Dan Gould

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. (?)

I thought it was pretty clear that when Shrugs wrote this: I Remember Clifford for the most part but I really love Whisper Not a la Keith Jarrett and co. Have any other piano trios recorded it? "it" refers to Whisper Not, not Clifford.

AMG reveals a lengthy list of trio as well as duo or solo recordings of "Whisper Not", including Ray Bryant, George Cables, Kenny Drew, Tommy Flanagin, Harold Mabern, Ahmad Jamal and Hank Jones (on a CD I have that is quite nice, Essence with Billy Higgins and Ray Drummond) and Horace Tapscott.

Taking a short look through, I'd say there's a lot of nice one-stop shopping to be had, some of which is very tough to find these days (I'm thinking especially of the Evening Star recordings or the Blacknote recording. Anyone looking for the Another Time, Another Place two disc set featuring Benny Carter and Phil Woods, they've got it in stock. They also have the new Charles Davis/Cedar Walton disc that got a nice write up in the Times, and I also noticed that the Greg Skaff disc has Mike LeDonne on organ and Joe Farnsworth on drums. Definitely a site I need to check out carefully, anyone who gets ringers like LeDonne or Sebastian Whitiker to play on their date, there're pretty good chances I'll dig it.

Sorry if I skipped your favorite, but I think I came up with a pretty good list. Mine is definitely "Whisper Not".

Congrats, Tony, Mom and child!