ghost of miles

Got distracted not long after my original post and have not made any further progress. However, I have more reading time at hand than usual for the next week, and the book has a connection with the new Night Lights show I'm currently working on, so...thank you for the prompt! I'll pull it out of the Night Lights stack where it currently resides and chime in again once I've knocked out a fair amount of it.

Jsngry, will the return of Corey Seager be enough to fix the Rangers' offensive woes? Good Lord, if they start hitting even league average, that rotation's going to carry them a long way this season. I'm glad to see that Gleyber Torres seems to be doing well in Detroit. Miss having him in the leadoff spot for NY. Very talented player and still only 28.

So who has the best record in baseball through the first 50 games? Not the Dodgers… not the Padres… not the Phillies or Yankees… Detroit The resurrection of A.J. Hinch continues. And for all of the dominance of the Eastern division in the American League in recent times, it’s the Central that has four teams over the .500 mark as we near the 1/3 mark of the 2025 season.

The only collective label-based Select I can recall was the Pacific Jazz piano trio set. (Speaking of Pacific Jazz, board member James A. Harrod has a new book about the label that’s coming out soon.)

It has "Rock City Rock" and an alternate take of "Kitty."

This is the CD that inspired me to do the show. I bought it many years ago while I was in the midst of exploring the various DKE small-group recordings, both those made under the Ellington moniker and apart. A few months ago I pulled it off the shelf when I was in a Hodges mood and remembered that all of the dates were made for either Sunrise or Mercer. That inspired me to pull the Great Times! cd, which gathers all of the Ellington-Strayhorn duets and Oscar Pettiford sides recorded for Mercer) off the shelf as well. All of it put together seemed like a fascinating and diverse small-group chapter of Ellingtonia, all recorded on DKE's own label. And don't sleep on some of singer Al Hibbler's recordings for Mercer, two of which I included in the show, drawn from the Al Hibbler 1950-52 Chronologic Classics CD. When I posted that I was working on this show in a Duke Ellington Facebook group, another member mentioned that Jasmine was just about to put out a single CD devoted to Ellington's Mercer label recordings. I managed to get a copy of it before producing the Night Lights episode, and the sound does seem marginally improved. As a great man by the name of Sy Oliver once said, "Yes, indeed!"

Normally I wait until an episode has run its weekly course of broadcast before posting it here and elsewhere, but given the extraordinary wait for this show that board member Stonewall15 endured, and without whose assistance said show would not have been possible, I'm going to go ahead and plant it in the radio forum this evening: Stars Of Jazz: Jazz's First Emmy-Winning TV Show

Apologies if this has been noted previously in the thread, but it appears that the master and alternate of "Jack Armstrong Blues" on disc 1 have been inadvertently switched. The longer master is track #21, while the shorter alternate is track #14.

It's worth quite a lot! Thanks for the heads-up.

Starting in on this massive LP set of Benny Goodman’s mid/late 1930s recordings for RCA Victor. I like hearing the vocal tracks mixed in with the instrumentals. Borrowed the set from our station library, where it apparently landed around 1987 or so.

Two tracks in and I'm loving it. Milcho Leviev's presence made this one a no-brainer for me.... that and my growing appreciation in recent years for late Art as great Art.

As far as I know this is indeed in the works and possibly out November-ish? That's my fuzzy, needs-to-be-confirmed remembrance of a recent chat with Scott W while ordering one of the Vanguard boxes.

I’d love/take any of them!

A new show with a tip of the hat to the forum somewhere way downstream... this turned into quite an accompanying web post, with a deep dive from a couple of Ellingtonians into the evolution of what we now know as "Lotus Blossom." But mostly, just wanting to highlight some of the lovely and compelling small-group music that was made for this artist-owned label by Ellington and others in the Ellington orbit such as Johnny Hodges, Al Hibbler, and Oscar Pettiford, with Billy Strayhorn directing most of the sessions: DIY By Ellington: Duke Ellington's Mercer Records Label Happy DKE Day, an hour or so early.

Disc 4 on my second go-around for this set. Some excellent Peanuts Hucko from 1947 with Dave Tough on drums, then a Jo Stafford session, followed by some Mildred Bailey-Teddy Wilson duets. Enjoying this box even more than I did the first time I listened to it all the way through… bring on the big-band collection!

I hope you're the one who bit! I was just popping into this thread to add my encouragement to an RT purchase. You won't regret it! A fantastic body of music that I'm now feeling inclined to pull out yet again. 😆

A latecomer to this news, but managed over the weekend to snag reasonably-priced center balcony seats for Patti Smith's Horses 50th-anniversary tour when it hits Chicago in November. There'll be at the Michigan Theater (majestic early-20th century movie palace) with the very same band that my partner and I saw in Royal Oak in 2019--Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty from the original 1970s group, longtime bassist Tony Shanahan, and Smith's son Jackson on second guitar. They're going to play Horses in its entirety. Crossing my fingers that everyone stays healthy!

Listening to this for the first time and started with tracks 6 and 7 because of recent comments in this thread. I'm fortunate to report that they play fine on my ancient CD/DVD unit currently in use. Also happy to second the praise for Sonny Red, burning through "Bags' Groove" as I type.

One of my first and still one of my most beloved Mosaics:

Much appreciation to you both! Looks like the 1961 "Lotus Blossom" was an outtake from the Piano In The Foreground sessions, which would explain why it goes unaddressed in Lambert's book, published well before the expanded CD reissue was released that included said track. And the Hodges 1959 small-group recording likely explains why the composition was re-copyrighted that year under the "Lotus Blossom" title.