Big Beat Steve

Uh oh ... Just checked and discovered I am only 4 years his senior. (I was under the impression he was quite a bit younger) I know one of these days I will make lists and instructions about my collections to let the NEXT generation know what NOT do do - so as not to be ripped off. And if they decide not to heed my advice then so be it ... I'll be gone anyway. I trust that Mats Gustafsson will be even much, much more thorough about this, given how "archival" many parts of his collection seem to be. Happens every generation. During the past 6 to 10 years I had to unload what my father first got rid of and then left behind - tons (almost) of architecture books and art and cultural history books. Almost worthless except for a relatively small percentage of really old and collectible architecture books from the 1910s to 1950s. If you - like me - feel that uneasy about throwing old books away then it IS a chore passing as many of them as you can on to where they might be appreciated. So the heirs of almost any vinyl collection are likely to fare better. You invariably will start to scale down one day. But that's beside the point - whatever you decide to let go is no longer part of what matters to you so it's out of the equation of what you still will get around to listening to. And I am pretty sure many of us will STILL hold on to more than they can and will listen to. The ultimate question of that kind is: Where will John Tefteller's collection of 78s go?

Think about which "matters" exactly?

There is a moment that we record collectors all reach sooner or later when we realize that there are records in our collection that we definitely will never again listen to for the rest or our life (simply because there won't be enough time). The problem, though, is: Which ones? We will never know. Because we will never know what we will exactly listen to in our future listening hours. But we'd like to BE ABLE to listen to them. So we keep all of them anyway (at least those we bascially do want to keep). Inevitable ... such is life ... And - no, I for one don't believe in working off my records in a bookkeeper's fashion. I have bought secondhand records before where the inner sleve carried handwritten dates which apparently were those where the previous owner listened to that particular record. Not for me ...

@ lp / clifford thornton / rostasi: It think it Is way more than 5000. Not wanting to brag one bit, but I have about 7,000 LPs, 1,000 45s and 1,000 78s (in fact the last time I counted them I did it the way Rostasi suggested - measuring the space taken up by 100 LPs and then multiplying). Altogether they take up about 30 running meters. That's quite a bit less than Gustafsson's 47 meters. My LPs, in particular, ARE a tight fit on the shelves (too tight in places - storage space running out ...) but not THAT much tighter than what I see in those pictures. I'd say that at best I'd be able to fit in about 20% more if I stored them somwhat looser the way Mats Gustafsson did. So I'd definitely say his are at least 10,000.

I still disagree. I don't think i am reinforcing what you worte - I am reinforcing what Jim said. Again - for the question raised NOW it is of no importance today if the same thing happened in the past because jazz was more or less part of pop music then. The only thing of importance now IMHO is that as long as such requests happen (and according to Jim they still do) that grate with the musicians - totally regardless of whether this is a majority or minority thing in the public's taste - then it can also happen that the musicians react the way Jim did or the way they did in the past to discourage these requests (see the panels shown and mentioned). Same thing. And - again - regardless of whether 99% of the casual listening audience out there knew one requested tune from another - as long as the requests of the remaining 1% grate with the musicians then the situation exists. That's all. As for "greater musical value", that's beside the point too. Those "standards" or "classics" do have their value (to those who appreciate those tunes) which does not diminish one bit because one band prefers not to play them. A given standard tune or "classic" isn't for everybody, after all, and the repertoire of band A does not necessarily overlap with that of fit band B by even one percent, even if both play within the same style. So why should any band or group of musicians be under the obligation to play what is not on their set list (or is somebody else's repertoire, in fact), UNLESS they are HAPPY to oblige (for their own fun too)? This has got nothing to do with "musical value". Those values are in the ear of the behearer (including those who perform them) and NEVER absolute values. BTW (no mockery intended - I am really wondering ...), is "artiste" a new way of spelling this word? Or is there a finer connotation or difference of content to set it apart from "artist"? Some time ago I bought a (privately published) book on the history of early post-war country music, and the author steadfastly used the term "artiste" throughout. Looked quite odd in printing to me ...

The photo I remember was black and white - and older, probably taken in the 40s or 50s (sign handwritten in capital letters). But yes - same principle.

@BillF: Compared to that Brazilian who has an entire warehouse crammed full? But I liked this ... How many records are we talking about here? Two and a half tonnes. What does that equate to in numbers? Forty-seven metres. I refuse to guess the number, only amateurs do that. Got to remember that the next time people ask me. I still have quite some way to go to catch up with him, though it's more meters than I had figured and his weight calculation gives me the creeps, figuring the load that is on that wall in my house ...

It's not about whether jazz was pop music, it's about whether people want the musicians to play tunes that the musicains either hate because they have been played to death (cf. High Society) or that just don't fit their repertoire (which says a lot about the "appreciation capacities" of the audience). And I am only going by what Jim said (see my above quotes from his post), and if I understood this only halfway correctly THIS seems to confirm that HE is (or has been) facing the same problem too. That's first-hand proof and explanation enough for me. Apart from that - those jazz gigs I attend are more of the swing/mainstream/R&B variety (in all their shadings), and requests still do occur there every now and then. Usually politely (not yelled out by drunkards) and are dealt with just as politely - either refused or fulfilled. But these usually are club events off the radar of most of the "general populace" aka "casual listeners".

Yet according to what Jim said the problem seems to exist: Given the "right" (for them) settings, I can very well imagine those "casual listeners" can be the worst problem: They request what little they know in the way of "jazz tunes" (or what they perceive as such) in order to pass as "connoisseurs", regardless of whether this fits the band's repertoire or not. And I'd bet that "High Society" sign was put up those decades ago for the very same reason.

Hasn't Dmitry's question been answered (at least in part) decades ago? There was that pic taken many decades ago (can't locate it right now, unfortuutely) of a sign pasted up on the wall of a dance hall in New Orleans that read something like this: REQUESTS PLAYED - 50c "HIGH SOCIETY" PLAYED - $5 Anybody have to guess at all why they put up that sign? As for dancing .... It is indeed regrettable that jazz had to evolve in this direction with too large a part of the typical ("sophisticted"?) jazz audience finding dancing to jazz too "lowly" and therefore not encouraging it at all.

Very interesting ... Thanks!

Some background info: Hunter's Dream - "Dedicated to Hunter Hancock's Harlem Holiday Show" Eastside Bop - "Dedicated to Gene Norman's Eastside Show" (Sez the record labels on the 78) Now that you linked the 2009 thread, I do remember that thread. That was a wild one! Chewy, were you on speed for some of your posts there?

I have the Spanish vinyl reissue too (along with several other Andexes they reissued). My impulse to buy it at the time obviously was that "obscure stuff" vibe because who else would ever have been likely to reissue stuff like this on VINYL and would you ever run into an affordable copy of the original over HERE? I found the record OK (it's been a while since I listened to it) but not earth-shaking. OK enough to make it a keeper. There are others that I'd rather give the boot if I could (but can't - the featured soloists are too fine - but the backing ... ugh ...).

Of course ... in many fields of my hobbies I am more statistics-minded than most others. But here we are approaching a level where I really understand the reservations voiced by some around here. Like I said above - it's HUMANS, not machines. And like Nobel prize winner Nils Bohr said: "Prediction is very difficult, particularly if it is about the future."

Ha, so I bumped into the right one ... serves me right .... But you see .. when you're occasionally smitten by a brief outburst of interest in baseball history (like I said .. American "folklore" 'n'all) and happen to come across this page .... http://www.shorpy.com/node/21586 .. and follow up the comments just out of curiosity and end up here ... http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/g/gettich01.shtml ... and realizing this probably is only the barest of statistics (I remember having seen other tables like this in "big books of baseball history" etc. which of course read like Chinese to non-experts of the game) and realizing this chap seemed to have been a lesser light in the history of baseball and yet has been given the full treatment by statistics obsessiveness ... ... and THEN you try to follow this discussion which refers to stats that apparently are even far more complex (googling hasn't got me very far in grasping it, admittedly) ... well, does that leave anything but an initial reacion of "WTF"?

Ehhh ... you're repeating yourself.

We're digressing but all things being relative (!) you probably are right. I WAS a bit harsh. But with media coverage being as it is ... And besides, with the rules being what they are like, it IS an odd sports (unfortunately) by European team sports standards. Actually I find baseball quite fascinating as part of "American folklore" and history (if you know what I mean) but still it has its oddities for us here. But like I said (lest we digress further), I was not referring to the rules but to the statistics aspect. If you look a bit closer at this (and I have only barely scratched the surface too in trying to see what baseball stats are all about), you will see what I meant with my reference to imaginary additions to discographies. Hey - it's HUMANS, not machines!!!

I know. I knew a couple of people from a minor league team in the 90s and they told this and that about "the scene". But to call it a "minority" sport is putting it mildly. It's even a minority sport within minority sports. BTW, Regensburg is fairly far away from where I live (by our standards - by Australian standards it would indeed be next door ). And I suppose you realized I was just poking fun when I referred to the "stats" (it's all very weird to us Yurpeens - stating with those I came across when checking out a few sites on baseball history here and there - with stats that probably are a FAR cry of what I THINK is WAR). If you want to get the lowdown on how confusing, odd rules can end up in the hands of satire or comedy-minded folk, check out "Das Schürbelspiel" by Schobert & Black if you can (sorry, couldn't find a Youtube clip)...

I am beginning to understand why baseball has NEVER made any sort of impact over here (except as a more softball-like local leisure sports for part-time sportsmen and -women every now and then). Stats with a million columns to evaluate somebody's sporting capacities? Oh come on ..... (Although there has been a tendency here in soccer in recent years to publish heavily stats-oriented over the top stuff too in recent years, but hardly anybody except numbers nerds pay much attention to it ... ) And soccer IS one field of team sports where extensive statistics have been established for as long as the sport exists ... but nowhere near those finicky detail stats that crop up here and there now I can hardly wait for discographies to be expanded by including stats on the number of choruses, avg./max./min. chorus length, singer obbligato backing frequency etc. etc. scoreboards ...

Don't drool to much. It's not that odd, it seems: "The Prestige Book" (the book in the (Japanese) Jazz Critique series, No. 3, 1966), for example, lists "Dig" Pt. 1 and 2 (Prestige 777) quite normally under the "single-play" releases on the Prestige label. There were quite a lot of them - the releases ran from no. 301 to 304 and then 701 to 921 (and there was another 900 series), including quite a few that probably never made it to LP. And the recording dates tie in with the date given by Dmitry above. Google shows other Prestige 45s with that script logo.

During the first half of the 80s I lived in a place in Southwestern Germany near the Rhine that was at the coverage intersections between Südwestfunk, Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (AM only) and Hessischer Rundfunk - and some French stations too (and AFN as well). There were evenings - particularly on workdays - when I had to work off a really busy listening schedule because one half-hour or one-hour music show would neatly segue into another one of interest on a different station (sometimes with 15-minute overlaps), and there even were days when I set up two radios - recording tunes from one radio via the built-in cassette recorder while listening to the other station on the other radio so as not to miss ANYTHING. Yes, those were the days ...

To provide some comparison from a different area on the planet where records (including jazz records) were being sold: Retail prices were relatively rigidly fixed in the late 50s/early 60s and did not vry enourmously. At an approximate conversion of the buying power, taking hourly pay for, say, a skilled worker in a good job or an office clerk for comparison, today's equivalent prices would be about 15 to 25 euros for a single/EP and 60 euros for an LP. Pretty stiff money ... Later on records were compartively affordable or downright cheap. In the mid-to late 70s "suggesteed" retail prices were more or less still like in 1960 but were often undercut - not in the cutout bins but according to the general price level of the shop itself, and in the meantime wages had increased considerably.

Sorry to confirm this, but while I don't recall details I distinctly remember that during my very occasional lurking on the AAJ forum after 2010 (2011, in this case) I did come across posts stating that Saundra Hummer had died suddenly (THIS stuck in my memory because I regretted her untimely death) and whatever work had been done to compile her reminiscences looked like it had been sabotaged and had therefore to be taken down. So word about sabotaging or hacking was out on the AAJ forum itself - at least on some occasion back then.

Who the hell is that piano tinkler?

Upload a picture of the label and the experts might be able to go from there.