Stompin at the Savoy

I like having cds. They provide a last-ditch, non-volatile backup for the music. It's great looking at a nicely produced cd or box set with a good booklet. And I have a sentimental attachment to my cds, esp some of the big box sets like Basie and Ellington. On the other hand they take up way too much space. Same with books. I have a storage unit the size of a single car garage full of the stuff. Streaming is ephemeral: you never know if it's going to be there later. Downloading gives you a permanent copy of your own which you can make backups of and even burn to cd or dvd. The only real disadvantage to downloads is the lack of liner notes, booklets etc. But you can often get photos of those on musicbrainz.org and elsewhere on the internet. Over the years I have ripped all my cds to lossless files on hard drives and photographed all the booklets. The advantage is I can pull up anything I have instantly and take my music with me on phone, ipad, walkman, etc. I can also instantly bring up all versions of a song that I own, etc. I have reluctantly switched over mainly to reading books on Kindle for PC, where I put the book up on a large monitor, bump up the font and can read without glasses. It's simply the most comfortable way for me to read and it relieves the eyestrain, headache, and discomfort of reading hard copy with 3.5x cheaters. I've never owned a Kindle device. The screen is too small for what I'm trying to do - blow it up big enough to read without glasses. Like music in digital files, this format allows for all sorts of searches not available with a paper book. There is no best way to keep music or text. It's all up to your preferences and what you feel comfortable with.

Yeah it does appear to be the Qobuz downloader app. Does not inspire confidence when the download is reported complete and then there turn out to be errors. I downloaded again and all appears well now. Their downloader also does not handle alac files properly. It downloads flac files to an 'original' directory and then somehow converts them to alac in a new directory and deletes the 'original' working directory. The resulting alac files are ok but the metadata like track numbers, album title are lost and the track numbers appear in the song titles. So I have to edit the songs individually in itunes. The flac downloads work correctly.

I downloaded the hi res version of Volume 2 from Qobuz yesterday and it appears to have mastering (or distribution?) errors not found on Spotify. For ex track 2 Diga Diga Do begins with the tune already in progress, ends, and then begins again in the middle! Similar sorts of problems in track 3 I Must Have That Man, and others. I am wondering who to contact about this. Edit: this seems to have been a Qobuz downloader error. I deleted all the files and downloaded again and the errors appear to be gone. They ought to be doing checksum type calculations and this shouldn't happen...

How is the sound on that Frog release?

The set is not expensive and I picked one up after reading Jim Duckworth's recommendation. I've been listening to it. Good stuff!

Yes, if I understand your question. The session order given in the listings is not always perfectly followed in the release but the items listed are the items in the release. They seem to have opted to keep alternates contiguous rather than follow the session order. By the way I bought the hi res version of volume 1 from Qobuz and the files were very large, about 1 GB total for the 43 files. Very enjoyable listening and sonically head and shoulders above any other versions I have.

There are some very welcome discography pages here --> http://ellingtonlive.blogspot.com/p/in-order-discography.html

I bought the hi res files for the first volume from Qobuz as a trial of this release/format. The 43 files came to about 1 GB. Large files! Listening to this with LDAP on headphones I'm pretty impressed with the sound. Very detailed. When I compare to a cheapo mp3 version I had it's quite startling how much better and more listenable this is. It is also quite a bit better than streaming from Spotify.

Those are hyperlinks to articles in wikipedia. Click them and you go to the article. In this case there are only pages for certain titles.

Yeah or Jimmy Smith's The Cat (Lalo Shifrin). What about the great TV jazz bands. Tonite show, Steve Allen had a band didn't he. etc. I don't have any recordings by those bands but some were pretty tight.

Some Shorty Rogers stuff might qualify. Also Buck Clayton Jam Sessions.

You might like the Terry Gibbs Dream Band. Not exactly swing per se (though pretty close). A predecessor of the Jones/Lewis big band. Also the Bill Holman Big Band that preceded the Dream Band.

I finally scored a copy of this recently and have been happily going through it. The sound is so much better than anything I had of this material. Disk 4 at the moment.

You can often find the original covers and liner notes on https://musicbrainz.org/search For example: https://musicbrainz.org/release/8d5bebf1-2727-461e-a5e3-3cea63d67b7e/cover-art or https://musicbrainz.org/release/16f5911c-1ff9-3cdd-8acd-d3af9ea1bc84/cover-art They seem to have most of the Sonny Clark Blue Note Albums.

I stream with Spotify and Youtube, mainly to check out things I haven't heard and am considering purchasing. I've bought a few mp3s but basically stopped after I realized you can get cd quality or higher from Qobuz, Presto, and other services as m4a, flac files etc. I buy downloads mainly when I can't find something at what seems to me to be a reasonable price. I have a ton of Mosaics and other box sets as well as another ton of individual cds. I'm still buying them at a prodigious rate. I rip them all to files as soon as I get them and photograph the booklets so truth is I don't need the hard copies and in the back of my mind is a plan to begin selling them all off to save on storage costs and simplify my life. I'm old. Haven't begun yet. It's not easy to let go of things you have a sentimental attachment to...

Agree about those Capitol Teagarden sessions. I don't have this set. Listening on youtube for now. Even when he breaks the rules, he's still following the rules!

This is one of those inexpensive euro-compilations I got the other day. The sound is acceptable, if a little brittle. The music is top notch, imo. Lot's of great players - Stan Getz, Roy Haynes, Hank Jones, Zoot Sims, Mel Lewis and more. I'm enjoying it!

I did not get an email but when I looked at the order on the Mosaic site under my account, the status showed a tracking number.

I was listening to Blue Serge a day or two ago because of the Sonny Clark connection. Great album! Almost a Blue Note prototype or paradigm or something like that...

I originally thought there were one or two albums I didn't have but turned out I had them all. Nevertheless I'm happy with the purchase. I haven't compared all the various masterings but I did compare an expensive Japanese edition of Sonny's Crib I had and I was somewhat surprised to find I liked this new mastering better. If you only have one or two albums this is definitely recommended.

In another application it shows up as 1:20:03

The group was loud. It's a fairly high-level recording. So it's not going to sound good unless you crank it up a bit. Headphones and equalizers can help. If I don't have A/C on I like to just crank it up on speakers.