Stompin at the Savoy

As I mentioned above, I have bought many records based upon Mark's recommendations and not been disappointed. Therefore, given his advocacy of these recordings, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and listen more attentively as they come out on streaming platforms. Jim and I have clashed on several occasions and he has some tendencies in his rhetoric which I object to but that is hardly to say that Jim is the enemy or a bad face or whatever. He gets a little carried away with his hobby-horse issues. I have also bought many records that I am happy about - based on Jim's recommendations!

The flash drive doesn't need and shouldn't be updated and therefore doesn't require any kind of defragmentation or reorganization. Flash drives, like most storage, eventually fail and need to have backups. This is an unavoidable fact of digital life. There are many options for storage backups.

If the files are ordinary audio files like mp4, flac, etc you could just copy the material elsewhere for backup. But still, it's a silly idea. I think they could have made more money with a single disk best of. And they probably will eventually get to that.

https://archive.org/search?query=chronological+fletcher+henderson

Yeah, this is what I do with Mosaics that include albums - rip the disks and separate out the albums into playlists. I usually put a number in the playlist name to identify the sequence in the box and/or the year so the lists sort chronologically.

Thank you, Mark, for this satisfying answer! In the past I have bought several records based upon your recommendations and I was not disappointed. I will have to give these Tiberi recordings a more careful listen as they come out.

Mark, I respect and admire your work and generally agree with and value your reviews. And you have an advantage over me in that you have apparently heard the entire 3 disk release and I've heard 2 samples only. Nevertheless I suspect you have fallen into the same doctrinaire attitude that Jim Sangrey holds: when I hold a strong opinion that opinion starts looking like fact. I will totally agree with you that from the samples I heard, Coltrane was playing great stuff at these live performances. But I also think that he played great stuff on many, many recordings. Are these recordings a special departure from the rest of the universe of Coltrane recordings? To me, based on the samples I have heard, not really. It seems to me that you have proposed this dichotomy: people can disagree about the sound quality of these recordings but not about the quality and significance of the music in them. In other words you strongly believe these are significant, revelatory recordings and no one should try to argue with that. Isn't this just sneaking in opinions masquerading as facts again? In fact virtually everything you have offered is opinion, not fact. You claim of the sound quality that "The Tiberi Tapes are perfectly acceptable by bootleg standards to my ears." This is an opinion. TBH this point seems not particularly valuable to me. I care about the beauty of the performance, not how it compares to the miserable sound quality on other bootlegs. Your take on how unique and revelatory the performances are sounds like the subjective enthusiasm of a fan, not facts in evidence. "The more moderately tempo version of "Giant Steps" is also revelatory in terms of the melodic lyricism of Trane's solo, not to mention McCoy's extraordinary playing at 22." Revelatory in terms of melodic lyricism? Subjective word salad that tells me you like it, not that it is a significant departure from all we've heard before. I can't quite figure out which recording you are referring to when you mention Tyner's playing at 22. Possibly you mean on the following tune? Or maybe this is a different recording than the sample? When I listen to Tyner on the samples I feel they are very tantalizing but hard to appreciate because they are so muffled and because it is hard to hear the total effect and synergy of the instruments playing together because of the muffled and distorted sound.

Love You Madly

https://archive.org/search?query=chronological artie shaw

I think Jazzbo is right that they had these legendary tapes of Coltrane which turned out to be pretty rough sound quality. So now they had a big problem - how to market something that doesn't really recommend itself except maybe to imitators, specialists, historians, dissertation researchers, Coltrane super fans, etc. The sound quality suggests they have a limited period of time to sell before word gets out this is perhaps not the revelatory Coltrane arcana people expect. I predict eventually there will be a one-disk cd of the cleanest/most interesting takes that will continue to claim a modest favor among jazz fans.

Well I guess we do have to thank Jim for injecting a little controversy into a somewhat quiet place lately... But talking about subjectivity I remember 15 or 20 years back Bob Dylan issued a Christmas album. To my mind the material (Here Comes Santy Claus, etc) was schlocky and his voice a sort of variegated croak but to my surprise a lot of people loved it. I thought to myself that his fandom is such that he could record twenty minutes of him in a bathroom defecating and people would scream it was genius... Now I am gonna get flamed.

"Listenable" is a highly subjective concept. It's like saying something is beautiful - it's an opinion, not a fact. And this is where Jim has a recurring type of issue: if he has a strong opinion it starts looking like a fact to him. It's listenable for him therefore it must be listenable for everyone, and anyone who doesn't think so is blaming the product because they are too cowardly to own up to their decision not to listen (or something like that?). Jim and I had a remarkably similar discussion a while back about a photo of the back of an album cover that he posted. I have poor vision and the text was not legible for me. OK maybe I could have figured most of it out if I spent a few days studying it but it was not practical for me to read it. I have no doubt he could read it but the resolution was such that if I blew it up enough for me to read, it got even harder to read. Eventually it occurred to him that maybe my vision really does suck and I couldn't read it and he apologized.

Part of the problem with these recordings, for me, is I am old and my hearing of some of the audio spectrum has become attenuated. My hearing is pretty good in that I can detect very faint sounds, but the attenuation of some frequencies means I have trouble understanding someone talking if there is a lot of noise in the room. I believe this is actually quite common among older folks and there is probably a scientific name for this sort of problem.

The site has settled down to this behavior: the first time I access the site during a browser session, I am Rabshakeh! If I click something or refresh, I'm Stompy again and it sticks for the remainder of the session. Hmnnn...

Are you listening to yourself? You must listen to these recordings and like it or you are a coward who defames Coltrane. Or to boil it down further: if you don't agree with me you are a so and so. Get over your dogmatic self! Probably half the people who have posted about this have listened to the available samples and decided this is interesting but not terribly enjoyable listening because the fidelity is awful. Are we all cowards? Go on with you. If you think this material is wonderful and very listenable - go ahead and listen to it! Denigrating anyone who thinks otherwise is wholly unnecessary.