Stompin at the Savoy

I loved those Hubbard CTI albums back in the early 70s. I managed to see him play at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach around 71 and he performed lots of tunes from those albums. I had a copy of Jackson's Sunflower LP too.

The youtube clips I checked out aren't quite my cup of tea but they are impressive. She knows something about music and has a fine voice! (Unlike TS). She likes jazz! She's 24 and very talented and probably will eventually come up with some music I would like to listen to.

Sonny Stitt on Verve. Wouldn't that be nice to get the Mosaic treatment? Possibly carve into two or three sets. The three lps with Mel Lewis in 1959 would make a nice Select. Dream on... I did notice that Verve has issued some of their Sonny Stitt holdings as hi res downloads. Possibly that's why no Mosaic.

They roomed together in 1958 or 59. The stint with Monk was around 61, I think. Russell wrote up the theoretical basis for some modal playing, which of course was a focus in the late 50's for Miles, Evans, Coltrane, etc. Evans had worked with Russell and I believe these people were all floating around in the same circles. Edit: oops I guess the Monk period is 57.

Bill Evans, whom Coltrane roomed with for a while. Also George Russell. Coltrane reportedly took some lessons from Ornette Coleman and sent him a check for it.

👍

Right. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole were actually excellent singers and musicians. There are contemporary examples but I have to say that contemporary culture has in some ways hit a nadir. We live in the age of short-lived viral sensations which have a lot to do with superficial style, hair-dos, glittery costumes and a cult of personality. Thus you have Justin Bieber. I suppose if I make some attempt to generalize what is happening, it would be that popular artists are nowadays often popular for non-musical reasons. I suppose there have always been novelty acts but I think Taylor Swift is a new phenomenon which grew out of Sinatra, Beatles, etc sort of superstardom. There is a bigger package here, of which the music is only a part and sometimes even a pretty small part. The artist has graduated from singer to comprehensive, multi-media show. Jimmy Buffett, the Grateful Dead, etc are a lifestyle, an industry, not a musician or musical group.

I guess your assumption is popular music = lowest common denominator crap. That hasn't always been true. Fats Waller was once a very popular artist. There are plenty of examples. Listen to the audiences at Jazz at the Philharmonic and tell me pop music is crap by definition. And why is the comparison of Buffett and Swift ludicrous? Both parlayed a minor talent and personal cult into billions.

He made pleasant enough music and some of the songs were actually pretty good. Nevertheless it kind of makes you wonder that this guy with his mostly bland, formulaic, 4 chord strummed ditties ended up with half a billion dollars while a lot of worthy players and composers don't get much appreciation or recognition. Popular tastes are strange. People go ape-shit over the Jimmy Buffetts and Taylor Swifts of this world.

I picked up a second hand copy of the Waller after reading this. Great sound on this, better than the JSP sets. I wish they would remaster the entire Waller catalog but I guess that won't happen any time soon.

Yeah I hear you. People keep recommending things and I find myself buying them. Whee! The beauty of Kindle is you can read your books on several devices, for me a PC, ipad and iphone. In a pinch when I have to wait somewhere I can pull out my iphone and continue reading from the point I left off on the PC. I have to use cheaters to read the iphone but it's something to do while you are waiting at the dentist.

I have a standard ipad I use like that.

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.