Kevin Bresnahan

I added this CD to discogs.com for your reference. Sucky scanner - sorry. https://www.discogs.com/Cicci-Santucci-Arrivederci-Roma/release/15312035

But Hank claimed that the "Algerian war" recording was made for Blue Note and Michael Cuscuna found the original session notes. He documented every Blue Note recording session in his discography... well... except... according to the liner notes of the Mosaic box set of Woody Shaw's Muse recordings, there was a short period in 1965 where Lion supposedly gave back a few master tapes to people he recently recorded. But if Mobley was one of them, he had the masters so he should have said that in that interview. I still think Hank messed up and "Thinking of Home" was the record he was talking about.

I was over at the Steve Hoffman forums this morning and what do I see? A fairly long thread started by someone who was thinking about getting into Reel to Reel (also known as R2R apparently). It looks like there are a lot of users or former users contributing their opinions. An interesting read for sure: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/reel-to-reel-should-i-bother.506071 From reading this thread at the Hoffman forum, I am still glad that I never got into it. Most of the posters sounded relieved that they got out of R2R.

I could swear that we went around and around on the two unreleased sessions Mobley was talking about and the consensus was that the "Algerian war" album was "Thinking of Home" and the "brass ensemble record" was "A Slice of the Top". I do remember someone on the Blue Note bulletin board mentioning that he talked to guitarist Eddie Diehl, who claimed that he played on Mobley's unreleased "Algerian war" record. At the time, Diehl didn't even know that the recording he made with Mobley was released as "Thinking of Home". I don't remember if that person got a chance to get Diehl's thoughts on it later. In fact, I think the poster never returned before the board's demise. Since Diehl has died, I guess we'll never know.

If reel to reel was making a comeback, I would think that at least one band on bandcamp.com would list a recording on the format. I cannot find any new music releases on reel to reel. Lots of cassette releases but not reel to reel. The last reel to reel releases I read about were from The Tape Project. Until I found out about their prices for master tape replicas, I thought about getting into it for fun. But those prices are outrageous to me for something I was planning to do for fun. A few of these titles were very interesting: https://tapeproject.com/jazz/

Pepper Adams & Barry Altschul - Be-Bop? (Musica). This is fairly hard-to-find yet relatively inexpensive LP from France. I'm listening to it via mp3 files created from a needle-drop CD-R that was made from an original LP. 3 steps from Kevin Bacon. Piano sounds very rinky-dink. Must be a French thing (That's a joke revolving around the piano sound on Hank Mobley's "The Flip"). I do wish this was more readily available as it's not a bad date. To answer the title's question - no - this is not Be-Bop. It's bop, certainly, but this is not going to warm the cockles of a be-bop fan's heart. No matter how hard the French tenor player (Jean-Pierre Debarbat) tries, he still comes off sounding like a poor man's Coltrane "sheets of sound" during most of his solos.

I don't how far you want to go down this rabbit hole but let's take it to the extreme... you hear digitally. How's that you say? Well, your eardrum converts sound waves to nerve impulses that your brain interprets as "sound". Your nervous system transmits this via nerve impulses. The word "impulse" is specific in that it has a rapid rise and a rapid fall. From a 0 to a 1. Digital defined. So your brain is converting digital to what you perceive as analog all the time.

Jim - you're mixing up the sampled soundwave with the soundwave that comes out of the other end of the digital to analog conversion. Using a CD player as an example, the signal coming out of the analog outputs does not have "undetectable gaps". That's not how the digital to analog conversion process works. It's not a simple process that just converts those small chunks of data to small chunks of analog waveform. It uses algorithms that stitch these pieces back together seamlessly to recreate the waveform that was encoded with the digital bits. The digital and analog conversion processes are both well understood. As long as you take enough samples at a high enough rate of speed, you can replicate the waveform exactly. There are plenty of papers on this. But let's get back to reel to reel anyway. We've had enough digital versus analog discussions on these boards already. I would probably still have a reel to reel deck today if it had managed to stick around past ~1978, when I was getting heavily into audio. But by the end of the 70's, reel to reel tape production was really only popular in the classical music genre, which was not my thing then, and they weren't being sold in any of the record stores where I shopped. And cassette tape recording was proving to be able to make a decent sounding recording if done right. I'm still trying to figure out what Chuck has against the cassette tape. I had a pretty nice cassette set-up back in the day so I may be biased, but low cost was not the reason why I got into it. The Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck that I used to drool over certainly was not cheap. With the right deck and the right tapes, you could get a pretty nice sounding system. From Chuck's sigh, I guess he had less success than I did.

Tape does not capture sound vibrations. A microphone captures those vibrations and converts them to a signal that's electronically encoded to magnetic tape. There is "conversion" here too. The ability of that magnetic tape to capture those wavefroms is also limited by the tape medium. It cannot capture all frequencies equally, which is why they tweaked the format over the years, adding things like high bias tape and the use of noise reduction to mask those weaknesses. And again, if you create a digital file with a high enough sampling rate, then the analog waveform can be perfectly replicated. There's no "closer". It can be the exact same. You can say that you heard a before and after with a standard 16/44.1 "CD quality" digital conversion, but it's likely whatever was fed to the analog to digital converter wasn't that good. As for cassette tape vs. reel to reel, I didn't mean to imply that cassette was a better playback medium, just that it was designed to minimize a lot of the mechanical problems inherent with its big brother.

C'mon - every American knows that Bangladesh is in Sweden. This is a joke about how some Americans cannot identify many other countries on a map.

I recall seeing Hollyday live and him burning through tune after tune as well. He really cooked and back then, I probably enjoyed it a lot. I was not as into ballad playing live then, especially when the ballad moved to a bass solo. Actually, I'm still not huge fan of bass solos even in uptempo tunes. Ha ha ha. Strangely enough, I didn't even keep any of his Novus CDs in my collection. I know I had a couple at one point, but where they went is lost to me.

I think there were several things that could cause wrinkled tape. A dirty head or capstan could easily kill a tape but crunching it up. Also, you had to wind the tape carefully onto the feeder reel. Too tight and it would bind up. Tape stretch or crunched tape could follow. Too loose and it "snapped", which was where the tape relaxed off the feed reel and snapped tight as the loose section played back. This could also cause tape cause tape stretch, snapped tape or a crunched tape as well as a pulsing sound. Most experienced users were well aware of these problems and took care to avoid them. FWIW, cassette tape only did a better job of masking these reel to reel problems but it couldn't get rid of them Tape is tape.. The cassette shell helped keep the tape wound onto the reels properly and the head/capstan area was smaller, making it less likely, but not impossible, to get a tape crunched in there. I know it was possible because I had it happen to a couple of cassettes. With cassettes, all you really had to do was make sure the heads & capstan were clean and you were pretty much all set. Oh - and buy good blanks and hope that any prerecorded tapes you bought used a decent blank supplier.

It's been almost 14 years and I still get sad on Father's Day. Time has blunted the loss but it's still there.

I'm a little interested in this recording. I didn't know that Hollyday got back to recording in 2018. I thought he had retired from the scene entirely. That he just turned 50 makes me feel pretty damn old.

This is a fun date. I haven't spun it in a while. Thanks for the reminder.

2014 Justin Savant

The Don Redell/Ian Carr Quintet - Change-Is (Columbia/EMI/Jazzman). Another record from the box set. Not a fan of that harpsichord but other than that, nice record.

In the many years I've been flipping through records, I've never even seen that version of "Orgasm". When did it come out? UK release?

Not hard to beat an old Admiral console for sound! But you could stack as many as 6 records on that changer! Number 7... or was it 8... always seemed to catch the needle when it swung over to play it. You know, I knew someone was likely to come into this thread to defend the format. It has its fans. I had to chuckle when jazzcorner came to the format's defense but then added qualifiers to allow you get the best out of it and then swung the discussion right over to a cassette set up. Point proven. And I almost joined the reel-to-reel crowd in the mid-80s, when their fan base was probably at its peak. It was (is?) considered "audiophile" by many people and back then I was always willing to try "audiophile" anything. But as Jim mentions, they are not very convenient and other formats came along that were much more convenient with satisfactory sound. Convenience matters.

Are you sure it's not being returned to the sender? "Out for delivery" would seem to indicate it's on your mail carrier's truck. Maybe the mail carrier saw something they didn't like and returned it to the sender? Do you know your mail carrier? I would ask them what happened yesterday.

Yeah, they are cool to look at for sure and there is some ceremony to the playback process akin to LP playback. I don't remember great sound. I remember very good & clean sound. Yeah, it didn't have the surface noise of an LP but it did have hiss, crosstalk and warble. Warble was a bitch if you didn't stay on top of the maintenance. I remember one time when I was over my friend's house and he was playing a reel-to-reel tape when we started noticing a bad warble. He jumped up and ran over to the deck - too late - it crunched up the tape in seconds. The tape was toast. He had to clean and align that thing all the time. Maybe he had a bad deck? The fear that your precious tape could get destroyed by a second of inattention... nah... not for me, at least back then when I was young and unwilling to commit to that much maintenance work and it became moot once the cassette tape came out. Cassette tape killed reel-to-reel more than anything else.

According to Woody's son in the liner notes for the Mosaic box, "The Complete Muse Sessions": "Cassandrite is Woody Shaw's first actual record date as a leader. It was to have been the start of Woody Shaw as a Blue Note recording artist. But a full album was never completed. Within weeks, Alfred Lion completed the sale of Blue Note to Liberty Records and was already regretting the decision. He gave these tapes back to Woody and cancelled deals with a handful of other artists with whom he was in discussions." In the discography of the booklet, these sessions are listed as being recorded at Van Gelder Studio in December 1965.

I never got into reel-to-reel and never will at this point in my life. From the limited interaction I had with someone who had one that he played regularly, they were much more of a pain to use & maintain than a record player and I didn't hear that much improvement over LP playback to make the commitment. Also, those reel-to-reel decks took up tons of shelf space, space that was already taken by the turntable.

Various Artists - Eight Trails, One Path (Three Lobed Recordings). A 2011 Record Store Day release. The LP is made like a matchbook, which is kinda cool if kinda impractical. The music has an acoustic folksy/country vibe. Here's the "matchbook look". Yes, the top half folds down and tucks into the edge below like a matchbook. The sleeve is stapled in place and doesn't come out. I'd never heard of one of these guys before I picked this up but I do play it every now & then. You can "You Tube" all eight tracks here:

The top one is a 4 track "Cine Reel" that is still considered "reel-to-reel" by most collectors: https://www.discogs.com/The-Dave-Brubeck-Trio-Featuring-Gerry-Mulligan-Compadres/release/12913753