Big Beat Steve

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.

@Hot Ptah: I wish you luck and will keep my fingers crossed.

Add (roughly) 40 to 50 years to the pictures on this site I linked to earlier https://auraladdict.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/rip-saundra-hummer/ and compare ... Going by the pic with the 2 cowboys on FB, it might well be so ...

You very neatly summed up my impression of the stories she told (and no doubt I have read only a fairly small part of them). Considering all the "oral histories" out there which all have their merits but often lack the sensitive yet necessary editing to bring the (sometimes rambling) reminiscences of the interviewees into a somewhat more coherent and readable form (without sacrificing the essence of the narrational styles), hers would have been a much more readable first-hand account right from the start. Apart from the page I linked to earlier in this discussion, I remember reading somewhere else about her not feeling she was a writer. It's a pity she downplayed her own competences

Part of the Toshiba-EMI (TOJJ-numbered) facsimile 10" reissues from Japan??

Thanks for linking it, BTW. I have several of the Swinging The Blues and Jazzing The Blues CDs from Document so your review might make me spring for that one too.

Stahlnetz! Ah, those were the days ... And the Viscounts too! You sure made the rounds ...

The point is, the snootiness (I'd call it sarcasm - like it or not ) was intentional - because this is a widespread problem, i.e not as a matter of "spoken" sonversation but as a matter of being able to put into coherent WRITING what you want and have to say in any depth. Those 2-line twitterisms and facebookisms really don't help. I witness this with a lot of young'uns (within my family and on other forums where young'uns DO hang around) and usually am fairly relaxed about this because "time will tell" (and "time will show them"). But what I have observed over and over again is that if you have acquired such competences you feel PARTICULARLY at ease if you can make use of them in a setting where it is not about hack work and duties but about fun and your private hobbies and interests. And in most cases I have seen those who "had it together" just made use of it quite naturally and it all made sense. But those who didn't for the life of it were unable to cope, even after repeated, extremely patient questions about what they actually wanted to get at. With those of the older generation who may never have had any sort of higher education it just is so and needs to be accepted as such (life is like that ..., and it'sto their credit they are confident in using a PC anyway) but with the younger ones (particularly including those who basically DID get a decent education) it all too often seems to be so that competences that you used to acquire quite naturally way back now just get sort of lost. A bit like what's happening in some schools where the curricula say "it is no longer mandatory to teach pupils how to write decently in handwriting - they are using keyboards and tablets these days to communicate anyway" (seriously - don't know about the US but this IS what has been on some curriculum agendas here). Can you imagine where we are likely to be heading if this goes on unabated?

Good points too - the points of entry into jazz, including on forums. But like is tried to exmplan in my Miles Davis example above - if the question is too fogg,y how ARE you top provide a useful answer to a newbie? As for other way of getting into jazz - be it Robert Glasper or anybody else ...there is a LOT of snobbery out there among the "old hands" on the forums, particularly when it comes to forms of jazz that ARE accessible as an "introduction to jazz" to the "general music consumers populace" . One thing that really bugged me about AAJ not long after I joined there was that much to my pleasant surprise there were some who actually spoke out in favor of what in the 90s came to be called the "neo-swing" movement (which still went on in places - and still does now, including over here). But as soon as that subject was raised, there was the immediate avalanche of posts by those who found all this of "of no musical merit", "unworthy of discussion", "no real jazz" etc. etc. (like on this forum over here every now and then too, unfortunately). I happen to know of enough cases in this part of the subculture where people got into jazz (which even today DOES include swing springoffs, BTW, not just crossover, avantgarde or world music or whatever today's most frequently used labels are, FWIW) that way and eventuall explored other styles of jazz too. But of course if young'uns are confronted with this kind of B.S. statements they will turn their back on jazz forums too and just shake their heads in disbelief at those old'uns. I'd not be bugged by any such attacks by self-proclaimed popes of "good taste in valuable jazz" who may have "seen the light" for themselves when free jazz came along but fail to see the parallels, for example, between what went into "jazz rock" in the 70s and what happened in the 90s when punk and swing met (sometimes for betteer, sometimes for worse, but often interestingly enough), but I'd understand the young ones who just cannot be bothered by this kind of high-brow lecturing. If that works - fine. I'd be all for it.