ghost of miles

Checking in on "America's favorite pastime"... and it looks like it's New York & Boston doing battle for the AL East title all the way. Yanks are 13-3, Boston's 11-5... a great season already!

Somebody should forward these links to Tom Evered, should BN ever face budget cutbacks in its re-issue program... Remember the bastardizations Aric used to produce on the old board? Those were--ahem--"classic."

I'll probably have to catch it through the Archives, but thanks for posting this. I'm familiar with only the Fairport Convention era of her work; haven't really checked out the solo releases, but I'd like to learn more about her. Did she die from a fall?

According to Alyn Shipton's GROOVIN' HIGH, Gillespie undertook two State-Department-sponsored tours in 1956: a Europe/Middle East/Asia tour in the spring, and a South American tour in the late summer. Wasn't Ellington's 1963 tour (the one that supposedly inspired FAR EAST SUITE) also State-Dpt.-sponsored? I think they shortened that one considerably because of JFK's assassination.

Truly the baseball record that will never be broken!

Does anybody have inside info on Mosaic's current and seemingly-improving relations with Universal? There are now two sets of Universal-licensed material in the pipeline: the Mulligan Concert Band set and the Roy Eldridge. Might there be reason to re-awaken my dormant hopes for the Complete Keynote collection? If Universal is indeed re-admitting Mosaic to their vaults (even if only on a sporadic basis), there goes the family farm--Ma & Pa can damn well move into subsidized housing!

Lou Donaldson, Mosaic set Disc 2 (love that SWING AND SOUL!) Ben Webster, COMPLETE EMARCY Bill Evans, ALONE John Coltrane, THE GENTLE SIDE OF JOHN COLTRANE Art Tatum and Ben Webster Pablo CD The La's, THE LA'S Cleo Brown, HERE COMES CLEO

I found the McCoy a bit disappointing, actually. I really enjoyed his earlier book, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY, but found KISS sketchily implausible at times. I'm prepared to accept that to some degree in mid-20th-century pulp noir work (otherwise I wouldn't read David Goodis), but crazy breaks just happened too much to the protagonist in KISS for my taste.

Yep, one & the same (the new Everyman translation changes the title). I still haven't started it--read MISS LONELYHEARTS first and then got sidetracked with Horace McCoy's KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE--but it's now about to step up to bat in my literary reading game. I can definitely empathize with any book about a guy who continuously vows to quit smoking and then fails; it took me a long, long time to succeed. You know the old Mark Twain joke--"It's easy to quit smoking--I've done it hundreds of times."

Countin' my pennies, countin' the days...

I'm pretty sure I've spotted Shrugs a few times recently on Jazz Corner. In fact, I can attest that he posted there not long ago in response to an inquiry about his whereabouts--he did not get called up for duty and is still stateside.

Lemgruber & Mnytime, thanks for your informative and helpful posts.

Enough already. This guy's done more farewell laps than the Who!

Thanks for the news, John. Where was this date recorded? I saw them on this tour in Bloomington, Indiana, and it was simply incredible--at several moments I thought I was going to levitate! I'll have to pick up the Eremite.

I hit the Sweet Adeline set once or twice a week, and I'm sure they will excitedly post news about his new album whenever more becomes known. (It was originally announced for late 2001, so folks have been waiting quite a while now.) Whenever there is news, I'll post it on this thread. AfricaBrass, I like the s/t one better too--for me, it and EITHER/OR are the two must-haves, with XO and FIGURE 8 close behind. Rumor has it that Smith is returning to more of the stripped-down sound that marked his Kill Rock Stars era, when he released the two "acoustic" records, as ES fans sometimes call them. He played a killin' electric version of "Clementine" when I saw him at the Southgate House in Kentucky in Nov. 2000, and he opened with "Ballad of Big Nothing"... I was psyched to say the least! BTW, if you love the sound of the Kill Rock Stars CDs, you might want to look into ROMAN CANDLE, the record that preceeded them... it has the same sort of production quality to it, and the songs are quite good.

Dave Pell Octet, PLAYS BURKE AND VAN HEUSEN The Four Freshmen, COMP. 50'S CAPITOL (disc 4) Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Shirley Scott, JAWS Roy Eldridge, LITTLE JAZZ: BEST OF THE VERVE YEARS (in anticipation of the recently announced, forthcoming Mosaic)

I'm quite excited that Mosaic has decided to do a Roy Eldridge Verve Mosaic, something that's been on my Mosaic wish-list for some time now. Assuming that they will be releasing only his studio sessions as a leader, I've come up with the following list of records that will probably be included: THE ROY ELDRIDGE QUINTET ROY ELDRIDGE COLLATES THE STROLLING MR. ELDRIDGE SWING GOES DIXIE URBANE JAZZ OF ROY ELDRIDGE LITTLE JAZZ (Clef, not later Verve compilation) THAT WARM FEELING (w/Russell Garcia & strings) SWINGIN' ON THE TOWN TOUR DE FORCE TRUMPET KINGS ROY & DIZ (? RE is a co-leader here, but one hopes it will make the set) ROY'S GOT RHYTHM (? EmArcy date recorded in Sweden) ROY ELDRIDGE (? 1965 session for Metro, but I don't know if this date is owned by Universal or not) Any others I'm leaving out?

Well, it wasn't really a "sincere" apology... I just remember the cantankerous discussions on the old board regarding Sinatra & Lon/Weizen's lack of enthusiasm for said singer. Thanks, Tod, for the info on this set, and thanks for the E-Bay tip, John--I've put this on my "definitely-will-get" list.

Kinuta, I'm not sure that it does, but I'm hoping to pick it up tomorrow when I go up to Indianapolis. I'll let you know if anything's been added. BTW, I, too, loved "Them," another 50's classic that I first encountered as a child on a local Indy station's weekend late-night horror/sci-fi movie feature. Definite Cold War themes in that one, too, IMO.

Well, I feel a bit like Hardbop on the old board here, following myself on the now-reading thread, but I just finished Flannery O'Connor's novel THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY and wanted to recommend it to anybody who enjoys her short stories. A very familiar O'Connor motif at work here--the adolescent protagonist with a dark side who truly believes in God at odds with an "enlightened" adult intellectual who preaches a doctrine of rationalism. (If you've ever read her story "The Lame Shall Enter First," you might find the novel very similar, right down to the inclusion of a holy-goof child character.) O' Connor is a powerful and sharply observant writer, whether one agrees or not with her rather brimstone-ish view of religion.

Thanks, Tod... I'd agree that the Capitol recordings are superior, but I love the music of the 40's so much that I even enjoy said novelty numbers. I'm going to shop around and see if I can find it for less than $200 somewhere, or even pick it up used. (Deep Discount lists it at $209, and the list is $249.)

Yep, I've got both the Blakey version on Fontana and the Collectables Duke Jordan version. Doris Parker's liner notes to the Jordan Collectables CD suggest an unjust appropriation of the music on the Blakey soundtrack, where the compositions are credited to Jacques Marray; she writes that Sounds like quite a mess, with controversy about the composing credits, two released versions of the music written for the film, and still no sight of the actual soundtrack recordings made by Thelonious Monk. Is Romano still alive? One has to think, given that Monk is the performer, that the music will eventually surface.

Melba Liston, especially on the power of her arrangements for Randy Weston & others.

Oh... my... God! I once posted a desire for just such a set on the old Blue Note board, probably more than a year ago. YEEEEEE-HEEEEEE HAAAAAAAA! Thanks, BFrank! And more Universal-owned material, too... Yowzah.

Anybody else around these parts a fan of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, the 1951 sci-fi a-man-and-his-robot movie? I first saw this when I was a kid and am thinking about picking up the DVD. I really love the D.C. Cold-War-era setting as well as the religious symbolism and the political themes... and who could ever forget this guy?