Big Beat Steve

Good to see some things never change totally and that there are at least SOME constants in life. Through all generations, and even if it is on a small scale.

To add to what John L said, personally I find all Dexter Gordon albums from the pre-Blue Note era recommendable. The Dials and Savoys are the first ones to pick up, of course, then indeed there are the jam session takes with Wardell Gray (finest stuff!), both the LONGISH 1947 tracks ("The Hunt" etc.) and then the 1952 tracks often reissued under the title "The Chase and The Steeplechase"). Don't know which packagings would be the very best deal on CD (I have all of them good ol' vinyl) but all of them are out there. And personally I also like his Dootone LP "Dexter Blows Hot and Cool" and his Bethlehem item "Daddy Plays The Horn" from the mid-50s. Fine throughout IMHO.

For quite some time there have been two here that I've regularly pulled out to close off the day (more often than many others in my collection). Pete Jolly's "Little Bird" LP on AVA and Al Haig's "Today" (Mint AL 711) Must have been on a "late night piano kick with a (semi-)Latin 60s feel".

Thanks for making us aware of this book! Checked out the linked sites and tend to agree with antonyh. This should appeal even to those interesedt in jazz of that period who were NOT there at the time. If the reviews are anything to go by, this should be a very nice documentary of British jazz from that era. I guess I wil place an order for a copy shortly (so the book can keep similar "local jazz scene" books about Detroit, Newark, Stockholm, Göteborg and Cologne company on my bookshelf ).

BowleggedWoman.com? Got it. :crazy: But lots of non-jazz (and non-R&B, non-C&W) items out there.

What kind of policy could THAT possibly be that sets out to prevent people from linking to other interesting sites that provide INFO to the collectors? You'd have to cut out 99% of all links posted here, then ... Again, what kind of weird rules would THAT be??

Indeed!!!! EVEN Bad Pres is worth having, you mean?

What you been smokin', Chewy, writing' like that??? You seem to be stuck in overdrive again ... Forheavenssake .... As for the Kimberly connection, check this (Google is your friend): http://www.bsnpubs.com/pri/kimberly.html Seems like they did all sorts of tributes to the big band era greats. Good occasion for musicians to make some extra dough as studio freelancers. Lots of West Coasters did that. No big surprise. And in the early to mid-60s they did some straightforward albums featuring West coast greats, as you can see. The Bud Shank album, for example, is from 1963 according to another source. If Gioia and Gordon did not dwell too much on this in their books then maybe this was because this time span (60s) was beyond the KEY period when WCJ was all the rage so they had to thin out their coverage of what happened AFTER that period??

Don't know how many alternate takes there actually were but two takes each (takes 1 and 2 of each tune) of Way Down Yonder ..., Countless Blues, Them There Eyes, I Want A Little Girl and Pagin' the Devil are on the "Kansas City Six and Five 1938" LP in the Commodore Classics series reissued around 1980. A disc I've seen surprisingly often in the secondhand bins through the years. But of course that's old-fashioned vinyl ...

Tanya's place? Tanya's Place?!? Qu'est-ce que c'est? Intrigued Parisien would like to know. Just a quip. "Tanya" was a long track on that album. So if she is a Parisian, maybe that is where they took the picture. But maybe not. In fact, quite doubtfully. Ah so... Doubt a Tanya would live in a place like that Anyway might be worth asking Donald Byrd. He composed the tune! Somehow this facade looks like one of the buildings they used to shoot Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle" (the one M. Hulot lives in or one of the buildings around that marketplace). IIRC those scenes were filmed in St. Maur Les Fossés (in a part of the town that has long since been bulldozered completely).

Hey, I was stating this tongue-in-cheek, but for a good reason, as anybody who has ever heard English-only speaking people make the perfectly mumbled mumbo jumbo out of clearly foreign names can attest to. (O.K., I will have to admit that the French aren't any better - or even worse still - whereas many of us Germans cannot get to grips with that English "th" either). But changing one's GIVEN NAME because the majority population in the country one chose to live in felt inept enough to pronounce this name halfway correctly? (See the case of Uffe Baadh above) - Oh come on ... What would those persons/musicians/artists with REALLY unintelligible and unpronouncable names around on the scene today, such as those with Arab or Indian backgrounds, have to say if the same were demanded of them?? Clearly times have changed. (But have pronunciation abilities evolved in the same way? )

Luckily enough NHOP was the only Dane present at all those session. Just imagine his fellow countryman WILLIAM SCHIÖPFFE would have been called in on drums. Norman Granz and all other English-only speaking recording bigwigs would have been in fits trying to pronounce THAT without getting their tongues twisted inextricably (and writing would not have been much better - "oh that "umlaut" in that funny place, could that possibly be really so??" Small wonder UFFE BAADH did not stick with HIS name either.

That sums it up about as well one possibly could sum it up. BTW, I don't know what kind of grasp on reality, i.e. on the moment the war ended, music biographers have but the Aladdin recordings look very much POST-WAR to me. And they sure ain't bad. And as has been said before, the "Prez and Teddy" and "Jazz Giants 56" albums of course are masterpieces.

Sick. Totally sick. Let the real loonies run free and wield and tote their guns and do NOTHING about them toting and actually firing their guns (or even possessing them) and all this in the name of the "land of the free" - and then this. How hypocritical can you get?? Or is this another way of living out one's own incompetence in dealing with the REAL criminals? If you cannot get to grips with street gangs, backwoodsy "white supremacy" militia gun hoarders or the like, then why not haul away 11-year olds in handcuffs instead? Must make you feel real good in your cop attire and satisifed that you#ve done a really good job in fighting the real threats to society at large. Lousy.

As for Horst Jankowski, look back further, dear discophiles, and don't get stuck in the MPS rut, if you please. His 1961 album "Gäste bei Horst Jankowski" on Metronome is fine, and his even earlier "chamber jazz" EPs on Telefunken are very nice too. Real period pieces that yet do not fall prey to the overwhelming and suffocating influence of the "Third Stream" fetichists of those times that were so beset with imparting "respectability" on jazz over here. Compared to that, all this "Black Forest" stuff really is something more for the lounge/easy listening/mood music fans. You really have to do some digging through those MPS mood music items to discover what's left of Jankowskis' jazz background.

Being the vinyl nut that I am, last week I was exceedingly pleased to find the (to me, anyway) definitve format of affordable reissues of this in a local record store (can't recall having ever seen facsimile VINYL reissues of the original LPs in a very, very long time): The early 80s reissue "Basie Reunions" in the Prestige 2-LP series (P-24109). Listening to both sets really was an experience, and one of the rare occasisons where I wondered how I had managed so long without this (thanks therefore for earlier entries in this thread that reminded me of this item!). Cannot say that I find that rusted-up Jack Washington drags down the results THAT much, and the spirit of Pres being so pervasive is little wonder IMHO, given the influence that Pres exerted on modern 50s mainstream jazz musicians and given that the session was credited to Paul Quinichette as the nominal leader.

Yes - both is "good" - the film and the music - neither outstanding, I'd say. But both together is definitely outstanding! It just works perfectly well - one of the most naturally integrated of all jazz soundtracks! Sorry to disagree. But if you listen to the music even while NOT watching the film but AFTER having it watched (no matter how long ago) the music - even on its own - works perfectly well and, considering what musical scores of movies were able to achieve back then at all, at least from a jazz angle, really is outstanding. The fact that the music does manage to bring up certain images (no matter how imprecise) makes all the diffrence.

So I figured. But still it is odd.

Might well be. The items came from a European seller. But the "Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast" imprint is rather atypical for European pressings. Usually they had the entire "Unauthorized public performance prohibited ..." or "All rights of the owner of the recorded work ..." blurb (or the like) in small print around the outer circumference.

So what do I have here, then?

Can't recall any concrete online sources but remember having read about this label somewhere out there along time ago. So the history must be documented somwhere on the web. Those 78s look like period repressings of BN 78rpm releases to me (maybe a budget line or some license for other markets?) but can't be THAT rare. I remember picking up two (swing-style) Blue Note recordings from the 40s issued on that Climax label at a fairly affordable price a couple of years ago.

Wise words, Brownie. Armstrong (and Ulrich from Germany too - and others) did a good deal to push pro cycling towards its grave, and Contador and his ilk finally did the sport in really good. If it still rears its head then only because there is so much at stake for all the sponsors, bigwigs and string pullers that they still keep milking a deadbound cow. To the disgrace of ANYTHing even remotely resembling real values in this sport (unless you call systematic cheating a real "value"). In short, nothing to be proud of, not even on the part of Armstrong.

Amazing ... Wonder what my original VG+ copy of the "Byrd In Paris" LP (the one with Byrd reading the Figaro) would really be worth now. Bought it 7 or 8 years ago in an eBay LP lot for a total of some 50 euros or so that also included an original VG+ copy of Horst Jankowski's "Gäste bei Horst Jankowski" LP on Metronome (which I re-sold for a good deal of the price of the lot as I already had a copy of that one) plus an original Dutch Philips pressing of one of Miles Davis' late 50s Columbia LPs ("Miles Ahead", I think) plus several lesser items. Seems like that buy wasn't the very worst of my vinyl "investments".

So now the French newsagents will be swamped not only with loads and loads of more or less collectible "toys for adults" (such as 1:43 model cars of classic automobiles) and other similar series but also with jazz vinyl that you are supposed to rush to your newsagent for every 2 weeks or so in order to pick up the latest release in that series? Knowing the fad that seems to exist in France for these collectible series that are being sold through "maisons de presse" it will certainly be interesting to see the mid-term outcome of THIS ... BTW, seeing that this series is being launched by Altaya, I can only hope that they will get their act together with the distributionn of this at least inside France. Altaya /IXO in recent years did a 1:43 historical model cars series of my favorite collectible car marque and even though I only wanted the occasional item from that series I had a TERRIBLY hard time getting them at the newsstands over there. Even larger cities sometimes were supplied incredibly poorly.

The guy doesn't sound very broadminded. What has he got against the 20's, 30's, and 40's? So, what, he doesn't like New Orleans jazz, swing, or bop? WTF? My reactions exactly. After having seen the topic title I was expecting a picture of a FAR larger collection anyway. And after having read his exclusion criteria I definitely felt underwhelmed. In fact this "melodic" blurb makes me think of the kind of "jazzy" MOR stuff that would have gotten played on the AFN FM easy listening programs over here where you'd regularly find artists like AHMAD JAMAL programmed in between Hugo Winterhalter and Mantovani.