was way more obscure than the Vogue label (or the Metronome-Prestige setup). Yet they DID lease these recordings and issue them.

What Caister weekenders do YOU remember, I wonder? Reading about their 3rd annual rockabilly and rock'n'roll (you know, the REAL r'n'r variety, not what the US take it to be ) weekender in the UK "Street Machine" mag in 1980 made me vow I'd be there one day. Well, it took me 12 years to eventually get there (at the nearby Hemsby location up in Norfolk). Memories, memories ....

So don't play your music too loud in that new neighborhood - or else ... (read: or face the consequences with your new neighbors ...)

I am no musicologist either (which may be for the better in such discussions, you know ...) but considering the excitement, feel and rhythm of the music, the build-up of a climax, and the frenzy it generated this might well be considered a forerunner. I am sure many later bands consciously or unconsciously built their crowd pleasers on the Sing Sing Sing structure.

Chewy, get yourself a discography! Or do a search on Discogs at the very least. No matter how incomplete Discogs is, it will get you further than just stumbling with blinded eyes through the discographical forest. This was originally released on Vogue (in France and UK) and on other labels (e.g Brunswick in Germany) at the time (and reissued a zillion times). This BN pressing isn't common but probably only pricey because it is on BN. Even period originals on the original labels aren't that rare. BN leased several items from Vogue (Fats Sadi, Wade Legge a.o.) for their 5000 10" album series. https://www.jazzdisco.org/blue-note-records/catalog-5000-series/album-index/

Was "Vocal with instrumental accompaniment" really a specialty of Decca? From what I've seen elsewhere I doubt it. At least in the 78 era. Checking a few of my 78s, I found another one like that on Roost to start with. And Capitol went one better: "Vocal with piano and instrumental accompaniment"! So piano does not rank among the "instruments"? Or is it just because the piano is more to the fore in places?

And this on the 41st anniversary of his death!

You're talking about "God Didn't Like It", right? I'll have to re-read it, I guess. @MG: This is not a matter of doing a "Lost Chords" book on early r'n'r. The way I understood, it, it just is that the white part of this pre-history has been overlooked a lot more than the black part (which Is covered in Allen Lowe's book too, BTW). The "white" angle indeed loks important because rock'n'roll was mainly a phenomenon of WHITE U.S. society from c.1954 onwards. R&B acts just kept on doing what they had been doing before (Fats Domino is a clasic example of this), adapting to new trends and fads and evolving their music in the second half of the 50s too. And it is interesting to see (and merits investigation) that there WERE white artists too who had been doing things that pointed directly towards Elvis. I cannot quote names right now but listening to quite a few pre-r'n'r hillbilly bop/western swing reissues in recent months I remember several instances of liner note writers pointing this out specifically, as if still in bewilderment that such pre-Elvises actually existed. It's this kind of details that goes into providing the FULL picture.

There would be others (and others' opinions), of course, who've touched on the subject. Arnold Shaw - as mentioned by you. And then Florent Mazzoleni, Jean-Christophe Bertin - and no doubt others. But this ought to go well beyond simple opinions IMO but rather to assessing what there was and how it fit into the wider picture of the evolution. All in all I'm inclined to side with Allen Lowe, though, when it comes to assessing what or who provides new insights. (My my, if this goes on like that I'll have to grab a copy of the Birnbaum book after all just sto see what kind of clues for further exploring he actually provides after all ... ) As for ALL R&B being "but the pre-historiy of r'n'r" - well, that's oversimplifying things quite a bit and has almost become a cliché by itself by now. If you want to you can consider any black r'n'r just a continuation of R&B (in the same way you could consider soul the further continuation of R&B). But that's just part of the story. Where things get interesting is if you look at where the mutual interaction of black and white artists actually took place and what THIS yielded LONG before Elvis was around. That's some of the strings that need to be pulled together (and not just rattled off) IMHO by someone knowledgeable enough to cover the WHOLE field.

Actually - no, I think it WOULD be quite possible. I am not even sure you need to go back to extended coverage of the deeper details of minstrel music or to the prehistory of blues, for example, but if you do look closer at the "outliers" of jazz, blues, country, etc. from, say, the 20s onwards, you'd be able to see a lot of details that really point at "things to come". There are many examples of cross-pollination between the genres and of uncommonly uninhibited and unconventional artists (both black and white) who did in those early years what the more sedate "mainstream" set still found so shocking in 1954. It's a highly interesting field to explore so this is why I was asking about this book. P.S. Just as a hint at the direction research might take and referring to the quote you included in your above post, have you read "What Was The First Rock'n'Roll Record?" by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes? Written a bit tongue-in-cheek and actually mostly "food for thought" for further individual explorations starting from each recording discussed there, but one of the earliest recordings they list as candidates is in fact "Blues" feat. Illinois Jacquet from the 1944 JATP concert.

Which invariably inflated the price. Thanks for your input, both of you. I was a bit wary of whether this would add anything new but I think I'll give it a pass. The minstrel angle that seems to be dear to the author might have been interesting but maybe reading the liner booklet to this or that CD reissue from the Old Hat label will provide the key info anyway - in an in-depth way. And I do think I am rather familiar with a lot of the other angles of the pre-1954 "prehistory" of rock'n'roll anyway so won't gain many substantially new insights there. Particularly if it seems like the ONE book that pulls ALL the strings together still remains to be written. .

Now that we have settled that it's Birks and not Birk - can anybody tell me who Herk was??

Did I miss something somewhere? The track listing that I downloaded starts with the Nov. 8, 1943 session.

An interesting set. I am a big Woody Herman fan but on looking closer i am rather unsure about it. As I see it, this begins with the Deccas AFTER the end of the recording ban, and I guess I have all the Deccas from that period on other reissues. As for the "rest", I once picked up a few stray LPs of the Woody Herman in Disco Order" LP series on Ajax (@gmonahan - now THIS is where the sound can get bad! ) and am rather underwhelmed by many of the vocals that fill the gaps beyond the usual reissue fare. What I have on previous reissues from his Mars and MGM period is more spotty but still I wonder how much of the "remainders" or "new" tracks were first of all geared at those who like romantic vocals. I downloaded the track listing and will compare in due course.

Of course I did not read every feature in detail but just glossed over very many of them. But I did take note of the subjects covered (if only to check what to copy for my own reference and what to let pass ).

I wasn't a regular reader of JP either but bought an almost complete collection of JP from mid-1953 to 1986 or 87 in 2005 or so. I only kept the years up to 1966 and sold the later years (the last ones went at a fleamarket about a year ago) but before I packed away those available for sale I went through all of them and and made and kept photocopies of those features, stories and record reviews that were of lasting interest to me. As you can imagine this was an intense reading crash course and you got a pretty good impression of the mag as a whole because you did all your reading during a reatively short span of time.

I don't have my Jazz Podium mags from that period anymore but the way I remember the general line of the mag in those years it seemed to me that they were rather forward-minded and gave a lot of coverage to free and avantgarde and experimental jazz and jazz rock and whatnot ... Particularly to upcoming German or European artists of the day. That may have shifted somewhat through the years (yes I remember they did a feature story on Scott Hamilton too, FWIW) but Jazz Podium of the 70s and 80s did not strike me as a very traditionalist paper. As for the Dizzy Gillespie review, maybe they just found those attempts at modernization did not suit him, in particular.

So "Birks Works" actually means "Birks at work" - right?

Actually I did not know for sure. Public Domain labels often have quite generic names that don't say much, and in most (though not all) cases the actual label name figures exactly there on the Amazon site.. So I'l admit whatever is written there is not totally reliable but your guess is as good as mine. Discogs did not yield anything (though if that record actually dates from 2004 - as the Amazon description says - it ought to have shown up in secondhand circles by now). But again - whatever it is - I'd not assume it is anything but a Public Domain reissue.

If you check the item description further down on that Amazon page you see the label name GENERAL IMPORT. Never heard of ...

Never heard of THAT reissue label, though ...

There is a THIRD one IMO. Stupid selection of the photographs on the cover or back cover that are totally out of sync with the musical contents, and even more so, are horrendous to watch - such as a LOT of garish 70s garb. I can understand that the Route 66 label may have been at a loss of finding decent, usable early 50s photographs of their featured artists when they did their early post-war R&B reissues (witness the awful Billy Wright or Goree Carter LP fort covers) but other such as the above Harptones LP were just the slapdash thrown-together "work" of couldn't-care-less cover "artwork" people. In cases like this it's not just that you wonder if the music played by people willingly dressing in such sartorial horrors can be any good but you have to look and search hard to find out if the music matches the suits(both of which you'd abhor) or if it really is just a mismatch. So dissuasive covers like this in fact do the sales of the record a disservice. As for not giving a damn about how one looks, no doubt these were signs of the times too, but I find this less intruding than the above mismatch. And, for example, I have yet to see any Big Town Playboys record from the 90s where the guitarist is shown wearing only socks (to his already sloppy outfit) and no shoes as he had a habit of doing at gigs. @MG: If you want music from that period and in that musical style - fine. Looking at musicians dressing in the more cliché-laden way of what may have been considered hip at THAT time is part of the mix. But like I said, if the cover leads THAT far away from the contents of the record then you get to wondering ....

For how long did Tony Scott live in Japan?

Honestly, I think mike-ing and recording of the bass part is only part of the problem. My main quibble is that the bass players of those times too often tried to play the busybodies trying impose themselves into the overall mix way too much instead of just keeping the pulse of the rhythm going and flowing (outside their solo space). In short, it is the STYLE of bass playing of that period that very, very often bugs me. The leaders of the dates apparently felt differently and this opinion of mine may make me a "moldy fig" but anyway ....

Maybe because a) IMHO the bass ought to provide some sort of pulse or "body" and these bass men don't. Intruding and overamplified (or ineptly amplified - probably, but that doesn't help matters), and to my ears they just get in the way, trying to show they can "do their solo thing too" at a moment when their place isn't among the soloists. (But that's just my personal impression, and maybe I am expecting things incorrectly, given what the times - and their musical trends - were like, but then I'll just side - again - with those over in the Shirley Scott thread who feel they won't like to touch many jazzmen's output from decades that have that different stylistic connotations) b) I did not pay that much attention to the cymbals, maybe not expecting much in the first place (or being glad there were any at all), seeing what drummers' work in 70s/80s music - outside jazz - often was like (making you wonder what the drummers had cymbals for anyway) In short, apparently some can handle the bass better, some can handle the cymbals better. Different strokes ...