Big Beat Steve

A bit touchy today, maybe? Maybe time to moderate yourself? (You're on the verge of getting political.) So everybody can get back to counting band members (and/or assessing theire repertoire) to decide if they are rightfully "orchestra" members or not, etc ...

Like I said, "concept" would have done the trick. In a very straightforward manner. No linguistic meandering. That's all. And like I said too, points exchanged and taken, so on with the ACTUAL subject.

Well, I think you do understand after all, and I know too that it all amounts to one single letter, but aren't "conceit" and "being conceited" a bit too (linguistically) close for comfort here? ... hmmm ... "Concept" would have done the trick and served its purpose of getting the message across, unless it is a matter of showing off linguistically (in which case ... but oh well ... talk about coming full circle and so on ... ) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conceited So back to the question on hand ...

Was the underlined word INTENTIONAL? Or just a Freudian lapse? As for semantics, I have always read and understood "orchestra" in a jazz context to be a synonym for a "big band" if used correctly. Your "today's" distinction between "big bands" leaning a bit more towards older styles and "orchestras" being anything else as well, including more experimental forms of jazz, makes sense. BUT - from the 20s classic jazz period up to R&B combos and elsewhere through the decades there have always been bands labeled as "orchestras" that were maybe a bit larger than the typical 4-5-6 piece combo ("small band") but certainly not big enough to be considered a REAL "big band" or "orchestra". Sometimes this actually sounded a bit pretentious. So once you are aware of this the terms become interchangeable and not quite that meaningful again and may just as well be just a marketing gimmick.

@MG: I cannot be sure about the origin of the photos but I do think these came from the US. Somehow the type of "bobbysoxers" does look familiar from other (US) photos from that period. Maybe a series of pics taken at an Elvis concert (hence the extreme emotion)? The French often had different covers for many of their domestically pressed, printed and released versions originating from the USA but the one you show must have been a relatively short-lived one. I have a relatively early French pressing of the Newport LP with the "other" (familiar) cover. And the Joe Turner "Rockin' The Blues" LP, for example, was first published in the US in 1958 and was also issued with that "crowd" cover in the UK on London.

I am aware of the second series (with the six smaller cover pics) which was re-used for facsimile reissues in the 80s but I cannot recall the other one with the screaming teens. Probably not used for reissues because by then it appeared too "dated" to the execs. This kind of cover photos showing teens in various poses of ecstasy and/or partying was used widely in the 50s, it seems, e.g. on various R&B/R'n'R compilations on Savoy, as well as a cash-in attempt elsewhere for quite unlikely acts.

An amazing "period" cover ... Another one of those covers where the record producers tried to cash in visually on the teen market. It might be interesting to try to find out at which concert featuring which "name" artist(s) this photo was actually taken.

Strangely, an ITALIAN (so it says) edition of a book under that title with the number of pages given in the excerpt you posted and a publication date of 2018 is listed on amazon.de.

"Technically" speaking, you no doubt are right. But they seemed to have had that IMMEDIACY that grabbed the kids who went out to buy their records (and that immediacy got lost - at least in the tastes of many rcord buyers - when technically overproficient studio musicians who "tightened up" other R'n'R records from that period got into the act and produced something that just fell by the wayside (by comparison) with the target audience. Besides, talking about "sloppy", I wonder what "objective" criteria (provided there were any) could actually have been applied to that music to do it justice - or to others? If it was just about being "sloppy" in how you play, how utterly sloppy would you have to consider John Lee Hooker (and quite a few others from that low-down "country" blues corner of the popular music scene) and his odd meters, missed beats, etc. that made him the laughingstock of many among the more accomplished Detroit R&B musicians who insisted "he couldn't play shit" (see "Before Motown"). Certainly it cannot have been be a matter of "the cruder you are, the more authentic you are, and the more authentic you are in a crude way the sloppier you are allowed to play" (though I have no doubt quite a few of the white folksy rediscovery/revival audience thought like that)? So there must have been other criteria at work (beyond pure romanticism by the white folk/academic audience belatedly discovering the old country blues "heroes" and sometimes even making umpteenth-rate guitar dabblers into a hero or making the rediscoverd acts of past times crudify their craft - cf. Big Bill Broonzy) . At any rate - as far as the audience was concerned, what worked for the older African-American blues men and their "rediscovery audience" worked for a good deal of the younger white Southern rock'n'rollers and rockabillies too for THEIR audience. So - again - technical professionalism cannot always have been THE #1 quality criterion. "Authenticity" and "immediacy" in their appeal, maybe?

So did Linda Ronstadt ...

Personally I doubt it, but I cannot be sure. Collectors of such equipment would be able to tell exactly but I don't think they are around here.

I don't know about this particular brand (fitted to Chryslers) but those I know of (e.g Philips AUTO-MIGNON) all played normal 45s. The pickup weight was enormous, though, to keep the record from skipping (i.e. skipping too obtrusively) with the car in motion. A common nickname here was "record planer". Talking about retro value, those Auto Mignons, if in good condition play relatively well and fetch insane prices among collectors. I was seriously contemplating buying one in 1983 or so to go with my 1957 car but with student funds being low this was out of reach. But the prices of that time would make it a steal today.

A bit of a tight squeeze for LP's, though.

That's quite possible. Those reel-to-reel units were all over the place as THE home recording medium in the 50s and 60s. Not audiophile throughout, not cheap but something to save your bucks for in many circles. I remember copying a few reel to reel radio shows from such a device onto cassette in the early 80s. No problem with a suitable adapter. But I have never owned a reel-to-reel unit myself (compared to cassettes they WERE unwieldy and fiddly and the nostalgia bug had not bitten). Which may have led me to a blunder (of sorts). When I bought a virtually complete collection of 1953-90 issues of the German JAZZ PODIUM magazine about 14-15 years ago the seller also asked me if I was interested in buying a reel-to-reel tape recording of the Stan Kenton concert in Berlin in 1953 he had made as a teenager when he attended the concert. I declined, not owning a playback unit and knowing that at least part of the concert had been released on vinyl. It may well have been a mistake, though (but i did get the program booklet of this concert along with the lot of mags ).

Yes, about 1998. a friend had one in his car. the first time i actually had one. I found this very practical and I still used cassettes in my cars then (until I bought my current car new in 2012, in fact). I still play cassettes - to a limited extent - in my late 50s cars, BTW, but do figure shifting to CD players). As for the launch of those K7 ("compact cassettes" as they were originally called), the first ones were marketed here in 1966 according to my catalogs, including playback units and recorders. Add-on devices to be connected to the car radio to be able to play the cassette via the car system were also available from that time from a scant few manufacturers (Philips was among the first). Car radios with an actual built-in cassette slot (as produced up to much more recent times) were listed from 1969. But reel-to-reel playback devices were still FAR more numerous among home audio devices then and for several years afterwards. Cannot find many traces for those fat, huge 8-track cartridge tapes in these catalogs, though. They really must have been a niche thing over here.

Maybe easier for Europeans because "cassette" is and was the word throughout. Including in many non-English languages where the pronounciation is more or less the same. Less ambiguous than the US "tape" which often is NOT used in its full form "cassette tape" and in itself does not tell you if you are talking about "reel to reel" tape (very widespread before cassettes came along and even for some time afterwards so if somebody had told me he copied it to "tape" in the 70s or 80s this might as well have meant he copied it to reel-to-reel tape), 8-track cartridge "tapes" (culty retro items now, maybe, but never really got off the ground in Europe) and the fairly long-lived "cassettes", i.e. CASSETTE (or K7) "tapes".

Reminds me of my days of copying music from radio (and VERY cocasionally from LP) onto K7. To know how far to wind the cassette if I wanted to listen to specific tracks or only parts of a side of a cassette I always indicated the starting and ending numbers as shown on the counter of my cassette deck while the cassette ran form start to finish. Worked OK, though of course only exactly for the particular deck in question, and if you had reset your counter to zero in the meantime and started at zero at the beginning of a track in the middle of the cassette this count only told you a track went on for 25 digits in the count. So if you make a note of these figures when playing your cassette all the way through you should be able to see where you are at any point (even during a track) while the cassette is running when you rip the contents somewhere else (provided the K7 runs on the same medium - having a counter - that you used when you played the K7 to note down the counts). Just an idea ... (a very old-school one, I know, but as long as there are K7s ... )

You never been sniped at eBay before? Happens regularly and has probably happened to everybody who's been on eBay. Don't presume others aren't as sly as you are in their bidding strategies.

For years? For decades! I remember hearing this "TIger Rag" to my amazement and fascination on a local jazz radio show (and taping it on cassette) in the late 70s or early 80s. It must have come from the below LP which was the release most widely avilable around here (I bought my copy a couple years later). https://www.discogs.com/Charlie-Parker-Live-Sessions-1947/release/2305342 This broadcast even figured in the selected discography of Ross Russell's "BIrd Lives" (listing Spotlite 107 as its vinyl release) which I had bought during a school trip to London in 1976. I'd love to hear the Rudi Blesh "Moldy fig" tracks too. The label looks like that of an S-D (Steiner-Davis) 78.

Then go on and read "The Jazz Scene" too. Just to continue into the (musical) side of the matter.

With me it is not a matter of never listening to them but of just postponing listening to new purchases (that were bought when the occasion presented itself and in the knowledge that they DID fit my tastes) when required up to the time I felt/feel in the mood for that particular style of music. When I am on a West Coast Jazz listening binge, for example, I know I won't really and fully appreciate listening to a newly bought Ernest Tubb LP. And vice versa in all directions of styles. So it' s postponed. But every item's time will come. Overall, just by sheer statistics I KNOW there are loads of records in my collection that I will probably never listen to again for the rest of my life. But I have no idea which ones they are (because listening moods and habits are not totally predictable into the long-term future) so they are keepers. (For the time being, anyway ... ) I'd guess this is the case with many collectors with larger collections out there.

I was very, very, VERY reluctant to make the transition and held out for a long time well into the 1990s, spurred both by the fact that early CDs often used to be more expensive here than comparable LPs and offering not that much more music to offset the higher cost and that this coincided with secondhand LPs dropping in price (noticed particularly during my trips to London and its record shops in the 90s) as many seemed to unload their vinyl in favor of CDs. I knew I could not hold out forever and did in fact buy the Bear Family box below as one of my very, very first CD buys long before I got a CD player as this was right up my alley and I KNEW I'd never get this music in any other form, originals being rare and pricy and much of the contents never having been released before. So I decided to grab it while it was available, postponing listening until some time later (little did I imagine that this item remained in print for very long time): https://www.discogs.com/de/Various-Deutsches-Jazz-Festival-19541955/release/3829499 I got myself a CD player 2 or 3 years later (1993 or so), finally makng the plunge because the LP racks in the shops kept shrinking fast and more and more reissues in niche fields such as R&B, Jump Blues and Western Swing made their FIRST appearances ever on CD. So it was CDs or none at all. (This also was the time when the Chronological Classics CD series were in full bloom and they were very tempting too.) To this day I still prefer vinyl if I have the choice, though.

Looks like one of those Italian series from the 80s to me. Vaguely remember that series from the racks in the record shops.

Just out of sheer curiosity: There was a time in the pre-digital days when (put in an oversimplified manner) the sound restorer would individually tape off pops, crackles, scratches and other "out" sounds from a slooooow-running tape of the track to be restored and thus eliminate this foreign noise to the extent possible at all. Time-consuming but would this be possible today and with today#s technology with voice-overs too (if somebody wanted to go to that extreme trouble)? I've often wondered if something could be done about this sort of "foreign noise" in the case of basically interesting recordings where the announcer (or whoever ...) talks right into the tune/music.