Stompin at the Savoy

The site itself, the software, has gone downhill a lot over the years. It's buggy now and the popups and popup videos are really excessive. If you try to block their popups with popup blockers and script blockers they get all huffy and send you to a dead end. I still view it with Firefox but often where I would have gone to allmusic I now go to Discogs and Musicbrainz... As far as the content, yep it's also going downhill. They don't seem to maintain anything and nothing is ever corrected.

The wax does not dissolve; it softens and is driven out by the stream of water. Many years back a doctor removed ear wax for me by reaching in and pulling it out with specialized hand-held metal instruments. Nowadays doctors here generally use the squeegee bottle method with water and a small amount of hydrogen peroxide. This is what I had done to me at a hospital - exact same equipment. In the hospital they had a chair set up with a basin next to you, etc. At home I just do it in the shower. You squeeze the handle and a stream of water goes into your ear and comes out again. If you let it build up for many years it can take a number of sessions to get it all out. My advice is to get this done by medical professionals and only afterward, once you understand the procedure, try at home if you want. By the way, the consistency of ear wax is genetically determined and there are two main types. Treatment of the two types is somewhat different.

Um, yeah, I know. I was a professional programmer for many years. I only use chrome occasionally for comparison, hence I don't have it set up.

Chrome worked for me on Win 10 but not very well. Need to set up something to stop the innumerable popups,,,

Works for me. Try using a different browser to determine if the problem is in your browser environment.

I had wax removal done at a doctors office (by nurses) once but they did not get it all out. I ended up buying one of those squeegee-like bottles - same equipment they used - and used it several times on myself in the shower. If you do this make sure to get the water/peroxide mixture to body temperature. You feel pretty sick if you don't.

I will probably get some at some point. I really wonder, though, if the fidelity of those tiny, tiny transducers that most of them have is as good as a good pair of speakers or cans.

I think the dementia risk kicks in when the person really can't hear much at all and becomes isolated. Probably most of us are not there yet. In my case I still have fairly sensitive hearing and can hear quite low level sounds. But the loss of sensitivity to some frequencies is noticeable to me. When I play acoustic guitar I don't feel like I am hearing the richness and fullness I used to hear. If I set up some mics and monitor the guitar on headphones it's almost like before. Same with recorded music. I compensate.

Thanks for the tip. Excellent!

This is how I listen to music. I can't hear mids and trebles as well as I once could so I boost them with an equalizer. And play with the volume. Purists might sneer but it's nice to hear cymbals, rhythm guitar, etc

I am shocked that I find myself agreeing with McWhorter, who often comes up with rather right-leaning um, stuff. Iverson's reply was ill-advised, IMO.

There's good stuff on there, actually quite a bit better than I expected.

Some info here: https://musicbrainz.org/release/e7dc7e05-e4a0-4c51-a4c0-49356351abf1 https://musicbrainz.org/release/0f0affd0-c188-4ab2-bd65-6faedd76ff8d https://musicbrainz.org/release/82691ba5-937b-4ccd-ac1a-4f6db6ed6bd1 https://musicbrainz.org/release/fc5cf04e-820c-408a-a60c-f61b44502dbc (note: in the above entries from Chronological Classics and the JSP release, check the cover art, which often has very detailed discography) Al Morgan plays bass on probably all of it. Another player named Jimmy Smith may be on a few tracks.

Presto mentions these musicians for vol 1: Cab Calloway & His Orchestra, Charles L. Granata (director), Howard Fritzson (director), Cab Calloway & his Orchestra featuring Roy Smeck & Chuck Bullock, Roy Smeck, Chick Bullock, Arville Harris (alto saxophone, clarinet), Doc Cheatham (trumpet), Lammar Wright (trumpet), Edwin Swayzee (trumpet), Walter "Foots" Thomas (tenor saxophone, clarinet), Andrew Brown (bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, alto saxophone), Eddie Barefield (clarinet, baritone saxophone, alto saxophone), Cab Calloway (vocal, bandleader & vocals), Bennie Payne (piano), LeRoy Maxey (drums), Harry White (trombone), Morris White (banjo), De Priest Wheeler (trombone), The Mills Brothers & Cab Calloway with Don Redman & His Orchestra, The Mills Brothers, Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/mastertalent/detail/103488/Calloway_Cab Somebody will probably produce some notes for this pretty soon.

I like Benny Carter. Seems like his currently available discography is sort of falling into disrepair. He had his own orchestra at times. There are a few euro-compilations of his stuff, some individual albums, the Chronological Classics... I wonder if there isn't a Mosaic set or two worth doing in there?

Whoa, sounds awful! 😲 Glad you got out.

Scott Joplin wrote at least one opera, Treemonisha, and I seem to remember Eubie Blake had some big project too. The curious thing is ragtime, blues and jazz players often seemed to want the validation from the musical powers-that-were that they thought writing in longer European musical forms would garner. This was not their everyday music or their forte, really, but apparently they craved respect and recognition and this is one path they saw to those. For the most part it never seemed to work. Didn't James P. Johnson subtitle his big project "A Negro Rhapsody" or something like that? After Gershwin, I suppose. Somebody very kindly posted a clip with Gershwin playing his original arrangement on piano roll and I listened to that as well as a few other renderings, since this discussion came up. I haven't listened to RiB in years and now I remember why I liked it so much originally. He takes a very few melodic themes and then sort of runs the changes on them - as you might expect in classical music - but he keeps playing the same or slightly altered strings of the same notes while the chord, and thus the mood and emotion, keeps changing underneath. So there is this interesting sense of repetition of the same line on top of changes. As though he is showing you: look how different these same notes can seem with a different background.

When you get a chance, make a windows repair disk. (I think 7 may also allow a thumb drive repair disk). With a repair disk you can keep an aging hard drive limping along for quite a while. Keep in mind that all mechanical hard drives will fail completely sooner or later. How long depends on how much use. If you use it a lot, maybe 5 to 8 years. Assume it will fail and keep backups.

You never made a rescue disk for the win 7 machine? (In future, always make a rescue disk!) You can probably boot from any rescue disk or bootable disk you have around (not necessarily a win 7 disk) and at least get a look at your hard drive and see if you can get the files off. You can also try some generic emergency repair disks like this Think about getting a portable external USB hard drive, such as a 4TB drive. When you get your files back, back them up to the drive so you are not dependent on one drive.

Good program!

That's your assessment and that is fine by me. Nevertheless I find Rhapsody memorable and there are a few passages from it that I occasionally recall.

Hmnnn. Well I don't agree with you. And I reject the tune, which you seem to be moving towards, that Gershwin is somehow bad or undeserving (sung over rhythm changes).

Come on Jim, now you are not doing your homework or something. The piece was discussed to death at the time. Gershwin was the toast of Europe. At the time most black music was considered beneath consideration. A serious composer took black music seriously in a European musical context.