Stompin at the Savoy

Arg! Grum.

I received the set today but haven't had time to read book or listen. Will report back later.

Droste effect.

If you rip all your albums to a hard drive (and have a fairly extensive collection) it's a snap to do this with any reasonably good music player application, such as itunes. I often check out all the versions I have of a song. Not all album metadata contains all the participants but it often does, so I can often search and find sideman appearances too. The difficulty for most with a large collection is if you haven't been ripping everything to hard drive all along, it could take a long time and a lot of labor to rip them all now! Many years back I wrote to allmusic asking them to expose an interface which would allow you create queries connected by 'and' and 'or' to allow search for two musicians on the same album, etc. They never replied and the site has gone downhill so badly I no longer use it.

Presto has this as a download (44.1 kHz, 16 bit, FLAC/ALAC/WAV - cd quality), for a few weeks the price will be $14.25. Thinking of picking it up.

I haven't really used AI besides Google search ai summaries, ai summaries of comments on articles in newspapers etc. Those are often useful if not exactly brilliant. As a whole I find AI to be in its infancy and interesting if not quite ready for prime time. Unfortunately the way AI is being developed now it is a huge electricity hog which has already made electric power more expensive and promises to continue to do so. There are a lot of ecological and safety problems around this technology which are not being addressed.

https://www.prestomusic.com/jazz/promotions/blue-note-downloads/browse I took advantage of it to get Duke Pearson - The Right Touch. Some of the Capitol Vault Series (mosaic and mosaic select as downloads) are also included in the price drop. Might pick up a few selects I don't have. Some of these are a pretty good deal, for example if you don't have the Elvin Jones Mosaic (which is dynamite) you can get a legit copy for $25. Here are the Capitol Vault series: https://www.prestomusic.com/jazz/search?search_query=capitol vaults

Freddie Green very up front and audible on this album. This is becoming a fave. It's like the archetypal small group swing date.

Your attitude has hardened. You view the errors as signs of irremediable character traits in the producer and have written him off. I agree with you that there have been some significant issues. Zev is not a good writer and has, in my view, kind of bad taste. He is attracted to glitzy, glossy sort of stuff. All that means is he should delegate and let others design the covers, booklets and advertising and write the copy while he handles the bigger picture with more care. Those are my constructive suggestions but the truth is I don't care much about Zev - I care about the music and focus on the product coming out of my speakers: is there benefit to music lovers such as myself in these releases?

"All the bullshit" I assume means self promotion. He's in a business where promotion is part of the game. His advertising doesn't really harm the product and basically I don't care about it. Presumably by "blatant, oblivious fuckups" you are referring to the fact that he didn't notice the presence of a player on one disk and he endangered another release by shooting his mouth off. These are sins I find forgivable and I am willing to give Zev the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because I have made mistakes of a similar sort in other circs. I have some releases he produced that were good quality and reasonable price. All My Yesterdays by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis comes to mind. Excellent release, IMO. He could use some constructive criticism on the overdone packaging and liner notes which are long but don't really illuminate...

Well, he produces reissues and recent 'discoveries' so I am willing to cut him quite a bit of slack. Yes he does toot his own horn too much and yes I hate the idea of expensive, luxury vinyl in limited editions that I will never buy. That said I assume he is doing this as a career, has to make money at it somehow, and pricey vinyl is a thing right now, incomprehensible as it may seem to me...

I have some of the Muse albums on previously issued cds and would be interested in purchasing several more but not on pricey, deluxe lp editions. Good quality downloads (cd or better) would work fine for me too.

I received a tracking number! It often takes several days to my little corner of Oregon. On top of that today I received a very nice copy of the Buddy De Franco/Sonny Clark quartet and quintet set, for which I have searched many's the long year, and the price was shockingly low - counting for 30 years of inflation, probably less than the original price. I tried for a while to get all the original albums but some were pretty difficult to find on cd.

I had to think about this one for a while too but I finally pre-ordered it. Wasn't sure if I would want to listen to it. The curious thing is that I was actually a big Pharoah Sanders fan in the early seventies. My interests lately have been delving back into swing, big band and older stuff.

Rhoads is more like the electric guitar virtuosity I used to admire listening to the radio in the 80's. Yes it's licks and tricks but it's damn fooking impressive nonetheless.

So, are you impressed by this? He says it's a "jazzy solo" but it's a memorized passage and you can go to a guitar store and hear people playing as well or better every day. Okay this is probably not leading to edification so I will shut up.

I've been playing guitar since around 1968 and I'm pretty familiar with guitar blues licks and all that. Not that I am any great shakes after all these years. I think what is really going on here is Iommi has a sound, that metal electric guitar sound, and was a pioneer with this sound. I will certainly go that far - he is good at that sound and a certain rough-hewn attitude in his playing. But that sound is mostly settings on the guitar, amp, and perhaps some signal processing devices in the chain. If you took off all the amplification and distortion and whatnot and he just played the same thing on an acoustic guitar, there would be very little to it. I can in most cases easily play the pentatonic riffs he is playing - it's not hard stuff. Doubtless I cannot play those same notes on an electric and get his sound but then again I don't want to. These guys are not famous for beautiful melodies, musicality, or memorable lyrics; they are famous for a kind of melodic and rhythmic minimalism coupled with a loud, vaguely menacing, sound, along with campy showmanship and costumes... IMO. Johnny Winter, btw, is a whole different thing and really has guitar chops.

I suppose whatever music people were dancing to in high school burns a particularly deep impression in one's mind. But it is possible to overcome this sort of bias. In my case the music that came out in high school was the Beatles, Stones, etc. And I really liked all that very uncritically at the time but later on it occurred to me that quite a bit of what the Beatles put out, for example, was dreck.

Well, I listened to the first and second tunes on there. There was a little break in between with some acoustic guitar which sounded like a nylon string guitar or three. Call me unimpressed! If you think that is very good guitar playing I envy you because there is so much good guitar playing out there which you can look forward to hearing. The electric guitar sounds nice - authentically metal - but in my view is nothing much musically - simplistic pentatonic riffs and power chords. If this is the best you can come up with for Iommi's playing then I guess I need listen no further. The melody and singing on the first number are absolutely what I was talking about: throwaway repetitive melody and lyrics. To each his own and if this does something for you, great! Does very little for me.

OK but when I listen to Black Sabbath I find nothing like Joe Pass or Jim Hall. Iommi may claim them as influences but where's the influence? Do you hear it? Or failing that, name a cut where Iommi plays well, whatever style... I'm willing to be convinced.

Back in the 80's I used to occasionally listen to a Tommy Vance program on the BBC. I forget what it was called but it was music "on the heavy side" as he would say. In my view it was kind of lightweight musically but these bands often put on an impressive display of electric guitar virtuosity which could be enjoyable in and of itself, the tunes and lyrics largely simplistic and barely audible. OK a lot of it was repetitive tricks and pentatonic cliches but it had a certain cocky majesty in its braggadoccio. I don't know if my tastes have changed over the last 40 years. I still find the occasional shredder exciting but when I went through several notable Black Sabbath tunes mentioned in the newspaper, and when I listened to the excerpts that Rick Beato played in the clip linked above, I was struck by how rudimentary, obvious, and unswinging it all is. The combination of third-hand blues mixed with English music hall and camp satanism, hyper-masculinity blended vaguely with an ethos hinting at drag-queens - not that there is anything wrong with that - does little for me.

Ozzy Osbourne did not become popular until my college years and that was the period I got into jazz, so I never really listened to him. I did not own a tv in the 70's or 80's so I never watched the show. I was reading one of the obits in one of the papers and it mentioned several of his supposedly seminal hits so I listened out of curiosity. I admit that a lot of stuff I liked as a kid in the 60's and 70's no longer appeals to me but gee whiz this is trashy stuff and not in a good way. I know Ozzie did not play guitar and I am not the greatest player but the playing on that stuff makes me look like a wildly imaginative and hip guitarist. Truly awful.

This is what they are saying on the site: So I guess end of July.