Big Beat Steve

That 4CD European 'Complete Joe Maini' box is definitely worth seeking out. Speaking of box sets, may I give a big plug for THE COMPLETE NOCTURNE RECORDINGS - Jazz in Hollywood Series (3-CD box set Fresh Sound NR3CD101 - and NO, lest someone come up with the worn-out "Andorran thieves" argument again: NOPE, this set was endorsed fully by Nocturne co-founder Harry Babasin!)

That is correct, although frankly I think the Short Stops collection works better without the Count album. I cannot recommend the Johnny Mandel/Gerry Mulligan "I Want to Live" highly enough. It is quite natural for tastes to vary, although I for one do see the continuity between those first two 10-inchers and the "Courts The Count" album. To me, the EP with the "Wild One" score would be much more of an "intruder" wuith all its rather dramatic film score ingredients. If I wanted to listen to the "Wild One" score in context I would not so much choose the other music from that album but rather the "Wild One" score (and then some more) by Leith Stevens on Decca (and reissued on Fresh Sound, for ex.). which brings me too name this Leith Stevens album as another recommendation for an interesting WCJ project and contrast with Shorty Rogers' treatment (the "All Stars" that Leith Stevens assembled for that recording really are just that - ALL stars: Rogers, Guiffre, Shank, Cooper, Bernhart, Freeman, Manne, Childers, Geller, Pena, Bunker, etc.).

Those Shorty Rogers tracks are great (and excellent as an introduction into WCJ, both musically and chronologically) but the CD version of "Short Stops" would be only second choice compared to the 2-LP set of "Short Stops" as the CD omits a lot of music (it has only 20 out of 32 tracks of the vinyl). So you will have to shop elsehere to find the "rest" (AFAIK his "Courts The Count" album is missing from the CD and that's a real pity). The above list by Peter Friedman is excellent as a (longish) starter, and the Shorty Rogers "Cool and Crazy" album is on the abovementioneed "Short Stops" set, BTW.

By the yardstick of this forum, that thread linked above is an ANTIQUE one. Can't find more recent ones right now but there was one not long ago initiated by Chewy, I think, which mentioned a lot of goodies across the whole field. BTW, do NOT use Stan Getz or Gerry Mulligan as your main focal points! They were/are lumped in commonly with WCJ but Mulligan, for example, HATED that, and there definitely is a "cool" school that is NOT the most typical WCJ (just check out the farily huge share of 50s Stan Getz that was actually recorded in the East). So if you really want WCJ and not just "cool" 50s jazz (as opposed to the hard boppin' angry young horn blowers of the late 50s ), the by all means DO look way out West. And do use the West Coast Jazz books by Ted Gioia and Robert Gordon (and Alain Tercinet, if you can read French) for some vital background info and therefore written guidance.

Thanks for making me (us) aware of this book. Sounds highly fascinating. My Amazon order went out right away!

Hey, MG! Good to see you back here!

Yeah, thanks, I hadn't thought of that sort of restricted googling (though I use it VERY often for other searches). My site search on the site itself ("search on this site") after having opened that website had not yielded any matches.

Holeee sheeeet .... I had checked this very website on Chicage postwar R&B labels (Red Saunders Archive) this morning in the hope of finding something there but word searches did not yield anything so I gave up ... Thanks for checking this, Niko!! So let's assume this really MAY have been the CLub Society in CHI. And no, it doesn't bug me beyond that statement. Anyway, my main question was about the identity of the musicians. THAT's what I'd like to find out.

Somehow I seemed to remember one of the "name" clubs from New York had a sort of spinoff in Chicago and it might well have been Cafe Society (disregarding the one that exists today) so I did not question that caption but I have been unable to find any written proof of this so my memory may be playing tricks on me. Maybe it really is so that the title of that Shorpy photo was not meant to hint at that particular club but rather at the "society" to be found in (night club) "cafes". Yet this leaves the question about the musicians' identitfy unanswered. The recent comment on Shorpy claiming that the dude at the mike looks like Earl Hines and naming a lot of women drummers cited in "Swing Shift" certainly is way off the mark. BTW, I feel the attire of the woman drummer isn't all that out of the ordinary for those times and in those settings (check period photographs of Moms Mabley and Gladys Bentley, for example). Any clues, anybody? Any experts on black Chicago jazz of the 40s around here? I guess if there'd be an extremely thoroughly document book like "Before Motown" (on pre-1960 Detroit jazz) the wuestion would be far easier to settle.

If you'd really had a closer look at the Hawk's discography then you'd have seen this just ain't so. Just look at the huge number of labels his Commodore, Signature etc. recordings of the forties or some of his recordings of the late 50s (e.g. his Felsted session or some of his live recordings) have been reissued on.

Amazing ... wasn't Red Mitchell living in Sweden at that time (and for many more years)?

Caught in a time warp? :D And seriously ...?

Can anybody identify the musicians shown in this picture? http://www.shorpy.com/node/6866?size=_original No idea about the singer, but somehow the pianist bears some resemblance to Cliff Jackson, the sax man looks a bit like Jack McVea, and I wonder if the drummer could be Jackie "Moms" Mabley on some "special assignment". But I doubt it's any of them. Anybody got any clue? And BTW, you better disregard the comments relating to that pic on that website. Most contributors totally miss the point of the image, it seems, and even fail to see the picture within the framework of ITS time instead of judging it from today's point of view (all that transgender nonsense, etc.).

I guess the EMI dinosaur's ass is waaaaay to big for them to notice anything even if they get kicked by a hundred O members at the same time! Sorry ... I know how you feel, especially with you Amazon Marketplace buyers, this has often kept me from buying from certain vendors with oh so attractive prices (and I'm not even talking Mosaic there ).

Sounds very much like some of you were among those business-dressed, deep blue-suited tie wearers in the 50+ age bracket that I'd occasionally bump into upstairs in the vinyl department of Mole Jazz while patiently working my way through ALL racks from A to Z on those Monday afternoon intermissions spent there on my way back to the ferry at Ramsgate or Dover. :D

That is very good to know. So, do LPs that have been newly remastered for the LP release say so obviously on the packaging? Or do you need to do more investigation to know? Reissue LPs that have been remastered usually say so in the fine print on the back cover and give the name of the remastering studio and/or engineer. But what does that tell you about the quality of the remastering? Nothing much - except for certain "quality" remastering engineer names such as John R.T. Davies for certain classic jazz/swing reissues. Some people can't even seem to agree on whether all RVG remasters are THAT good. Ears and listening preferences differ, you know. The same, incidentally, goes for CD remasters. In short, impossible to answer your question on a general level. But generally speaking, do not make too much of a mystery of LPs and their mastering quality. It's the MEDIUM that's the main and basic difference vs CDs, not the mastering. There are goods and bads both sides of the fence.

Both Jepsen and Bryuninckx assume it is either Maxwell Davis or Bumpy Myers on tenor. Others unknown except Red Callender (b) and Chico Hamilton (dr). And they do list this record as having been issued both on RIH and Federal.

Ever heard of re-sealed platters? :D

Me too, and also quite a few of those black Mole Jazz plastic carrier bags. BTW, while browsing through those copies of B&R, I was surprised to see Dobell's still advertised fomr that 21 Tower St. address as late as late1991 in that mag. Didn't know I had missed the closure of Dobell's THAT closely when first got back to London in the spring of 1993.

It probably was. Monmouth St was on my route - its location was a bit further to the South on the Eastern side. Sometime in the 1980s I think (or maybe even early 90s). It was definitely still 'Collets' back in the late 70s. Like I said above, ads for Collet's were still run regularly up to mid-1989 (in "Blues & Rhythm"). But their ads are conspicuously absent from the 1990/91 issues of B&R that I have.

I remember Colletts moving to Charing Cross Road but for the life of me I cannot remember it having a music section, but I am sure that is just my memory failing me. I must admit my memory of exactly when Collets morphed into Rays is very hazy. Collet's still ran ads in "Blues & Rhythm" in the late 80s.

Ha, I can imagine that ... Though that might work out to your advantage. I remember one time ('94 or '95) when I went there after having made the rounds at Mole where, among other items I had picked up Vol. 2 and 3 of Hampton Hawes' All Night Sessions (UK Vogue/Contemporary originals in VG+ or better condition for 5 or 6 pounds each) and lo and behold, at Asman's there sat a copy of Vol. 1 for me - pristine vinyl but cover just a slightly bit more worn - and priced at one quid! That made my day (and maybe Asman's too as they got rid of that bummer :D). As for Dobell's, does anybody remember if they still had the listening booths in the mid-70s? For the life of it I don't remember (maybe because except for one long-established shop they were a thing of the past in my hometown so i did not expect to find them anywhere else).

Maybe I am romanticizing things a bit because I was EXTREMELY overwhelmed by what I discovered in that "Aladdin's cave" at Dobell's back in '75-77 (remember I was 15 to 17 at that time) but I cannot remember the staff as being that off-putting. On the contrary. And I was there several times during each of my 2-week stays in each of these 3 years but (due to lack of funds) left with very few purchases after lots of rummaging that must have seemed endless to the sales staff. Or maybe I obtained bonus points due to the fact that during one of my visits I lilterally jumped on that Cyril Davies LP released on the Folklore label (a Dobell venture) not long before that I figured I just had to have (after reading about it in a book on British Beat). I guess the (to me) elderly chap at the counter (Doug Dobell himself?) never really figured out why a student youngster from "the Continent" would jump on that one like I did .... Thinking about it now, somehow I must have felt and acted like the penny-pinching browsers in the record shop portrayed in Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity".

The original Dobell's stood in a block known as "the buildings" which was demolished in the late 70s/early 80s and replaced by a new block now full of tourist trash outlets. Back in the day it was said that the ultimate in cool was to live in a cold water pad in the buildings "within the sound of Do-Bell's". I remember in 1993 when I made it back to the City of London for the first time since 1977 I wandered down Charing Cross Road, trying to track down Dobell's at their original address (either unaware of their disappearance or maybe I could not believe the rumours of their disappearance that I may have heard) and of course did not find any trace of the buildings that looked like they might have held that old shop front. But I also remember the buildings that were there at that address definitely did not look like they were only some 10 years old. Maybe it was just the general dirt and neglect? At any rate, London certainly managed to run down their buildings in record time in those years.

Yes it was not too far off the Leicester Square tube station in a small side street but on the east side of CCR and according to the address I have that was St Martins Lane (consulting my London A-Z, actually a few steps off St. Martins Lane proper). So probably Honest jons was just around the corner from there but AFAIK when I was there in the 90s there was no Honest Jons branch anymore. I think I did fine-comb the area because once or twice I did get lost in those little side streets and as I always had a double reason for going there (the MOTOBOOKS motoring book shop where I also left fairly hefty sums was in the immediate vicinity) I did try to make sure I did not miss the right turn to get where I wanted.