Big Beat Steve

2 1/2 stars from Down Beat. Quote (by Leonard Feather, FWIW hereabouts ); "... this was potentially a four-star album, except for the material, which fits like the first suit you pick off the pipe rack. On the other hand, commercially speaking, i know Vik's Bob Rolontz was wise to use this gimmick, for it should certainly help the Messengers towards a healthy sale."

So I figured. Purely rhetorical thinking ...

Excellent. I should have thought of something/somebody along those lines. Reading the phonetic "transcription" above I was trying to figure out who (among non-Anglosaxon pianists, given the "Henri" instead of "Henry") this announcer might have meant but who'da thunk his pronounciation of the family name was THAT far off the mark.

Great set indeed - particularly to those who don't have the 70s/80s Krazy Kat LPs yet that collated quite a bit of the highlights of these labels (I do have almost all of those LPs yet I dont regret having bought this box set). If you'd put the hillbilly companion set Tennessee Jive up for sale I'd have been tempted to ask about overseas shipping ...

Nobody said you were, Scott D.. But there are lots of other listeners out there who might or might not agree. Some agree with you here, Guy Berger seems to agree more with my impressions. No point counting here. Much too small a sample. No final word possible. Just personal opinions.

I thought so - it just looks to me like the Capitol cover with Rogers and Muligan blowing against each other face to face against a black background is far more common and known (even as reissues) and "evocative".

Though not exactly in that (virtually unrecognizable) packaging, unless you know your Shorty discography well.

Driving to work this morning I happened to be tuned in to a radio station where they aired "Another Brick in The Wall". To me it most obviously was "oh, 1979 revisited" - with connotations of several specific situations and evenings back then. I wonder how many other listeners would have taken it to be of totally "undefinable", "timeless" vintage and would not have reacted like "oh, that's been around before" at the very least.

Funny .. this thread brings back memories. I never was into contemporary rock but back in 1974/75 when I got seriously into rock music (of the 50s and early 60s kind, FWIW) of course most of my high school buddies were into the then current (or recent) rock styles - hard rock, psychedelic, krautrock, whatever .... so I could not help being exposed to that too at the time (to limited personal appeal, some Cream and TYA (e.g.) excepted). The Pink Floyd albums I remember seeing and being discussed at my friends' homes were the ones initially named - Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, etc ... All titles that ring bells ... As I remember it, their stance on on the period from Dark Side of the Moon onwards and then, of course, The Wall was that Pink Floyd had "gone commercial" and did not nearly appeal to many of them in the same way the earlier releases had. Very likely a generational matter ...

Ouch ... this is kind of sobering to hear that the market seems to be THAT slim, seeing what you tell about how long it took to offset the advance (particularly since sales probably were best in the first years) ... I wouldn't quite have imagined that ... Well, my copy would have been part of your 2012 statement (provided you received any)

Oh, it may well be one: Available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/1950-1951-Lars-Gullin-DOMNERUS/dp/B00008YGVY/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=arne+domnerus+rolf+ericson+dragon+381&qid=1554401979&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0 And on amazon.co.uk to boot!

You mean to say records by Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke would not have been the first ones to feature prominently there In the first place? (Yes, me gotta this too ... ever since it was published)

Why not? Nobody would want (or lay claim to) this actual copy. Why wouldn't I (or anybody) be able to clearly indicate the title of a book that I's recommend even if my own copy that I am reading is one I have taken out from the library or have been lent by a friend or whatever so do not actually OWN a copy of my own?

The more I look at that cover pic the more he looks like Charlie Shavers to me.

Membran - yes, but I wouldn't quite call it "shit". It's just utterly redundant to ANY even halfway serious listeners and/or collectors as the stuff is available in lots of forms of better packaging elsewhere. But it is nice as an introduction to total newbies (who will hopefuly upgrade before all too long) or for anyone who wants to save himself the trouble of burning CD-Rs for the car player (at the price they sold at Zweitausendeins for the price per CD wasn't more than that of a passably decent CD-R blank). I am surprised to see this mentioned here NOW. These boxes have been around for something like 10 years or even more.

Don't know about which period or part of the Trip reissue program you two are talking exactly, but I remember them primarily as a reissue label of Mercury/EmArcy material from the 50s (and still have those I bought at the time). Instantly recognizable by their scaled-down (mostly) B/W versions of the original covers on the front. Some 78 rpm-era reissues on Trip were more nondescript but otherwise while they really were no eyecatcher there were sooo many ugly and REALLY boring and out-of-tune album covers in the 70s and 80s that from a certian point you just shrugged it off. Artwork of German MCA reissues of 50 US Decca and Coral material was extremely nondescript, the French RCA "Jazzline" or "Masters" series were nothing to write home about either, etc. etc. Not to speak of many, many other European reissue series. As if they all had had hoards of second or third-rate album cover "artists" to feed. Soundwise I'd say they are just what many of them were at the time, not outstanding, not unbearable. And at any rate they made a lot of music available that at that time you'd only have been able to get if you'd be lucky enough to find orignals or be able to shell out for those Japanese reissues that existed at all (exceedingly thin on the ground here, a fact that seems to be forgotten by many US collectors around at that time).

As for the search function, these books do have an index that looks fairly comprehensive (at least the Savoy, Chess and Verve books that I am familiar with do) and should allow everyone to locate the artists fairly easily throughout the book.

I think our local city library may have one too. I borrowed the Savoy and Chess discographies by Ruppli in the late 80s/early 90s (and they had others from that series, though I cannot recal which ones) and photocopied everything that was of interest (e.g. Savoy everything except the gospel section, for example) but I have not set foot in this library for close to 20 years. So I do not even know to what extent the whole book searching/borrowing system has been reorganized since and if anything at all in their setup remains the way it was then (or if maybe - horror - any scaling down of what they have in their archives has occurred as part of the library has moved to another building in another part downtown about 10 years ago).

Gumpert, maybe?

"Weehawken Mad Pad"??

Don't know? Not explored big bands in greater depth to reach out to these first-and-a-half tier black bands (no,though he has often been overlooked I wouldn't consider him outright "second tier")? A blind spot, maybe? (Like others have it in other places) That particular compilation of tracks actually has been all over the place in multiple guises in the "H" section of big band jazz racks for about 40 years, first in the record shops, then in secondhand bins, and must have been the easiest available Claude Hopkins material for a very long time prior to the Hep and Classics CDs. It'd be impossible for me to count how often I've had the (French) Musidisc (30JA5156) equivalent of that (Alamac) set in my hands ever since the late 70s but did not grab it (and in retrospect I don't even know why I didn't). I finally took the plunge in the mid-90s and bought it secondhand on Swing Classics ET2. It was also out on Jazz Panorama LP13. FWIW, some secondhand bins seem to yield similar items worldwide these days. Not all that long ago I bought the George Lewis "Dr.Jazz" and the Davison/Condon "Live Miami Beach 1955" LPs for next to nothing from the secondhand special offer bins too. Wouldn't mind getting hold of a few more Condon concert releases from that period on those 70s collector labels at the same price.

Somehow Sonny Clark looks like Prince's dad there (or Esquerita's somewhat more subdued cousin )

I really wouldn't say so. I don't have the set but I do have about 80 to 90% of what's on it on vinyl (mostly those Savoy twofers from the late 70s and 80s). I may be biased as I am quite a bit into bebop but I really do enjoy a huge lot of it for what it is - on a par with what was out on Dial, some early BN and other 40s labels. Bird definitely was in a league of his own and often is beyond comparison but the "rest" was much, much more than just also-rans IMHO. And that's not only Fats Navarro or Dexter Gordon ... By YOUR yardstick you might as well claim that once you go beyond 2, 3 or 4 "key" hard bop acts the rest was just an "academic bore" too. "Just blowing sessions rambling on and on and not much more ..." (In more ways than one, in fact I do find a lot of the 40s bebop recordings more rewarding than not all that few hard bop sessions. The 3-minute limitations of the bebop 78 rpm era turned many of these into condensed, extremely intense musical "miniatures" whereas I find quite a few hard bop sessions did not just "stretch out" but really overstretched things. Anyway ... "to each his own ..." and "one man's meat ...")

Déjà vu ...

The reason I was mentioning this was SPAIN - boy, was I baffled when I saw the tons of his reissue LPs flooding the racks in the record shops when I visited Spain (not Argentina, mind you ...) in 1980 and 1983, by which time he had been gone for close to 50 years. No doubt you will remember this too ...