Big Beat Steve

You can do this via Google Books. https://books.google.de/books?id=PCMEAAAAMBAJ&hl=de&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1 E.g. here for a copy from 1955: https://books.google.de/books?id=PCMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA5&hl=de&source=gbs_toc&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false But scrolling through the individual pages and enlarging them piecemeal to find what you are lookng for can be a bit of a pain the you-know-where if you do this for any length of time.

Exactly my approach. Making sure they don't lean too much for too long, wiggle them every now and then, etc. For quite some time I had my 12in LPs stuffed way too tightly (having run out of space) but last winter I finally shifted my 78s to the room next door, shifted my 10" LPs into where the 78s were and now have quite a bit more looseness and hope this will last me for a while. My shelves have a combination of 95, 75 and 45 cm width (chosen to be able to fill up one complete wall in my music room with the LP shelving and not waste any space). No dividers (none suitable available with that shelving system bought from a specialist shop - not cheap) yet the boards have not warped significantly during the 18 years the LPs have sat there. Board thickness is close to 20 mm, so not quite an inch as suggested above. But solid wood throughout. BTW and FWIW, my 10-inchers and 78s sit on standard IKEA BILLY bookcase modules with 35 and 55cm wide shelves. Perfect as far as I am concerned (provided you assemble the elements carefully and make sure the pins that hold the shelves are a snug fit in the predrilled holes in the side walls) and they have not shifted one bit though. And visually they match my LP shelving very nicely. I have used these much-sneered at BILLY bookcases in other instances where they really were crammed full with books or magazines and yet they haven't yielded under the (over)load. So these records should not be a big deal for them to hold. Though the 78 shelves are fairly full (and the records virtually upright throughout, without being squeezed) I still have to come up with some sort of solid dividers for the 55 cm wide 78rpm case, though (I've had two 78s - both Capitol, incidentally - warp significantly through upright loose storage in one of those 50s record wire racks - way outside sun or heat radiation - and would hate to see this happen again).

Don't mind or care too much about masonry. If they want to engage in that, so be it ... But that Orion Cube thing ... now come on ...

Mitch Miller an extraterrestrian? Well, who knows ... Maybe Men in Black ought to have been made much, much earlier?

Chewy, what have you been smoking this morning??

An interesting read. Thanks!

Just added a note on the discography page of the booklet of my copy of this set.

Thanks for bringing this to everybody's attention again. This was among a host of Fresh Sound** facsimile reissue LPs of 50s jazz I bought unheard-untested in the very late 90s/early 2000s. I gave it a listen but somehow it did not immediately grab me the way others from this reissue series and period (though Al Cohn charts, for ex., mostly are a safe bet with me) so it went back into the racks and has not been pulled out often. Time to spin it again, then ... **Edit: Just checking my pressing: While I bought it along with lots of Fresh Sounds actually this one is an older pre-Fresh Sound reissue pressed by Iberofon for RCA in 1983. I now remember the Spanish leased a lot from other countries at that time and also did a lot of this kind of facsimiles (when reissues in other countries were still marred by ineptly "modernized" covers). I bought several from other labels (e.g. Capitol) during a stay in Spain in 1983.

Oh come on. This was no MIddle Age. Even then the companies were in contact all over the world and had their representatives both ways. Take a look at the (U.S.) ANGEL label from the mid-50s, for example, and wonder how THEY ever got hold of THOSE European jazz releases for release in the USA. This was way more obscure than the Vogue label (or the Metronome-Prestige setup). Yet they DID lease these recordings and issue them.

What Caister weekenders do YOU remember, I wonder? Reading about their 3rd annual rockabilly and rock'n'roll (you know, the REAL r'n'r variety, not what the US take it to be ) weekender in the UK "Street Machine" mag in 1980 made me vow I'd be there one day. Well, it took me 12 years to eventually get there (at the nearby Hemsby location up in Norfolk). Memories, memories ....

So don't play your music too loud in that new neighborhood - or else ... (read: or face the consequences with your new neighbors ...)

I am no musicologist either (which may be for the better in such discussions, you know ...) but considering the excitement, feel and rhythm of the music, the build-up of a climax, and the frenzy it generated this might well be considered a forerunner. I am sure many later bands consciously or unconsciously built their crowd pleasers on the Sing Sing Sing structure.

Chewy, get yourself a discography! Or do a search on Discogs at the very least. No matter how incomplete Discogs is, it will get you further than just stumbling with blinded eyes through the discographical forest. This was originally released on Vogue (in France and UK) and on other labels (e.g Brunswick in Germany) at the time (and reissued a zillion times). This BN pressing isn't common but probably only pricey because it is on BN. Even period originals on the original labels aren't that rare. BN leased several items from Vogue (Fats Sadi, Wade Legge a.o.) for their 5000 10" album series. https://www.jazzdisco.org/blue-note-records/catalog-5000-series/album-index/

Was "Vocal with instrumental accompaniment" really a specialty of Decca? From what I've seen elsewhere I doubt it. At least in the 78 era. Checking a few of my 78s, I found another one like that on Roost to start with. And Capitol went one better: "Vocal with piano and instrumental accompaniment"! So piano does not rank among the "instruments"? Or is it just because the piano is more to the fore in places?

And this on the 41st anniversary of his death!

You're talking about "God Didn't Like It", right? I'll have to re-read it, I guess. @MG: This is not a matter of doing a "Lost Chords" book on early r'n'r. The way I understood, it, it just is that the white part of this pre-history has been overlooked a lot more than the black part (which Is covered in Allen Lowe's book too, BTW). The "white" angle indeed loks important because rock'n'roll was mainly a phenomenon of WHITE U.S. society from c.1954 onwards. R&B acts just kept on doing what they had been doing before (Fats Domino is a clasic example of this), adapting to new trends and fads and evolving their music in the second half of the 50s too. And it is interesting to see (and merits investigation) that there WERE white artists too who had been doing things that pointed directly towards Elvis. I cannot quote names right now but listening to quite a few pre-r'n'r hillbilly bop/western swing reissues in recent months I remember several instances of liner note writers pointing this out specifically, as if still in bewilderment that such pre-Elvises actually existed. It's this kind of details that goes into providing the FULL picture.

There would be others (and others' opinions), of course, who've touched on the subject. Arnold Shaw - as mentioned by you. And then Florent Mazzoleni, Jean-Christophe Bertin - and no doubt others. But this ought to go well beyond simple opinions IMO but rather to assessing what there was and how it fit into the wider picture of the evolution. All in all I'm inclined to side with Allen Lowe, though, when it comes to assessing what or who provides new insights. (My my, if this goes on like that I'll have to grab a copy of the Birnbaum book after all just sto see what kind of clues for further exploring he actually provides after all ... ) As for ALL R&B being "but the pre-historiy of r'n'r" - well, that's oversimplifying things quite a bit and has almost become a cliché by itself by now. If you want to you can consider any black r'n'r just a continuation of R&B (in the same way you could consider soul the further continuation of R&B). But that's just part of the story. Where things get interesting is if you look at where the mutual interaction of black and white artists actually took place and what THIS yielded LONG before Elvis was around. That's some of the strings that need to be pulled together (and not just rattled off) IMHO by someone knowledgeable enough to cover the WHOLE field.

Actually - no, I think it WOULD be quite possible. I am not even sure you need to go back to extended coverage of the deeper details of minstrel music or to the prehistory of blues, for example, but if you do look closer at the "outliers" of jazz, blues, country, etc. from, say, the 20s onwards, you'd be able to see a lot of details that really point at "things to come". There are many examples of cross-pollination between the genres and of uncommonly uninhibited and unconventional artists (both black and white) who did in those early years what the more sedate "mainstream" set still found so shocking in 1954. It's a highly interesting field to explore so this is why I was asking about this book. P.S. Just as a hint at the direction research might take and referring to the quote you included in your above post, have you read "What Was The First Rock'n'Roll Record?" by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes? Written a bit tongue-in-cheek and actually mostly "food for thought" for further individual explorations starting from each recording discussed there, but one of the earliest recordings they list as candidates is in fact "Blues" feat. Illinois Jacquet from the 1944 JATP concert.

Which invariably inflated the price. Thanks for your input, both of you. I was a bit wary of whether this would add anything new but I think I'll give it a pass. The minstrel angle that seems to be dear to the author might have been interesting but maybe reading the liner booklet to this or that CD reissue from the Old Hat label will provide the key info anyway - in an in-depth way. And I do think I am rather familiar with a lot of the other angles of the pre-1954 "prehistory" of rock'n'roll anyway so won't gain many substantially new insights there. Particularly if it seems like the ONE book that pulls ALL the strings together still remains to be written. .

Now that we have settled that it's Birks and not Birk - can anybody tell me who Herk was??

Did I miss something somewhere? The track listing that I downloaded starts with the Nov. 8, 1943 session.

An interesting set. I am a big Woody Herman fan but on looking closer i am rather unsure about it. As I see it, this begins with the Deccas AFTER the end of the recording ban, and I guess I have all the Deccas from that period on other reissues. As for the "rest", I once picked up a few stray LPs of the Woody Herman in Disco Order" LP series on Ajax (@gmonahan - now THIS is where the sound can get bad! ) and am rather underwhelmed by many of the vocals that fill the gaps beyond the usual reissue fare. What I have on previous reissues from his Mars and MGM period is more spotty but still I wonder how much of the "remainders" or "new" tracks were first of all geared at those who like romantic vocals. I downloaded the track listing and will compare in due course.

Of course I did not read every feature in detail but just glossed over very many of them. But I did take note of the subjects covered (if only to check what to copy for my own reference and what to let pass ).

I wasn't a regular reader of JP either but bought an almost complete collection of JP from mid-1953 to 1986 or 87 in 2005 or so. I only kept the years up to 1966 and sold the later years (the last ones went at a fleamarket about a year ago) but before I packed away those available for sale I went through all of them and and made and kept photocopies of those features, stories and record reviews that were of lasting interest to me. As you can imagine this was an intense reading crash course and you got a pretty good impression of the mag as a whole because you did all your reading during a reatively short span of time.

I don't have my Jazz Podium mags from that period anymore but the way I remember the general line of the mag in those years it seemed to me that they were rather forward-minded and gave a lot of coverage to free and avantgarde and experimental jazz and jazz rock and whatnot ... Particularly to upcoming German or European artists of the day. That may have shifted somewhat through the years (yes I remember they did a feature story on Scott Hamilton too, FWIW) but Jazz Podium of the 70s and 80s did not strike me as a very traditionalist paper. As for the Dizzy Gillespie review, maybe they just found those attempts at modernization did not suit him, in particular.