GA Russell

Thanks, Mike! I wonder why CDs taken from CDs don't sound exactly like the originals. Isn't that what the industry was afraid of? Thanks, jc!

Waffle House is getting its own beer, and it's "bacon-infused." https://www.southernliving.com/syndication/waffle-house-beer-collaboration

Of course. As I say, the landlord refuses to help. Since stealing mail is a federal crime, maybe I should file a lawsuit. I've also thought about trying to get my congressman involved.

We have a security guard at the door who demands ID.

Ken, I was thinking along those lines. The UPS Store will collect your mail/packages, and email you if you have any waiting for you. It costs $15 to start plus $66 every three months. I think that's what I will do. Thus far, I have received replacements for everything that has been taken. I think I am more bothered by the disrespect of it all. I have been told that the packages most often stolen are those which look like there is medicine inside. Dmitry, we don't even have CCTV in the mailroom! But you cannot enter the building unless you are a resident or a guest like a relative. That's why I think it's an inside job.

Guy, all I know about her is from the previous press releases I have posted. Is there something you want me to ask my contact?

I get emails from oldies.com about those 10-CD sets weekly. How is the sound? Are we talking cheap junk here?

Jim, this is the mailroom of an apartment building. I think the packages are taken by one or more of the residents. The landlord refuses to help. Many of us have been victimized.

It happened again today. I was informed less than 45 minutes after the mailman left it in the mailroom. I'm spitting mad.

RIP Richie Allen! I saw him play for the White Sox in '72. By that time, he had changed his name to Dick.

Yelena Eckemoff Intensifies Her Conceptual Approach to Music With "Adventures of the Wildflower," Scheduled for March 19 Release By L&H Production Pianist-Composer Traces the Life Journey of a Flower On a Double Album Recorded with a Unique Finnish Sextet December 7, 2020 Pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff unfurls her most elaborate and ambitious musical work yet with Adventures of the Wildflower, which her own L&H Production label will release on March 19, 2021. As its title suggests, the double album is the story of a life, from birth to death (and rebirth), of an anthropomorphic columbine flower. Its story is told through the inspired work of Eckemoff and a Finnish ensemble that includes saxophonist Jukka Perko, multi-instrumentalist Jarmo Saari, vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, bassist Antti Lötjönen, and drummer-percussionist Olavi Louhivuori. Long a conceptualist, Eckemoff has previously tended to craft albums of thematically linked but discrete pieces. Adventures of the Wildflower, however, functions as a single narrative. The flower—aptly named Columbine—undertakes a vivid journey, growing from baby to mature plant as she observes from her garden spot the whirl of nature and of life, plant and animal, around her. She even learns to communicate with her garden mates, a real phenomenon that inspired Eckemoff to create the album when she read about it in a magazine. “I was intrigued to learn that plants communicate with each other through the air, by releasing odorous chemicals, and through the soil, by secreting soluble chemicals,” she says. “Such communal life sparked my imagination. I started to envision how a single plant would feel being part of such an interconnected community and how it would react to its neighbors who lived next to it. Soon I had a kernel of an idea about a wildflower.” Eckemoff supplements the original music with an 18-part narrative poem (one part for each composition) that tells Columbine’s story. While nuanced, the narrative is built on an earnest simplicity, like a children’s story. The music, on the other hand, is much more complex. The multiple levels of melody in “Home by the Fence” or “Children Playing with Seed Pods” are sumptuous feasts for both the ear and the intellect, while pieces like “Chickens,” “Butterflies,” and “Another Winter” are filled with experimental, even psychedelic, textures. Credit for these soundscapes must go as well to the musicians who work with Eckemoff. The sounds Saari conjures from his guitars, theremin, and glass harp lend the music a unique palette, augmented by the bold, unconventional playing of Perko, Savolainen, Lötjönen, and Louhivuori. “They were fearless in approaching my extensive lead sheets,” the pianist affirms. In Adventures of the Wildflower that fearlessness has, like Columbine, blossomed into a splendid and very alive specimen of its own. Yelena Eckemoff was born in Moscow, where she started playing by ear and composing music when she was four. By seven, she was attending the Gnessins School for musically gifted children, eventually matriculating at Moscow State Conservatory to study classical piano. In her twenties, Eckemoff found herself drawn to jazz—at a time when the music, or at least recordings of it, were a rare commodity in the then-Soviet Union. Yet an appearance by Dave Brubeck behind the Iron Curtain reinforced her newfound love of the music and shaped her creative path thenceforth. That path turned out to run through the United States, where Eckemoff immigrated in 1991 and settled in North Carolina. Now ensconced in the country that gave birth to jazz, she went in search of players who could do justice to her intricate ideas. The search was a long and sometimes frustrating one, but it paid off when she was able to work with the likes of bassist Mads Vinding and drummer Peter Erskine on her 2010 album Cold Sun. Later collaborators have included projects with Mark Turner, Joe Locke, Ralph Alessi, Billy Hart, Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Joey Baron, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen, the Norwegian drum great whose final recording was on Eckemoff’s 2020 release Nocturnal Animals. With Adventures of the Wildflower, Eckemoff wanted to make an offering of positivity to her adopted country. “I was moved to make this record as my answer to our turbulent times,” she says. “I believe that nothing is more important than for all earthly beings to find a way to live together peacefully, next to each other in the same community. Characters of my story may have disagreements with each other, but in the end, they always find a way to coexist together on the same plot of land.”

I lost a package in April and a second in late October. The USPS does not want its people to deliver packages throughout the building because of the virus. So all USPS packages are left in the mailroom out in the open, there for anyone to steal. UPS and Amazon will deliver to my door. Whenever my friends and I see a package in the mailroom, we bring it to the person's door (if so requested by that person).

This week everything at Bombay Electronics is 10% off with free shipping. Code: CM2020

Presumably the rent is whatever the landlord can get. After the club closes, will someone else come along to fill the space at a higher price?

Thanks, Michael! I don't remember Loma.

This deal is back on.

What record label did Ike & Tina record for that wound up in Columbia's hands?

I'm halfway through it, and so far it is a real downer. However, some people like that sort of thing. The question in my mind is whether it is a realistic portrayal of Hollywood in the '40s. I bet you met some old hands over the years who could tell you, and perhaps did. Since you're in the business, I bet you would probably enjoy it.

Joe, I'm reading a Horace McCoy novel about Hollywood called "I Should Have Stayed Home." Did you ever read it, and if so, what did you think?

New album coming out December 15 called "Atlanta." Here are four excerpts... Avalon The Trip Patricia Mambo Koyama https://artpepper.bandcamp.com/album/free-a-few-tastes-of-volume-11-atlanta-out-soon

jcam and Niko, here are the CDs: CD #1 1-4...May 5, 1967 evening 5-6...May 5, 1967 morning 7...May 3, 1967 Disc #2 1-4...May 3, 1967

Attention Dan Gould! 2018 World Series (8 DVDs) - $14.99 prime after coupon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GW5217S/

Resonance Records To Issue Set of Sonny Rollins Discoveries From the Dutch Jazz Archive, "Rollins in Holland," As a Limited 3-LP Record Store Day Exclusive On November 27 Collection of Unheard "Take-No-Prisoners" Live & Studio Recordings From the Tenor Sax Master's 1967 Netherlands Tour Will Arrive as a 2-CD Set On December 4 Packages Include New Interviews with Rollins & Dutch Sidemen Han Bennink & Ruud Jacobs, Comprehensive Notes by Rollins's Biographer Aidan Levy, An Essay by Journalist-Researcher Frank Jochemsen, & Rare, Previously Unseen Photographs  November 27, 2020 Los Angeles – Today, “Black Friday,” independent jazz label Resonance Records continues its ongoing tradition of releasing previously unissued archival recordings as limited-edition Record Store Day exclusives with a stellar new three-LP collection of historic Sonny Rollins performances, Rollins in Holland: The 1967 Studio & Live Recordings. Featuring more than two hours of music, this stunning collection, drawn from tenor saxophone master Rollins’s Netherlands tour of May 1967, will also be presented as a two-CD set, due Dec. 4. The Rollins set succeeds Resonance’s critically acclaimed RSD archival finds from such jazz giants as Bill Evans, Eric Dolphy, and Wes Montgomery. Last November saw the release of the label’s poll-topping 10-LP/seven-CD Nat King Cole box Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years (1936-1943). Resonance co-president Zev Feldman, known within the industry as “the Jazz Detective,” says of the forthcoming release, “The music on Rollins in Holland is extraordinary. Rollins fans will rejoice when they hear the news of this discovery. These performances follow an important time in his life, and he brought those experiences along with him to make this incredible music.” In a new interview with Feldman included in the set, the 90-year-old Rollins says, “I’m so happy that Resonance is putting it out because it really represents a take-no-prisoners type of music. That’s sort of what I was doing around that period of time; that was sort of Sonny Rollins then—a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach. It was very much me. And I loved it and I loved playing with those guys.” The music heard on the Resonance album is drawn from a little-documented period in Rollins’s career. The musician’s 1966 Impulse! album East Broadway Run Down was his final record date before a studio hiatus that lasted until 1972. In 1969, mirroring a celebrated public exit of a decade earlier, he began a two-year sabbatical from live performing. Rollins in Holland captures the then 36-year-old jazz titan in full flight, in total command of his horn at the height of his great improvisational powers. He is heard fronting a trio, the same demanding instrumental format that produced some of the early triumphs of his long career: the live A Night at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note, 1957) and the studio dates Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957) and Freedom Suite (Riverside, 1958). During his brief but busy 1967 stay in the Netherlands, the saxophonist was supported by two of the nation’s top young players, bassist Ruud Jacobs and drummer Han Bennink. The pair had together supported such visiting American jazzmen as Johnny Griffin, Ben Webster, Wes Montgomery, and Clark Terry, among others. Jacobs was a celebrated straight-ahead accompanist, while Bennink had developed a reputation as an avant-garde lion, having backed Eric Dolphy on 1964’s Last Date. The pair jelled magnificently behind their celebrated leader. Rollins in Holland brings together material drawn from three separate appearances by the trio: a freewheeling May 3 concert at the Arnhem Academy of Visual Arts, at which Rollins stretched out in expansive performances that sometimes topped the 20-minute mark; a four-song May 5 morning studio session at the VARA Studio in Hilversum, where Dolphy and Albert Ayler had also cut unforgettable dates; and two live shots captured during the band’s stand that evening on “Jazz met Jacobs,” a half-hour national NCRV TV show presented from the Go-Go Club in Loosdrecht and hosted by bassist Jacobs’s pianist brother Pim and his wife, singer Rita Reys. In his essay for the collection, Dutch jazz journalist, producer, and researcher Frank Jochemsen notes that while recordings of the Arnhem show (presented here with carefully restored sound) had been passed hand-to-hand by Dutch jazz buffs over the years, the rest of the music was only recently unearthed. In 2017, the four stereo tracks from VARA Studio were discovered by Jochemsen, and they were authenticated by Ruud Jacobs and Han Bennink as they were being digitized for the Dutch Jazz Archive (NJA). In 2019, Jochemsen also discovered the audio from the “Jazz met Jacobs” appearance in the Dutch Jazz Archive, along with a unique set of photos shot at the sound check and live broadcast of this lost TV show. Jochemsen says, “I find it an exciting idea that so much has been recovered and documented from this modest tour and that the music is indeed of such high quality. Even more sensational is the fact that the whole world can listen to it now. The great Sonny Rollins at his best, accompanied by a great rhythm tandem, which makes me, as a Dutchman, extra proud.” An extensive overview of Rollins’s Holland trek is supplied by jazz journalist Aidan Levy, whose biography of the saxophonist will be published by Da Capo Books. Levy says, “Rollins in Holland is a resounding, still-urgent argument for jazz as a universal art form, transcending time, place and race. This is jazz at its most international and interdependent, with no boundaries or borders.” Rollins in Holland also includes an in-depth interview by Levy with Han Bennink and Ruud Jacobs, conducted a year before Jacobs’s death from cancer in July 2019. In it, the late bass virtuoso recalled the experience of playing with the American legend as “something spiritual. [There was] a very special atmosphere on the stage where I felt I could do anything.” The opportunity to bring Rollins’s exceptional Netherlands performances to the public for the first time has proven a special moment for Resonance, Feldman says: “Working with Mr. Rollins has been the experience of a lifetime, and I’m so grateful that he has put his trust in Resonance and our team to bring forth this newly unearthed, previously undocumented chapter in his career.” Photography: Toon Fey (at Academie voor Beeldende Kunst, Arnhem, Netherlands; May 3, 1967)  “A major addition to [Rollins’s] discography … These mighty performances, without any explicit political reference in the titles, are linked in form, tone, and ethos to [his 1958] ‘Freedom Suite,’ and extend its stylistic range to the new times.” –Richard Brody, The New Yorker “Vintage Rollins in a freewheeling setting, playing his heart out.” –Kevin Whitehead, Fresh Air “****1/2 … A prime period for Sonny. … [This] is two hours of blistering Rollins improvisations.” –Jeff Krow, Audiophile Audition The photos are not showing up here either. I'll let my contact know.

I asked my contact why the recordings are not presented in chronological order over the two CDs. She contacted Zev Feldman, and he responded twice. "In short, we faced difficulty when programming the Lp sides and we did this so it fit and also still had a good flow. " and "The more expansive answer to the question about chronological order is that we wanted to lead off with the newly-discovered, stereo(!) material from VARA Studio 5. Even though it was recorded 2 days after the Arnhem concert, it had the better fidelity and had never been circulated before in bootleg circles. It made sense then naturally to program the 2 tracks from the Go-Go Club in Loosdrecht on Side B since it was literally recorded on the same day, and was also a new discovery. Regarding the Arnhem concert, we chose not to start with "Love Walked In," which was the first song played at the actual concert, because we didn't want to have the same song appear on the first 3 sides of the 3-LP set. We thought it made for a better listening experience to put it on Side E/LP 3. We also didn't include the incomplete tracks (ie, "My One And Only Love," "Old Devil Moon," and "St. Thomas")."