Don Brown

Lloyd Glenn.

That was Bish Bash - Xanadu 114. It has five titles by Walter Bishop's trio plus three quartet titles with Frank Haynes from a date recorded live at the Half Note.

Hey you guys, Ronnie Mathews had only one T in his surname. I remember asking him about the odd spelling when he was playing solo piano at the Montreal Bistro here in Toronto. He told me that no one spells his name correctly. Judging from this thread I guess he was was right.

Unless he was singing harmony parts.

Yes Lon, you're correct, French CBS did issue All American on CD. I have a copy.

Alto saxophonist Willie Smith. Smith was one of the finest lead alto players of the swing era but when called on to solo it was quite a different story for this listener. I found his solo work on records he made during the 78 RPM years, when most recorded music was limited to three minutes a side, quite acceptable, but once the LP was introduced producers like Norman Granz let Smith loose on jam sessions in the company of players like Benny Carter. More often than not Smith came off sounding like an air raid siren.

I received the Artie Shaw set yesterday from Mosaic. This is the first set I've ordered since Mosaic farmed out their shipping. I found that the new shipper gets the package here sooner than Mosaic did back when they did their own shipping, but unfortunately it's now necessary that someone be at home to receive the shipment. When Mosaic handled their own shipping, the Canada Post letter carrier would simply leave the package between my front doors. The new company has "do not safe drop" clearly printed on the package so the mail person has to either hand it to the recipient or take it back to the postal station where it then has to be picked up. A bit of a drag.

Amazon.ca is selling the set at $56.99 Canadian.

I put all the music from the double LP release that Ken Dryden mentions (on Atlantic) on two CDRs. Wonderful music.

I first met John in 1959 when he was doing a nightly jazz program for CHFI, one of Toronto's early FM stations. John was always a totally dedicated champion of jazz and its creators. He was also a man of great integrity who could not abide any sort of compromise when it came to the music he loved. He will be sorely missed by his many friends. We'll keep John's chair open at our Friday noon-hour gatherings at the Imperial Pub.

She was a fine piano player and seemed to be a very nice person. I saw her with the Terry Gibbs quartet at Toronto's Town Tavern in the '50s where she also indulged in four-handed vibes playing with her boss. I remember in the 1980s talking to Terry Gibbs about Terry Pollard. It was obvious he'd been very attached to her and talked about visiting her in the hospital not long before and realizing just how much damage her strokes had caused. She apparently had no idea who he was.

Looking through this long-running thread I noticed a couple of posters commenting on the Pablo label's less than great sound. I agree that the sound just wasn't up to the standards of labels like Contemporary or United Artists but when Pablo albums were issued in Canada we got even worse sound. In this country Pablos were pressed under license by RCA Canada. I met an engineer who'd worked for RCA in Montreal during the period Pablo LPs were manufactured there. He told me that instead of proper master tapes Granz sent RCA only cassettes as source material. Pretty shoddy way to do business..

Allen, I just took a second look. You're right. That is a young Harold Ashby at the 3:43 mark, and the guy with the beard and pipe is definitely Nat Hentoff. I guess I was looking mainly at the members of the other band that's featured on this Robert Herridge program who are lined up alongside the piano. They are from right to left Hank Jones, Buck Clayton, George Duvivier (with the dark glasses) Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, and Jo Jones.

Not Harold Ashby, George Duvivier.

I first heard Dick Katz when he was a member of Tony Scott's quartet along with Milt Hinton and Philly Joe Jones. He absolutely knocked me out on that Brunswick album and continued to do so on every other record he made, either as a leader or sideman. And damn, Katz was also a brilliant writer. I'll never forget the notes he wrote for a Thelonious Monk album.

The title of the book appears to be Verve: Norman Granz: The Conscience of Jazz and is listed as "Available for pre-order" on Amazon.ca, but the publication date is shown as July 7, 2019!

Another happy birthday, Chris. I love your blog.

The first sample could be early Sun Ra. The second is definitely NOT Coleman Hawkins.

I'm nearly finished Kelley's book and what a rare treat it has been to read such a well-researched biography. One is so used to coming across glaring errors in biographies of musicians and singers these days that it's a real pleasure to find so few here. The couple I noticed are so trivial that they're hardly worth mentioning - and it's possible that I'm the one who is wrong. Kelley puts New York's Taft Hotel at 7th Avenue and 50th Street. If I remember correctly it was at 7th Avenue and 49th Street. And when talking about Art Kane's famous Esquire Magazine photograph (A Great Day in Harlem) he says that Kane called every jazz musician he could think of the day before the shoot. I always thought it was Nat Hentoff who rounded up the musicians. But, as I say, pretty minor errors, if they are errors.

Oh, that's easy. The Seventh is my favourite.

This material is available on two French CDs: Classics 588 and Masters of Jazz MJCD 104 (Volume 3 of "Young Bird").

Why don't all of you wait until you've had a chance to read the book. What's the point of wasting time pre-judging it?

I've read the first hundred and ten pages and, so far, I'm very impressed.

Jeez, who am I going to talk to at Mosaic now? Cindy was simply fantastic and I'm really going to miss her. If you're reading this, Cindy, all the best in your new career. You'd be an asset to any employer!

Many of your questions are answered in a recent book by John Broven, Chewy. It's called "Record Makers and Breakers, Voices of the Rock 'n' Roll Pioneers" and was published in March of this year by the University of Illinois Press. Broven interviewed surviving members of the Bihari family and some of their former employees. The book is a great read and offers a real insight into the operations of the independent record labels that sprang up after the war. I don't think Broven missed a single one of them. They're all in his book from Apollo, Chess, and Crown to Imperial, King, Specialty, and Joe Davis. Amazon has it for $40.00 U.S. For some reason it's cheaper in Canada. Amazon.ca is asking only $33.95 Cdn.