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Good point, Ken. I've considered Al Cohn Memorial Collection, but haven't put it in the will as of yet. Well, knock wood that should be 30-40 years off. I have a lot of trouble believing that CDs will be salable items at that point, even the Mosaics, and I don't have enough vinyl to be worth much. But I have given thought to the will and whether it is worth the hassle of setting up a trust for my kids.

This is actually a sad story, though perhaps there will be a better resolution. Words to the wise: just leave my damn stuff alone! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/1...ess-thrown-away

Well, it looks like the ugliness over at the Boston Globe is about to get worse, as the Times is getting ready to sell: http://www.suntimes.com/business/1615795,w...-061009.article

wish i'd know where i've put my books of lovecraft short stories... Well, you can replace it with this: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=223 I have to say I find it amusingly perverse that LoA would publish this. On the other hand, this looks like one of their skimpier collections. Most of their volumes are complete writings or short stories or nearly so, but some are really disappointing in that they are just random collections or "best ofs". That appears to be the case here, where there are several collections from other publishers even longer than this version.

I'm not that happy with the way the Mosaic website is handling back-orders. There is some language on the main page about sets being back-ordered, but you can still add them to your shopping cart without any warnings. Anyway, I did call and they say that Chu Berry, which is the only set of interest to me right now, is back-ordered until the last quarter of 2009! Definitely seems way too long for catching impulse buyers.

Depends on the year when it was bought and the amount spent, but actually the Mosaic may be a bargain. Inflation calculator True, though I just picked one up on eBay for about $30. For a little while I thought I might get it for less than $15, but apparently someone else was paying attention!

PM sent on: Dexter Gordon - Our Man in Paris (Blue Note RVG) $3 light marks Paul Motian/Bill Evans/Bill Frisell/Joe Lovano/Marc Johnson (JMT) $6

Well, it is certainly not true about National Archives, where you can go in (to the Maryland outpost) and make copies of the videos and films, provided they are in the public domain. I did this once for a history software project. Don't know the story about LOC.

Are you going to go early and see Toumani Diabate as well? I was sorely tempted, though domestic duties call. I did manage to see Diabate at Millenium Park last summer.

If you find it cool; I'm not suggesting you just made this up. We're just curious. And indeed if eMusic is losing money, well paying more is sometimes a necessary evil. It will still be slightly better than iTunes for a lot of what I listen to, but not so much better that I won't cancel after I get through my backlog, particularly the rest of the Black & Blue catalogue. I actually found there are roughly 80 albums on my main wish list, and maybe 35 of them are no longer worth it to me at the new price point (yet 5 or 10 are now better deals if I can actually get them for 12 dls). Then about 75 from Black & Blue. So I might stick around 6-9 months longer. I think what bothers me the most is that they have this ridiculous PR campaign that is trying to make me feel GREAT about getting considerably less than I currently do for the same price. I absolutely hate it when companies treat their customers like idiots.

Thanks, but I am still not clear on this. Why hasn't the label hasn't seen a dime from emusic if a licensing fee was paid? Yes, not clear. Is this because not one customer downloaded any of their tracks? If that's the case, maybe there is a larger problem than their emusic contract.

Well, no guarantees I will actually get it since it is backordered, but Amazon.co.uk is selling this at a low price, and even with shipping it is better than the used copies sold on Amazon.com. I figured it was worth a shot. You could take a look here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Columbia-Original-...f=pd_sim_m_h__2

Right, well I'm on the 90/$19.95 plan which goes to 50/$19.95, nearly doubling the price per track. I feel I'm getting royally shafted to the point where I'll probably get a few boosters to clear out my baglog* and cancel. *backlog, though baglog looks cooler.

Well, it is hardly so black and white. There are plenty of places where the speed limit jumps around for the sole purpose of catching outsiders breaking the speed limit. And right or not, traffic engineers have lots of experience backing up the fact that people subconsciously know what the safe driving speed of a road is, and then speed limits are almost always set 10 mph below this. Or how about the fact that Chicago just dropped the number of outstanding tickets you get before getting booted (which means much higher fees to take care of this) from 5 to 2. Well, they are breaking the law by not paying their fines. Except you can easily be given three parking tickets in a single night in Chicago -- and certainly have no way to pay them off. Plenty of drivers are at fault, but that doesn't change the fact that municipalities have become money-grubbing entities that seem more or less at war with their residents and even moreso with outsiders.

Interesting to see--I've read 270pp of it & was debating whether to bother finishing. Uh, does it get better? Not for me. I've got about 100 pages to go, and it still seems pretty pointless. As I said, Fuller's Best of Jackson Payne does kind of the same thing but is shorter and far, far more interesting. I have actually gotten better about dropping novels that bore me, but I guess I will finish this one, then chuck it out (it literally is falling apart on me and other library copies are doing the same -- it wasn't a well-bound book, which is appropriate I guess though probably not intentional).

I guess this really needs to go on a wish-list, but Murakami has a new novel - 1Q84 - that has just come out in Japan. No word on when or whether it will be translated, but I imagine it would be soon. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/2...novel-published

Chicago Public Library has a fairly impressive collection of the early Mosaics, though I don't think they have been keeping up. (Fortunately doing much better on the DVD side with Criterion.) However, they are in reference, so no loaning over night, and definitely no loaning to other libraries (I would be very doubtful if any library would do interlibrary loan for OOP items quite frankly). So that means you need a long afternoon to go in to the music reference section and request them to be played over their equipment. It takes a lot of patience. More than I have frankly.

Two more cat books that I find interesting for the art work (and maybe I am not so subtly trying to condition my kids to want a cat when my wife keeps selling them on a dog ). The Calabash Cat by James Rumford and Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein and illustrated by Ed Young. Wabi Sabi is in the general tradition of Muth's Zen Shorts (itself a pretty cool book) though the concept is a little harder to put my head around. Still very nicely illustrated. I'm definitely leaning towards picking this one up. There is actually a fairly interesting backstory to this where the original illustrations were lost (and recovered much later after the artist did them all over again). He feels that the new illustrations far surpass the original ones: Ed Young interview

I'm starting to think about seeing this in the theater. It's been ages since I've seen Star Trek on the big screen -- either Star Trek III or IV. I've seen no more than one or two episodes of any of the follow-up series. I think maybe I was afraid that once it expanded so dramatically, I would lose so much time that I would regret getting into it. Or maybe it is I lived for five or so years without a TV and missed all the intermediate stuff and thought I would never catch up. Not sure. But this looks kind of interesting. Of course on the other hand I hate reboots in general, so it might be hard to get past that. In any case, I just bought my son the coolest toy -- a rocket that is more or less in the Playskool line: Rocket. I'll find out later on if it ends up leading him down either the Star Wars or Star Trek path.

An element of this may be true, but I think there has to be some other reason too. Well, everyone plays the shorter Ellington tunes, but hardly anyone plays the suites or the pieces that are heavily orchestrated (no touring big bands left to speak of). Much of Mingus' output is pretty complex and does need a larger group to play. I don't know if there is any concern with stepping on the toes so to speak of the Mingus Big Band, which is keeping his music alive. But could we turn the question around and ask how many other composers post 1950 say have a lot of their work covered? Monk yes and a subset of Ellington. Herbie Hancock. Maybe Horace Silver and Tad Dameron. A couple of Brubeck(Desmond) tunes are frequently covered, and a handful of Coltrane's. Possibly the top ten hits of Lou Donaldson and Lee Morgan. It doesn't seem that many to me. Seems to me most people go right back to the true standards rather than covering songs from the bop era or more recently. There aren't that many jazz "hits" that musicians want to cover -- or think the audience would recognize -- and that they should stick to originals or the true standards. Maybe I am wrong in this.

Could be. Certainly Walmart is now the 900-lb gorilla, though I think you can only get jazz on-line and not in the stores themselves. Probably after Walmart, it is Borders and Barnes & Noble (as troubled as they are).

While this doesn't happen all the time to me, I've had a couple of similar problems. Honestly, this is one of the advantages of going through Amazon, as they are pretty good about replacing defective merchandise. And if it keeps happening over and over, they have a lot more leverage to lean on EMI (or Anchor Bay is a DVD manufacturer with a somewhat spotty reputation) to get it right. I think if it hadn't been for Amazon, we might never have gotten the corrected disc for the Glenn Gould set from Sony. With the disappearance of Tower and essential dissolution of Virgin, it's gotten even harder for bricks and mortar stores to keep the suppliers in line.

This probably doesn't go here, except as a tangent on the general scuminess of companies and how they will do everything in their power to keep you on the hook. I get this message from a software vendor for some anti-virus software (SpyTools) I don't use anymore that I have an automatic renewal. I then have two days to try to turn this off. It takes almost an hour poking around on the site to find where you turn this off. So I turn it off, after about a dozen warnings, and having to write in the box that I will never use their software again. Etc. So I get an email confirmation of the change. Or rather what should be a confirmation. Instead, buried at the bottom, it says that I have two more steps to verify that I have moved over to manual renewal. WTF! Well, I really didn't see this first time around, and the deadline passed and the thing renewed on me. WTF!! I did call my credit card company right away to dispute the charge, but ultimately I think I am on the hook. Personally, I think it is a violation of fair business practices. I cancelled. They know I cancelled, and now they claim I need to confirm that I cancelled. It's not worth anymore of my time, though you can be damn sure I am extra-confirmed cancelled now. There's some similar story with a magazine subscription where you call, and get chased around endless voice mailbox options trying to cancel, and you don't know how to cancel. I think these deceptive practices are every bit as bad as the credit card fraudulence, though it's hard to imagine Congress could write a law that would adequately deal with the issue. Oh, BTW, there was an excellent article (probably in the NY Times) about the rise of a new telemarketing industry that is geared towards making the survivors pay off the deceased's credit card debt -- even when they aren't legally liable to do so (either the debt is supposed to be forgiven or it should be directed at the estate). I am going to write in 36 point font at the bottom of my will: don't agree to anything over the phone and let the lawyers hash it out.

Well, if it all about being in a major market, then Cleveland is screwed no matter what. AFAIK, the Knicks have little room to maneuver for the next batch of free agents. Same with LA. Bulls have a bit more space, but it probably means dumping Ben Gordon and/or Luol (maybe, just maybe Reinsdorf would agree on paying the luxury tax if it meant getting LeBron). Nets probably do have the most room of the major market teams. Never say never, but I don't think the financing for their new arena will come together, and the Nets will ultimately end up in Newark.

I am trying to determine if they ever recorded on a legit LP/CD. I see that Hutcherson was part of the ensemble backing Dizzy that played at Monterey, supposedly in 1965, on the bootleg Angel City. I've read that the sound is just terrible, but if anyone has direct experience I would be interested to see if the music overcomes the lousy recording. Anyway, I do have my doubts about 1965, since none of the material shows up on the fairly recent Concord recording Dizzy Live at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival. Of course, the Dizzy & Moody and Gil Fuller CD was not a live concert recording nor does it have Hutcherson on it. Well, any leads on whether they did play together would be appreciated. Thanks. Eric