Big Beat Steve

I clearly remember standing at a tramway station on my way home from a friend of my parents who'd helped me with my maths homework (I was 11 at the time) and reading the obit on Louis Armstrong in the newspaper display next to the waiting room beside the tracks. The name rang a bell as my parents (though totally disinclined jazz-wise) had 45s like his "Uncle Satchmo's Lullaby" and "What A Wonderful World" (what else, at that time, as a MOR buyer? ) that were spun occasionally, and I also remember my mother voicing her regret at his death. So it stuck in my kid's mind that somebody important had passed that day. It wasn't until a couple of years later (from the age of 14-15 when I began listening to jazz radio programs and buying records) that I really was able to CONSCIOUSLY cut my teeth into some more "meaty" works of his, and though I've never been that big an Armstrong fan I see him as a seminal person in every espect.

Above all he is/was a jazz scribe who became a prominent hate figure of the young music listeners' and budding musicians' generation of the 50s as he was given to ranting away against anything coming out of the skiffle/rock'n'roll corner and threatening the music "establishment". Described in detail in Pete Frame's book "The Restless Generation". Just goes to show how fast you can turn from a proponent of a minority music (that a scant two decades before had to fight for its own acceptance) into a "moldy fig" of the musical mainstream (relatively speaking ...).

Just out of sheer curiosity: What is the link between the Vocalion label linked above and the Vocalion label that does all the pre-WWII/early post-WWII British swing/jazz reissues (such as the ones shown below)?

The ENTIRE "Red Saunders Research Foundation" website that you picked this chapter from is a gem!!

Falls a bit short of making him a candidarte for the Darwin Award, but anyway ...

Judging by the pics, any vinyl that has been owned by these celebs must the thoroughly shot ... just seeing how they all seem to be intent on smudging/stamping the shiny playing surface with their grubby fingers ... :crazy:

Nice scoop! Congrats. Reminds me of a scoop of a somewhat less "stellar" quality (except to the diehard collectors ) I made on an internet site a couple of years ago. I had been looking for a copy of the Swedish book "GÖTEBORGSJAZZEN" with a personal history of Göteborg's post-war jazz scene, and sure enough I managed to grab one at a fairly good price (no other bidders). What a nice surprise to find out upon receipt that the book seems to have been carried along by a real fan who had the book signed by about a dozen or more local jazz greats on the very page where they figured in that book, including a few signatures by latterly quite renowned famous Swedish jazzmen. Couldn't have turned out better ...

Didn't vote (yet) but I am not a musician and I do dance (time and again). But only the jive that goes with a certain brand of swing, 40s/50s R&B and 50s rock'n'roll. Got into dancing kind of late and have recently gotten back into it after a couple years' hiatus and am enjoying it immensely (though I certainly am not the biggest jiver in the world) as this adds another dimension to enjoying your favorite music. Having a favorite dancing partner helps enormously, of course, as we are pretty well in tune with each other dancing-wise. Things tended to get out of control, though, once other ladies started dragging me onto the dance floor too (shortage of men, like everywhere, I guess ): As there are variations in the moves and dancing styles these excursions with others didn't go over quite as smoothly as with my #1 dancing partner, so it wasn't THAT much fun (neither for them nor for me), and I am not enough of a dancing pro to spontaneously anticipate everything somebody "moving to a different drummer" (beyond the beat, of course) might be up to ... But it's O.K. and fun anyway ...

As I've had problems with skipping on my Sony CD player too I am gettng ready to buy a new one before long. Now what I would like to know is this: My CD player has intermittently also been giving me problems with not recognizing CDs at all. I put in a quite normal music CD and it outputs "No CD" on the display, despite repeated trials. And on some other CDs (right from the time they were bought) it gives a hiss and fuzzy, distorted sound when playing the CD a if it was a CD-R that is breaking down and gradually becoming unplayable. Yet with both symtoms (not recognizing CDs and distorted play) the CDs in question play perfectly well on another (certainly NOT "upmarket") portable CD player that normally only serve as a backup unit for less demanding (party) use. Now how far down the line to total breakdown (beyond skipping) is my CD player when it shows these symptoms? Just wondering ...

What I hated much more was when I "won" an item at, say, 9.99 or possibly more and then, upon closer inspection of the cover, found that a price of some 50c or even 20c only was scribbled in a corner with felt marker. Which clearly showed the kind of money the seller shelled out at some garage sale prior to reselling it. :D Like somebody said on ebay: "Avoid the middleman"!

I've deliberately preserved some of the stickers on the covers of the LPs I bought secondhand if they were there from "way back", sometimes showing the names of local record and radio shops long gone but still remembered by those in the know or interested in such local business histoires, even if they happened before one's time. They have become part of the "history" of the album.

Thankfully Dobells' seemed to have stuck many of their price stickers on the BACK of the covers so they don't do much harm. Quite a few of those secondhand LPs I bought at Mole Jazz in the 90s have older Dobell's stickers and I've left them in place; reminds me of my stays in London in '75 to 77 when I dropped by at Dobell's (with far too little money to spend...). As for evil stickers, I've come across them too, especially one bright red type stuck on clearout sale LPs in a local record store. Their principle seemed to be "If we let you have a record at 1 euro each we'll make sure you won't get the cover without further damage because the sticker just WON'T peel off without taking a chip out of the cover!" . The glue residues of certain "Special Import Services" stickers (large round ones) that used to be stuck no new LPs sold here in the late 70s or of the one shown below were rather nasty too.

I'd say so too. At any rate, he's the third from the right in the front row (standing) in the other pic linked above in the second post by Marcel.

Enjoy your stay, Jim. Your gig on July 1 will be just 2 hours away from me but unfortunately I am taken and cannot make it there at such short notice (attended that festival some 12 or 13 years ago; nice atmosphere ...).

Maybe these pics taken during that particular tour would help by comparing the band members (beyond the obvious) by the way they looked then to rule out those who cannot be Brownie in the Finnish pics? That should narrow things down. They come from the October, 1953 issues of ESTRAD (most) and ORKESTER JOURNALEN (final one).

IIRC these were two different series that were on the market almost concurrently. The white ones where "I Giganti del jazz"; the black ones were "I Grandi del jazz". As far as I remember the white ones came first but the IIRC black ones came not too long afterwards. They were all over the place in the budget jazz bins here in the early 80s, and I remember buying a very decently sounding Fats Navarro compilation incuding the most essential Savoy/BN stuff from the black series as well as a few of the white ones that had obscure stuff that (at least at that time) was unavailable elsewhere. I bought one for several tracks by Harry The Hipster gibson (only several years later was I able to snap up a Musicraft reissue LP) and that one also had two tracks by Cecil Gant ("I Wonder/"Cecil Boogie") as well as four tracks from a 1961 Benny Carter band. VERY odd company ... The booklets inside the black ones actually were quite nice for beginners (if you can manage Italian and have not seen the - mostly familiar - pics elsewhere yet). Was glad to be able to upgrade my Fats Navarro to the Savoy/BN twofer reissues but kept one or two of the white ones for the odd tracks I still do not have elsewhere.

Depends on what exactly you like from that era. It's a wide field. Not everybody goes for doo-wop, not everybody goes for honking saxes ...

Aaah, so THAT's where the rights to the name went ... (or stayed ...) ;) Still, a bit ambitious if you consider that name probably hasn't rung a bell with active buyers of contemporary music for close top 50 years. Family sentimentality (which probably cannot be judged by usual marketing yardsticks anyway) aside, what would today's music buyers associate with that name that would make them take the plunge in huge numbers and shell out in the manner some today's artist's affiliation with good old Blue Note maybe would?

Wardell? :lol:

IMO it's just an attempt at cashing in on the old name (what for, I wonder ... DOH and RIH were soooo long ago and there can't be that many 50s R&B collectors who are just as much into Rap...). If the rights to the name have become "free" (or available) who knows what some shrewd whiz kid in search of an image may be up to? Maybe it's primarily the "Hollywood" image that counts to them? Happens all the time in marketing. Or why else would someone want to revive (of sorts ...) the BUGATTI car marque, and there sho' ain't no connection between the REAL Bugattis and Volkswagen (backers of the Bugatti marque now) either .

This may be against the usual "wisdom" in this field and I would not claim I have read enough in this field to be able to make a definite choice, but from what I've read (including some Chandler, for ex.) I'd say that a good dose of REX STOUT would have to figure high on any "top whatever" list.

Thanks very much for these infos, folks.

And for Europe? Anything in the pipeline yet? To be honest, trying to import from Japan on an individual basis is almost always just way too much of a hassle for a private end consumer, all things considered.

So this one here (2-part version, too) .... ... definitely is not the same version as on the 4-Star label?? Though recording the same tune in a 2-part version in each case is odd indeed. Ths would make it the third version of the three that Mosaic mentions. Jepsen says these are different versions, but like you said, he may have been mistaken, so who knows?? Especially as you claim the 4-Star recording seems to come from a different session if I got you right. Am playing it now - the tenor man blows a relatively fierce horn (not unlike what Flip Phillips did) and the bassist does hum some Slam-Stewart-ish lines behind the guitar solo towards the end of Pt. I and later on in his his solo in Pt. II. @all: Sorry for derailing this thread even further ...

As always, a great addition to the accessible information about that era. Keep it up.