Stompin at the Savoy

I have all my cds ripped (and backed up) and have photos of all the booklets so I never have problems finding and listening to something. About 20 years ago (when I spent a couple weeks ripping every cd I had) I alphabetized my single cd collection and put it into two or three plastic boxes per letter of the alphabet and kept it all in storage. I then let things go for decades and just accumulated cds in random order in boxes which I would throw into storage. I'm in my mid seventies and signs of aging and mortality keep turning up so I've begun to think about disposing of all the hard copies by giving some away and selling some. But in order to do that I needed to get them back into good order so I can find things. A landlord decided to take back the place I was living in a few months back (harrumph!) so part of my prep for moving included getting all my single cds back into alphabetical order by artist and mosaic sets by set number, which turned out to be a pretty big job. Once I got everything together I took photographs of each plastic box of single cd's (spines facing up) and each cardboard box of box sets - I highly recommend doing that, even pics of your shelves. You can do some types of search right from your desktop and in many cases the serial numbers are visible on the spine so you can confirm which edition you have.

I don't really see that much difference in quality between the small group and big band v-disc sets. I remember noticing there was at least one session that was actually split between the two sets. And there are a few vocals on the big band set that are pretty dated, too. This material has been available and much or most of it could be found on the internet prior to the Mosaics but I do think the sound quality on these two sets is great and sets a standard for any future release of V-discs. Very worthy sets!

Rex Stout works a bit like P. G. Wodehouse: very useful to have around to self-prescribe as a palliative for the blues. A roommate of a girlfriend I had in grad school recommended Rex Stout and I immediately picked up a used copy of Some Buried Caesar at a used book shop. Over the years I acquired many more volumes and read some from the library. Decades ago I came across an ebay listing for all of the Nero Wolfe series in various paperbacks at a surprisingly low price and bought it. Since then I have re-read the series (plus his other series and one offs) in sequence a few times. As my vision deteriorated I acquired the Wolfe series again on kindle. I recommend Rex Stout! There was quite a good video dramatization with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin but nothing beats the books.

Also interesting to find Dizzy Gillespie arranging Claire's performance of Who Started Love. This Boyd Raeburn group is good stuff!

Rogue Male (1939) by Geoffrey Household. Len Deighton and Eric Ambler if you haven't read them. If you like the occasional mystery with classy, brassy, humorous protagonist try Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert (1950). You might also enjoy John D. MacDonald. He has the Travis McGee series and a lot of good non-series stuff.

Resonance's facebook page has this: So at least there will be a cd version which presumably won't break the bank.

When this thread came up I checked the four volumes and the subsequent volume of essays on Amazon. I read the sample material of the new essay volume and picked up the Kindle edition of Vol 1 of the session volumes. I must say that though Listening to Prestige is a dandy title, he probably should have called the book of more general essays by a different name. Anyway I have picked at that first session volume a bit, by no means as extensively as Steve. Notwithstanding the defects pointed out by Steve, which I suppose stem from compiling a blog, which are by nature a sloppier and less rigorous enterprise than a book, I found the 1st volume interesting and worth the five bucks or so it cost on Kindle. I'm not sure about investing $60 on the four paperbacks. I'm going to keep referring to vol 1 as I listen to Prestige recordings it covers and possibly pick up other volumes later. As regards the latest book of essays - Chronicles - I read the introduction and first chapter in the sample provided on Amazon. Those were pretty worthwhile and I'll probably get the book.

I had the same thought when I listened to disk 1.

That first disk of Woody Herman is dynamite stuff, isn't it?

Thanks for the review. I'm impressed with your command of Prestige details!

Oh dear, does this mean the Tiberi material will all be pricey, limited edition vinyl?

Disk 5 track 22 is Call me Darling with Thelma C. I think Fred has it right. Keep in mind that what you see on the player probably reflects the entry in Gracenote database which it picked up when you inserted the disk. I noted that there are multiple gracenote entries for some of the disks. I ended up changing the metadata for some disks because what came up had an 'album artist' of V-disk All Stars but other disks did not (I ended up deleting all those album artist entries in the song info). With collections that have multiple artists I always set it up to display the box with one head entry and then disk numbers show up in the track listing. Like this:

Here is the quote in question. I think it is likely Janak meant the 15 records or 30 sides all together had 40-60 tunes.

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I came across this album. It's Andy Kirk with a bunch of musicians playing Kirk's old 1930s Clouds of Joy hits in 1957. This is interesting because I've been getting into Kirk, Mary Lou Williams and Clouds of Joy but particularly because of the musicians on it. It's a lot of the same players as MS-027 Mosaic Select: Al Cohn, Joe Newman & Freddie Green, including Frank Rehak. I love that Select so when I saw this I really wanted to hear it. It does not seem to be available to stream anywhere so I ended up ordering a used copy which will arrive in a few days.