Dan Gould

Glad to hear it! And no, its not *that* lame ... I remember when I met my wife, the song that stayed in mind was a country tune by Trisha Yearwood, "Thinking About You". Now that was lame!

Mike, The one Mike LeDonne organ date I knew of before is an unlikely one: He's on Scott Hamilton's Organic Duke, a set of Ellington tunes-not what you'd expect! Also not as greasy as I'd have wanted, so I'd like to hear LeDonne in a more traditional organ context. As far as other organ dates on CDBaby, I've had my eye on Jackie Ivory. I was really surprised to see his name, as I had no idea he was still around. But he made an album for ATCO back in the 60s that I traded for-not Earth shattering, but still pretty nice. It looks like he's doing a more soul/R&B thing (and in fact the listing actually mentions the dreaded phrase "smooth jazz"!) but the clips don't sound too bad.

For what it's worth, Free For All, I was asking about composition and not necessarily performance. Believe it or not, I still haven't voted yet. Need to revisit one more time before I decide. This is one of those favorites that eventually slipped into the stacks and stayed there for too long! (Sorry, Peter!)

Nice story, Peter, I have a similar one, even from almost the same time period. I had just started getting into jazz the previous winter, and now it was spring and I was home from Graduate School. I had used the first two LPs I received (Columbia Jazz Masterpiece Sampler Volume 1 and 2) to head off into different directions-Miles and Trane, Brubeck, Basie. I went music shopping with my younger brother, who had started playing trombone in the jazz band in high school, and I saw this album. Like everyone, I liked the cover, so I showed it to my brother and he said I should get it (though he really knew nothing whatosever about it). So I get it home, put it on, am completely blown away, and I start looking at the back cover, wanting to know more about these people. The only date I could find was 1984, and I remember thinking, "that was 5 years ago-these guys must have another album out by now." I was such a newbie, I had no idea Trane had died over 20 years earlier!

Its hard for me to relate to much of Rooster's rants, for a couple of reasons. #1, the "scene" in South Florida is limited, in my experience, to several jazz preservation societies who bring in national talents, plus a small number of superb artists who make south Florida their home, ranging from Eddie Higgins to Phil Flanigin to Melton Mustafa and his very talented brother Jesse Jones, plus some older players who are quite talented but for the most part make their money teaching. They gig locally or in the case of Higgins, get called in to support the touring acts like Red Holloway and others. #2, personally, I am not at all disturbed to hear standards that were standards by 1960. Not in the slightest. If I see an unknown, for instance, there is a monthly "Riverwalk Sunfest Jazz" thing that takes place on the first Sunday of every month, I am perfectly happy to hear serviceable bebop. Similarly, when I lived in Tallahassee, there was a Farmer's Market downtown every Saturday, and there would be a two hour quartet or quintet jam session, usually by FSU or Florida A&M jazz students. They didn't rip it up, but they didn't fuck it up either. Just a nice chance to sit out in the park on a blanket and hear some young musicians. Overall, I can't relate to Rooster's rant because I have not sought out the club scene very much so I do not know enough about the playing of the youngest, unestablished jazz musicians here. But there's definitely a strong core of very talented local musicians, some extremely well known, some totally unknown, who are very good at what they do. Specifically, I can think of the different local bass and drum players who have been called on to sit in with people like Eric Alexander and Norman Simmons, or with Red Holloway and Eddie Higgins-excellent rhythm sectionmates, who maybe did not stand out greatly but nevertheless performed their role admirably.

With the RVG upcoming, time to reconsider this one. I open with the poll question, but I was wondering about something else related to this album-an enormous part of the success of the album was Coltrane's tunes, and yet, to my knowledge, I can't recall that he ever revisited these numbers ever again. Maybe its the fact that he went back with Miles and when he left for good, his head was in an increasingly different place, but I do think its unfortunate that on the live recordings that have come out from the later-Miles period, Trane is of course stuck playing what Miles' called and when he did get to play his own when he went on his own, he never came back to these classic compositions. Which brings up another question-just how was Blue Train regarded at the time? Was it immediately recognized as a special record? Was it compared favorably to the "blowing sessions" on Prestige? Or had Trane even released a Prestige date as a leader at that point?

Parenthetically, if I remember correctly from my radio days, this is called "talking up the ramp" and it is something where, if the jock can talk right up to the start of the vocal, he feels mighty proud of himself (or at least I felt mighty proud of myself). On the other hand, when I worked at a Soft Adult Contemporary station, the absolute rule was do not ever speak over the music, EVER. The owner of the station would cite this as the number one complaint of all radio listeners, and it seemed like we were the only station in the market that cared enough to not do it!

Nope, no Minidisc player.

It can definitely be time consuming, but if you can make silk from a snake's belly, its worth it! The worst I've ever spent was averaging nearly a half hour per track (fortunately side 2 was much much better) and that is the time when you seriously start rethinking whether or not its worth it. On the other hand, having a decent copy that just has maybe ten or 15 clicks per side-you can clean that up in no time at all and really enjoy the result, so I generally spend the time cleaning up every album that I burn to CD. The vast majority are take maybe 30 minutes per side to do, and that includes the 17 or 20 minutes of listening in order to find the pops.

I would add to John's comments that when you truly isolate the pop, you lose nothing from the music and gain a great deal of enjoyment.

In the program I use, goldwave, listen to the recording and hit "pause" when you hear a click (or simply look at the wav form, its generally easy to spot a click, at least when its in a quieter passage). Telescope down into the hundreths of a second. Isolate the pop-generally it will be about 1/100th to 5/100ths of a second long. Choose "silence". Listen to the clip again to make sure you didn't take anything other than the pop away. Lather, rinse, repeat. As I said, it can take some time, but its like ending up with an almost perfect album (sometimes it gets extremely difficult to isolate a pop so sometimes I leave a small handful intact-that's why its important to listen a second time to make sure you got what you wanted to get!)

Dmitry, I'm not talking about a digital laundry. I'm talking about recording the vinyl sides as a wav file and manually removing the pops. There's no digital hocus pocus or filters or processors to distort, just the manual removal of extraneous noise, and only extraneous noise. Now, if its the vinyl sound qualities you want, then you are losing that because the end result is a burned CD. But I am not a snob who's got to hear vinyl, I want to hear music. The answer to your question is, because the vinyl has never been issued on CD or is unlikely to ever be issued. If I have a choice of a well-used original vinyl or a professionally remastered CD reissue, I'm going with the CD, always. But when it comes to rare vinyl, this "digital gadgetry" (which is not a fair description because again, I am talking about manual selection and deletion of individual pops) can make a world of difference. Just ask Lon, who I cleaned up two of his Argo Ahmad Jamal LPs, leaving no alteration in sound except for the removal of 90% of the pops/clicks. Of course, it all depends on your willingness to invest the time, and sometimes all the time in the world won't make a bit of a difference, if the background noise is really bad anyway.

TL, I am not sure if you'll get a response too quick from DrJ-Tony just made a birth announcement and really hasn't been seen around these parts since!

Did that store have any sense of how to price things? Mint, deep groove, $5? Great album, by the way, it ought to be a Conn. or RVG or Reece should get a Mosaic Select someday.

In fact, even on albums with skips, you can minimize the jarring-ness of the skip by normalizing downward the sound of the needle skipping forward. It doesn't save the missing music but it does make for a less disturbing listen. So all of this is to say that one can lower the acceptable condition standards and still get nice sounding results.

You know, so long as there are no actual skips or scratches that don't play through, most of these VG or VG+ albums can make for *awesome* listening experiences if you have the patience and set-up to throw it into your PC and manually remove the pops and clicks.

Not to hijack the thread in another direction, but what did she think about your jazz interests? Does she have some familiarity with the music? Is she open to it? Does she think Kenny G. when she hears "jazz"? Will she make you go Or will she make you go ?

I'm curious about the Maria Muldaur. She's on the Uptown Christmas comp. and sounds pretty at ease with the jazzbos, didn't know she did an album on the label.

Hey Mike, was that Griffin Argo one of the 70s pressings (in black and white) or one of the way cool originals, with the cover split down the middle? Speaking of '70s Argo pressings, I picked up a sealed copy of Benny Golson's Take a Number From One to Ten so now I can finally hear the three tracks that got dropped from the Universal reissue of "Free". Take that, Keepnews!

I have his "Big Nick" album on India Navigation. But I don't think it solves any mysteries.

Or laying off the drugs?

I was browsing through the CDBaby website and sampled two CDs by Ron Kearns, who appears to be headquartered in the DC area (one of the discs is a live recording at Blues Alley). Anywhoo, I was wondering if any of the DC Brigade was familiar with this guy. The samples sounded solid if not exactly groundbreaking.

My wife (who loves horror/zombie films) and I went to see this last week and we both enjoyed it. Interestingly, today's New York Times reports that a new version will be playing in theaters shortly with an alternate ending, more downbeat than the original film. A reflection of the importance of DVDs, I guess (the DVD is already out in Britain and it has more than this alternate ending).

I have a feeling these might linger on the shelves a wee bit longer ...

I'm gonna bring this up again as a reminder that this starts in a couple of days, and also because I don't think Brad has made his declaration of the July 27 nominee. (?)