Stompin at the Savoy

Farewell, Brownie. Enjoyed your posts.

I also get listening ideas from organissimo threads. Sometimes somebody mentions a Mosaic set and I look at it and think hey that looks interesting let me check it out - and discover that I own it! Oops. I love having all this music.

My set arrived yesterday and I listened to several tracks. Interesting and good and the sound was pretty good too. I keep getting distracted by the Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly Veejay set which arrived the other day but will get back to this soon.

Church, ballpark, skating rink, etc are all large venues. Organs and organ playing in those days were designed to reach a large audience with one loud instrument. They were loaded up with overtones and throbbing vibrato to create an all-encompassing sound in places where the acoustics might not be that good and audibility trumped subtlety. I remember in skating rinks it was like a wall of continuous sound. Very little space. You could barely make out the tune (and then it would turn out to be the Hokey Pokey) but there was a beat of sorts. That style does not work all that well in a jazz setting. It has to be toned down a bit or it overwhelms everybody else playing. All those overtones are muddy! For me the organ didn't really come into its own in jazz until Jimmy Smith.

I hesitated over this set for a long time because I had a lot of it on individual releases and the set ran a bit expensive used. Recently I came across a copy for quite a reasonable price and it arrived yesterday. I did not realize that this set had so much more material than some of the original releases! Very nice sound on the Malcolm Addey mastering, too.

I like that Berliner Jazztage record too and often play it. Hello to the Wind!

There is a relationship between heart rate and blood pressure. When cannabis lowers blood pressure - which it does - the heart speeds up. If you use it a lot the effect - lower pressure and faster pulse - diminishes.

The problem is organs are capable of putting out a lot of harmonic overtone series. So it can sound busy in the way a 12 string sounds busier than a 6 string guitar - twice as many notes. Depending on the organ settings one key depressed can cause several notes to come out. For some this doesn't matter but for me it sounds terrible. Overkill, confused and busy. And of course if you ever spent any time at a roller skating rink, and I did, the associations make this sort of organ setting sound really tacky. The organ on the 45 sessions is not as bad as some from the period, IMO.

I have absolutely no quarrel with that. Weed is not for everybody. On the other hand I have an 85 year old friend who has truly terrible arthritis. All over the place. Scary looking. Doctors asked him how he manages with this and he used to tell them he smokes weed every day. Keep doing it, they told him. Recently he had shingles and gout. The poor fellow is a mess and can't use cannabis as much but he told me how much he liked some blue dream I gave him.

I got a tracking number today!

The problem with that study is it did not separate out the risk of tobacco (and other drugs) and cannabis. So they combined all the data and found greater risks but it's unclear whether those risks are associated with cannabis or with tobacco or other drugs. In other words this study is deeply flawed. We know from other studies that tobacco is strongly correlated with heart attack risk.

When I started college in 1970 there was a sign in my dormitory which explained that marijuana had now become much more powerful than before and warning that the new super weed was causing 'bad trips'. 55 years and the supposed authorities are still trotting out the same canards and tropes! For some people, using cannabis is a problem and they get into all the same gyrations as people stuck in food addictions, etc. For most it's not that big a deal. My advice: stay away from those vape cartridges. You have no way of knowing what's in there and people adulterate them with things like vitamin E which is toxic to inhale like that. Dry herb vaporizers are good.

I love this and the Mosaic. Too many candidates.

It's a Blue Note album of his?

John, I like what you are saying and I just wish that were a true summation of what just happened. It is true except for one participant. Thinking of an old friend who is not in fact a 'bullshit person', just ignorant about jazz.