hopkins

Attended the conference this afternoon, which finished with a an exciting performance by Leila Olivesi's band. Looking forward to tomorrow night's concert, which will be held in a nicer venue ! https://www.balblomet.fr/

I found one on Discogs, for 35€ (so a little expensive) available locally (France).

If you listen to the 30sec samples on the Internet Archive you will probably come to the conclusion that it is not a 1940s recording... Two of the samples have violin, and one has vocals. I purchased the CD...

Has anyone heard these Earl Hines / Ray Nance duets issued on this CD (tracks 7-12) ? https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/14394475-Earl-Hines-Ray-Nance-Mostly-Fats-Unissued-Sessions Liner notes state that these recording were made "somewhere in the United States probably in the early 1970s." https://archive.org/details/cd_mostly-fats_earl-hines-ray-nance

Pre-ordered as well, thanks for the links!

Here is a very nice picture of a young Ahmad Jamal (taken in the early fifties?), included in the Jazz Piano Moods Mosaic booklet: RIP.

Among his later sessions, I enjoy "Blue Delight": https://archive.org/details/cd_blue-delight_sun-ra Another, from 1982, is Ceslestial Love: https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/celestial-love Edit: Blue Delight was already mentioned, had missed that.

This is what Jan Evensmo has to say about that one: "These trio performances may be considered the zenith of Lucky Thompson’s recorded performances!!! Strong words considering the numerous magnificent contributions made through the preceding 12 years, and of course it is a matter of taste; these chamber music items represent someting new for LT, for jazz, for us. With only guitar and bass swinging merrily behind, Lucky Thompson creates the most wonderful music. His sound was always unique, now it has a glow making it the most beautiful tenorsax sound in jazz history (together with that of Zoot Sims in slow tempo decades later). His version of a slightly camouflaged ”Body And Soul” is just perfect and incredibly beautiful! There are a lot of tricky compositions here, even the blues on ”… My Boy”, ”… Simple Truth” and particularly ”Mister …” are something different. This session is your tenorsax must!!!!"

In "Superstride" Derek Coller explains that Guarnieri had also developed a stretching exercises for his left hand, putting his thumb and pinkie on the side of a table and pushing his palm toward the table until "he developed a perfectly straight line running down his thumb from the right, lining up with his outstretched pinkie on the left. This enabled him to reach most wide intervals, despite his small hands."

Rosemary Clooney.

Hipsters beware, the next big thing is the wax cylinder: https://londonjazzcollector.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/ultimate-audio-revolution/ (Happy April fool's day!)

I have always wondered how Tom Lord build his discography, and who contributes nowadays (additions, corrections...).

An interesting bit of trivia, about that Guarnieri session (quoted from Tom Lord): "The performances on this album were captured on a Stahnke Reproducing Piano, a normal piano fitted with a computerized recording/playback system. When a pianist plays on this piano, the movements of all the parts of the piano action -- keys, hammers, pedals, etc.-- are measured and stored digitally on tape. When this tape is played back, the piano itself plays a performance identical to the original. Johnny Guarnieri was not present when the performances were recorded onto the audio tapes which were used for the mastering of both LP and CD. This technology was used here for the first time under the supervision of its inventor, Wayne Stahnke." More information in this NYT article: Technology; Ivories That Tickle Themselves https://nyti.ms/29jiabo Pretty cool...

https://archive.org/details/cd_wardell-gray_wardell-gray 9 minute Blue Lou on repeat last night!

Back to Guarnieri! Here is a very nice track from the "Echoes of Ellington" album: https://storage.googleapis.com/cloudplayer/samples/Johnny Guarnieri - Mississippi Moan.wav And the original, recorded in 1929: https://storage.googleapis.com/cloudplayer/samples/Ellington - Mississippi Moan.wav

I regurlarly play random track from this Ellington box set https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/7759958-Duke-Ellington-Anniversary-13-Volumes-Box-Set The box set contains 13 CDs. It was compiled by Claude Carriere. Covers the 1920s-1940s While I have all the material on other compilations (Mosaic etc), I like to listen to this set as it avoids the lesser interesting tracks or alternates included in most other collections (i would not do without them but those tracks don’t require repeated listening ).

Kudos for such a professional attitude. Nowadays, with streaming, these types of problems are amplified. I read that it is estimated around 25 % of royalty payments are misdirected due to missing or erroneous data!

I actually have the Delmark version, but I put the link to the only version I found on the Internet Archive, for the liner notes. I should have mentioned the Delmark version.

I regularly listen to "I Remember Bessie". Wonderful late Hodes https://archive.org/details/lp_i-remember-bessie_art-hodes

Yes, I listened to some of that album as well but prefer the solo album I mentioned.

I have been listening to Guarnieri's Echoes of Ellington album this week: https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/8976873-Johnny-Guarnieri-Echoes-Of-Ellington His playing is exciting, and I find it really interesting how he is able to recreate the "mood" of Ellington’s composition.

The discogs database is publicly available but it is HUGE, difficult to use, and as we both pointed out, of low quality for jazz discography. The system you describe is close to what I had in mind. I have given a lot of thought to all this for quite some time (years), and investigated a lot of different solutions out there (discogs being one, but also musicbrainz, and others mentioned above). There are many challenges to all this, but breaking down a complex problem into distinct smaller "components" we can make things more maneagble. I will take some time tonight to elaborate on all this and explain what I have in mind. Here you go: https://discogs-data-dumps.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index.html I'll answer some of this in detail as well.

https://jazzdiscography.com/brian-discography-software/

Discogs has a vast number of releases (albums), but the quality of the data (dates, credits) is poor. It is a platform designed for selling/buying albums, not really for collectors and even less so for discographers.

The effort involved in managing a database with detailed credits by session is very high. I do not regret having spend time building this detailed data for my own albums, but it would have been so much simpler to do if there were a single repository for session information available. The technology to implement this at very little cost is available, but I guess the incentive for discographers to "unite" and work together is not...