Big Beat Steve

An interesting (and worrying) experience ... Particularly if the risk is higher with brand-new sleeves? I am not quite sure which of my clear plastic record sleeves (which i only use for originals or very early pressings of LPs) are PVC or polythene because I usually reuse used ones that end up with me. Mostly PVC I guess ... But I have recently had one observation that had me baffled. About 10 years ago or so I bought an original European pressing of the Maynard Ferguson "Message From Newport" LP (pressing on Danish Sonet) and, the record being an original, filed it in a (used) clear plastic sleeve with the record inside the jacket, as usual. A couple of weeks ago I pulled it out for the first time in years and horror - both sides of the record were spotted with pimples and blobs and splotches and the remaining area had wavy streaks across larger parts of the surface. That LP had been "priced to sell" and as far as I can remember very likely had quite a few pimples and blobs in the surface (something I have observed with several late 50s/early 60s Sonet EPs through the years - the worst Crown LPs have better-looking surfaces than these ...) but it really cannot have been that bad when I bought and first played it. With the wavy streaks on the surface it now looks as if the vinyl consists of several layers that are slowly coming apart ... (Strangely enough the record does play through and there are virtually no skips, but with an underlying rumble and grumble underneath the music listening is more than bizarre, not to mention the strain this must place on the styles ... I have obtained a clean 70s reissue of the record since). I really am wondering if the plastic record sleeve is part of the cause?

FWIW, Joe Palin shows up in several photographs of mid-60s club gigs in Bill Birch's "Keeper of the Flame - Modern Jazz in Manchester 1946-1972".

Yet some seem to have seen enough interest in them to release them (with all their warts of incompleteness) anyway (Circle Records, anyone? ) It is a pity to see concert recordings destroyed, though.

Yes. Recordings that were actually released up to some cutoff date in 1962 and that therefore had reached a first release of 50 years or more in the past by that cutoff date in 2012 when the revised European P.D. law came into effect that had been lobbied hard by, above all, Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney to prevent their zillion sellers from going PD as the 50-year limit of their recordings approached. The botton line is from that day into 2012 the 50-year P.D. rule in Europe that has existed for a long time no longer was a sliding limit moving forward with time but became static. But it did NOT become retroactively applicable to anything first released at least 50 years earlier. That's the basis on which most of the much-lambasted European P.D. reissue labels (and also some U.S labels that are tokenly claiming to have been "released/pressed in the E.U.") operate. Just look at the recording cutoff dates of a LOT of (often huge-sized) box-set "anthologies" that are out there. According to the laws of the E.U. this IS legal. Strictly speaking not for sale in countries where these recordings are not yet part of the P.D. (but in this case the blame rather lies with "the bastids" or whoever ... ) Recordings recorded before that now-unmovable 50-year cutoff date but not released for the first time until much later are a very grey-shaded area in this (but due to the niche character of most of these collectible musics they usually pass unnoticed). Or, as it has also happened, the (re)issuers work out some deal with the parties involved anyway.

One thing has me wondering, though: What is a "public domain from before 1923"?? Come on, you text line fillers: What you wanted to say is "an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 enter the public domain". So say it. The structure of your language does give you the tools to do it. BTW, the article is only true for the US, of course - or to put it the other way round - not for Europe where the cutoff date is 1962 (some time in 1962 when the new EU law in question became effective in 2012). But it will be interesting to see who will actually recycle these "acoustic-era" recordings in recognizable samples in their today's music.

I agree. Although of course this restricts accessibilty even by "collector subculture" standards. Yet sometimes obscure music does not even remain strictly digitalized but does receive a "tangible" insiders' reissue. Such as this one which certainly took some fanatism to collate: https://www.discogs.com/de/release/10187300-Various-The-Best-Of-Club-51-Records (One of the obscurest Chicago post-war labels that received a "complete" treatment here ...) Download - even via dedicated collectors' websites or blogs - can be a dangerous thing, though. I once very narrowly avoided having my computer infected and ransomwared when I (for the first time just as a tryout) wanted to download an item from a Western Swing website that - along with serious historical information - had tons of downloadable music files up on its site (but seems to have had one of its servers hijacked where, for example, European visitors of the site were directed for downloading). So once bitten twice shy ....

I understand Booker Little died of uremia?

As did Stan Hasselgard (26), Doug Watkins (27), Willie Dennis (39) and Nick Stabulas (43). And Bob Gordon (27)!! And Chu Berry (31) but he would be long gone even as a nonagenarian by now, and Peter Trunk (37) who would not be a nonagenarian yet if he had lived.

Actually yes - from time to time. About 10 years ago I retired a 90s DUAL turntable (that does have 3 speeds - which is why i bought it in the first place) from regular use as for some unfathomable reason it had an annoying and persistent speed fluctuation problem at 45 rpm. So when I bought a new turntable to set up alongside I fitted the Dual player with its 78 rpm pickup and have used this strictly for 78s ever since. I do have trouble playing the few 16 2/3 rpm LPs that I have, though (one of the Prestiges and two Vogue trad jazz LPs). Only one portable record player from the 50s that I have will play them.

Actually my post was meant as a reply to your statement that you think you "have all those old Savoys that was released". All the names I listed were ones that had releases on Savoy (and I own only some of them myself, and some I've never heard anywhere either). All this because Hardbopjazz was referring to items from the Savoy catalog that have never been reissued (and if they were, some were not circulated far) and may be "lost" to accessible jazz . There was a lot like that (and Savoy is just ONE example - it happens with virtually any label - major or indie), and quite a lot of these does have its musical merits IMO, at least to those who like to look off the beaten tracks of the GREAT names. As you say, most collectors are no completists in every area of their muiscal interests. Some collector will get by with only a sampling of leader dates by artists that other collectors need every second of recorded music of, and course everyone has his own (differing) preferences. But as I have always been attracted to and interested in exploring artists and recordings that seem to be "in the shadow" and bypassed by reissue programs I easily understand what Hardbopjazz was getting at.

The one I was able to locate quickly in my 78s is Wynton Kelly Trio: Cherokee/Moonglow (Climax 1579 - with a small print referring to BN 402 on the label) Upon searching I also just discovered I do have at least one actual BN 78: Ike Quebec's Swing Seven: Topsy/Cup-Mute Clayton (BN 515)

Gheorghe, from what you say I'd bet you have only just scratched the surface with the obvious "usual suspects". Do you have the LP by the Chuz Alfred group (or its Savoy-Denon CD reissue that DID exist so it's not even a "lost" item - but certainly an "under-the-radar" one)? Or Ronnelll Bright? John Mehegan? Eddie Bert? Mort Herbert? Sahib Shihab? Paul Williams? T.J. Fowler? Wild Bill Moore? Sir Charles Thompson? The Four Bars and A Melody group? The Beale Street Gang feat. Milt Buckner? Just a random jotting of a few (major and minor) names from Ruppli's discography ... And I think Hardbopjazz will understand what I am alluding to ...

With the result that it sometimes is easy to trace the origins of a particular obscurity. I remember compilation LP reissues of one R&B 45 from the late 50s that must have been dubbed from some exceedingly scratchy original 45 (for lackof a better copy) that proved impossible to clean up properly. Over time the track appeared on 2 or 3 more compilations - with the same scratches and crackles, so obviously lifted from the same 45 or (more likely) "first reissue". As for what you say about Savoy releases that do not seem to exist anywhere except in the discographies, I will have to check on occasion myself. No doubt they include some R&B items that should sound tempting to me too. I hope, though, that these are not cases like those 20s or early 30s blues 78s of which it was claimed for decades that no copy had ever been found - until one was miraculously discovered in the 90s or 00s after all - decades after the fact.

Are you also drawing a line between unreleased sessions or tracks that are known to have existed but have never ever been released so far (and may well be definitely "lost") and sessions that were relased originally but never reissued? (Which would mean, however, that they haven't even made it to the pre-digital age, strictly speaking). In fact I find that in the "digital age" a lot that has never been reissued on vinyl has finally been made avialable on CD at last - and for the first time again since its original release. But if I look at my Jepsen, Nicolausson or Leadbitter/Slaven discographies it seems to me that a lot has still been bypassed (particularly from the 78 rpm era). But to give an even approximate percentage? Impossible ...

Several Climaxes (both oldtime and modern) but I don't think I have any actual BN 78s. But then I am no diehard BN collector and collecting 78s is a sideline in my music colecting interest too, not a core activity.

When I wrote "setting the author straight" this was not meant in the strictest sense of the word but to describe those cases where upon screening a text for its correctness you start wondering to yourself why you would have to point out this or that rather obvious fact (which in turn leads you to wondering - again to yourself - to what extent the author has truly immersed himself in that particular topic) and then you wonder how you can put this correction across to the author without offending him yet making your point. Not an easy task ... I have had this case recently when I read a magazine feature where a friend (a great expert on the subject matter) had supplied the author with all the info and hard facts to work into an article but clearly the author (a staff author of the magazine but no expert on this particular specialist matter) either had not listened enough or had been unable to really digest the facts to present them correctly in his story. So those who use this feature for reference either stumble across the errors like I did or absorb or reproduce them in good faith. With the not so pleasant result that as soon as one error is repeated often enough by one scribe copying another (here we are talking about a different specialist field but as we all know this has happened among jazz authors too) or enough readers perpetuating the error on other platforms it becomes "set in stone" and even harder to correct later on. Annoying if you know how it came about (and yes, I am glad I did not have to take this up with the author "to set him straight" ). And I guess this is how errors creep into Wikipedia too (and remain there and elsewhere - "set in stone", because after all "I read it on Wikipedia". )

I for one know about the difficulty to spot errors - in the case of a non-fiction book I worked on recently I spotted one obvious, glaring and actually unforgivable error on the part of the author only when I did the FOURTH proofreading of my translation of that particular book. But overall this was not even the tip of the iceberg ... As for authors asking fellow experts for proofreading, I did this (unofficially as a favor to the author) on two books in a field where the author and me were hobbyist experts (one of those relatively rare cases where an expert on the subject actually got to write the book instead of a "name" author), and yet I came up with numerous factual corrections that found their way into the book. But in these cases many of these were a matter of fine-combing the text for the full accuracy of the facts, not a matter of setting the author straight in the first place and having to do basic corrections. I often refer to one of those books (beyond the coverage of the historical contents it is a reference book and therefore heavy on - often minute - facts) and still find that I should have clarified and modified quite a few more details to weed out any remaining ambiguities and omissions that might get less informed readers on the wrong track when they use it for reference. So yes - nobody's perfect and everyone's knowledge in any specialist field evolves ... In general it really seems to me that the sensitivity and willingness to "getting your facts right" has lost much of its mandatory character in the writing trade ... ...either because, like I hinted at above, the double and cross-checking everything that goes with this approach would require the author to consistently ask himself "can I be sure of my facts or do I know that I don't know"" (to put it bluntly), or ... because while you of course cannot cram EVERY fact and piece of information into a book or even magazine feature (because it would end up way too long and fat) and therefore you have to trim down and weed out what you include and what you omit this does NOT mean that just because you cannot include everything the remaining facts by necessity must be incorrect just because they are incomplete (i.e not hyper detailed). A competent author can present even all of the incomplete and thinned-out facts correctly without causing the omissions to give a false slant or interpretation to the retained facts and statements. But this seems to be too lofty an aim with quite a few authors these days ...

Unfortunately just as true (particularly as far as factual accuracy goes) for non-fiction books far outside the realm of music or, more specifically, jazz. I think one of the main problems with this is that many publishers prefer to stick with "name" authors who over time are called in to write on an increasingly wide range of subjects they just are NO real experts on. Which means the names of these authors crop up on an endless array of subtopics within a broader specialist or niche area that these authors in the long run just are unable to constantly cover with the required attention to detail (or willingness to really leave NO stone unturned to get the facts and contexts right - as this willingness of course would require them not just to do exhaustive research of their own but to continually question their OWN "expertise" on the subject during the gestation of the book). And the end results turn out accordingly if you look and read closely ... On the other hand, there are people out there who would be real experts on the respective subjects and could teach many name authors a lesson or two on factual and contextual accuracy and completeness, but they are no professional or "name" authors. So they either do no have the clout and behind-the-scenes networking to get the publishers to farm ouot the job to THEM (an unwillingness to the detriment of the end result) - or their writing style just is awkward and heavy-handed just BECAUSE they are no professional authors. You can know as much about a subject (that is a hobby of yours) as you like but if your everyday job is very, very far removed from working with WORDS your results all too often are bound to be awkward and not all that readable, unfortunately, because writing WELL in all respects and for all purposes of publication DOES take some specialist competence. In some of the latter cases some publishers would be well off if they got some decent proofreading stage into the project (because the core material would be second to none, warts of the "non-pro" authors 'n'all) but it seems this is a dying art (or profession?) too. And of course the same problems plague Wikipedia too where there evidently are many who love to cover a particular subject and know a lot about it but just do not have a way with words and texts to make their stuff truly readable, focused and compehensible. And "peer reviews" do not always help much in that respect either becaue many peers aren't much better.

We're geting astray, but I think I'd be able to add 3 or 4 more like that. That would ALSO make for a separate topic (which probably will turn out rather controversial - as in the case of the books I alluded to ... ) It's always difficult if the author clearly has an agenda - particularly a social or societal one - that he sets out first (or premanently throughout the book) and then very much seems to adjust the facts to support his agenda (or his pet "narrative"). Interesting and informative books anyway but to be taken with a bucketful of salt ... But again - all this would better fit into a separate thread (and I'd only have been tempted to mention these books here if Rabshakeh had asked about books about the SWING era ). So let's NOT dwell on this any further but get back to the purpose of THIS thread.

That would rather be a topic for a separate thread and would lead us off the subject of THIS thread. I mentioned my caveats in this resepct nly because books that rely heavily on musical analysis involving transcriptions of solos and other finer points obviously require more musical background knowledge (and training?) to make full use of the contents than other books on the same subject that use a different approach. And I find this is an important aspect for would-be buyers of the books because readers' preferences and expectations differ widely so they should be aware of details like this beforehand.

"Jazz Masters of the 40s" remains a great book - much better IMO than the "Jazz Masters of the 50s" volume that picks out a dozen great names (well documented elsewhere anyway) to cover the "Masters of the 50s" theme n one swipe and that's that. (A bit of a letdown if you have read the 40s book first.) I find the 40s book to be rather more insightful - not least of all because Ira Gitler does not stop with the #1 exponent on each instrument but also gives due coverage to the "others" who had their own impact and importance too. This provides a much fuller and more nuanced picture. I'd consider individual biographies the next step AFTER publications on the jazz scene of a particular period. "The Music and life of Theodore Fats Navarro" by Petersen and Rehak is well-done, though the biographical part is a bit skimpy. Probably due to lack of source material or accounts by those who knew him (probably the book was written way too late to be able to document more first-hand testimonials). On the other hand the analysis of his recordings leaves no stone unturned. And again, being able to sight read music notations and knowing your musical basics would help, so non-musicians (like me ) will find the reading somewhat rougher going than musicians with the appropriate training. Browsing through the Dexter Gordon biography by Stan Britt now (it's been many years that I read it), it does cover all the ground, including more than a nod to his then-recent "Round Midnight" fame, but his European period seems to have been covered somewhat superficially. What marred the reading for me (and luckily is of no concern to the forumists here) was that the German translation of the book published by Hannibal in Vienna in 1990 (the direct way to obtaining the biography back in the early 90s here) is fairly stiff and often awkward - as if worded by an outsider looking in and not someone fully in tune with jazz and the jazz scene.

I agree with all the recommendations by Ghost of Miles (have them all, enjoy them all). But I would put a LOT more emphasis on "Swing to Bop" by Ira Gitler. This is mandatory reading to give you the REAL feel of the era. It is one you'd want to read several times over and you will find it will immerse you into that era each time and it would be one of my relatively few "desert island reading matter" items among my (many) jazz books. As an "oral history" book IMO it beats "Hear Me Talkin' To Ya" by a LONG mile (but then approaches on how to prepare oral histories for publication may have evolved considerably since "Hear Me" was first published). As for the "Birth of Bebop" book by Scott DeVeaux, I have one major quibble with it: What is in it is good and very interesting, but IMO (and not only IMO as far as I can see) the role of Coleman Hawkins in that field and period is grossly overblown in the book. Nothing against the Hawk (I have about 98% of his small-group recordings from the 40s and like them a lot) but was he really SUCH an overriding seminal figure in the evolution of bebop?? Two others I would suggest: - "Bebop - The Music and its Players", by Thomas Owens. He looks beyond 40s bebop creators into later artists "in a bebop vein" (so to speak) so his is a loose definition of bop. But to get the most out of that book it would pay if you are a (music notation) reader and have some knowledge of the basics of music (chord progressions, etc.). It is not mandatory to enjoy the book but it helps ... - Sometimes a "period" look at the music you are exploring helps for a better and more direct understanding of its impact in the day. If you can find a secondhand copy of "Inside Be-Bop" by Leonard Feather (first published in 1949, later reprints were titled "Inside Jazz") at a good price it would be a fairly good introduction as a primary (and not "historically predigested" secondary) source on the subject, but of course its "period" slant needs to be factored in. I've found a couple of books on the regional scenes very interesting to fill out the WHOLE picture but they all dwell on the periods before and after the 40s too. E.g. Los Angeles: - Central Avenue Sounds - Swingin' on Central Avenue Detroit: - Before Motown Newark: - Swing City - Newark Nightlife

Amazing ... I remember prices differed sometimes significantly for one and the same item (not just in the "Special Offer" bins) in the record shops I visited during my stays in London in 1975, 76 and 77 while I still was in high school. An important aspect for any student's limited buying means, and you fairly quickly found out which record shop was worth visiting again for the prospect of bargains and which one was out of reach ... What surprised me about the price classes of the records I mentioned earlier about the pricing policy at (German) MCA was the strict correlation between the max. number of tracks and the price class they would assign each release to (at least in that reissue segment). Pricing records differently according to marketing aspects (there always have been "specially priced budget" series and full-price series, etc.) is one thing, but that limitation in the number of tracks?? Particularly since the presentation otherwise was the same (the lower-priced ones did not look any more "budget-y" than the mid-price items) and limiting the number of tracks meant incomplete sessions etc. No doubt collectors cared about that even in the 70s.

Like jazzbo said (and like I mentioned in my first post in this thread)... A budget P.D. release (sneered upon by some, I know ...) but a good introductory package. https://www.discogs.com/de/release/13726466-Jimmy-Smith-Jimmy-Smith-Vol3-Seven-Classic-Albums

Merry Christmas and a safe and healthy (and better) New Year to everyone. And if life "out there" should be too confining while the virus is still rampant, then stay covered with your record collection and use the time to explore it again ...