Kevin Bresnahan

True, but the Go Fund Me's goal was $100,000. They didn't close the fund when they reached their goal. The fund now sits at $250,000, which I think is about $100,000 lower than the amount they actually raised. That extra $150,000 could do a lot of good for a lot more lesser-known Jazz musicians in the hands of the Jazz Foundation. The amount of financial aid shouldn't be tied to the artist's fame. FWIW, I do think that the Burrell campaign and all the weirdness around it, is going to negatively affect campaigns like this one.

I actually did reach out to the Jazz Foundation and I also messaged Jimmy's daughter via her Go Fund Me. I hope they can help as well. I am just a little leery about these Go Fund Me things after that Kenny Burrell campaign. I don't think we ever got the whole story there to this day. I'd almost rather we support the Jazz Foundation instead of individual artists like these Go Fund Me pages. The Jazz Foundation support all artists due to their need and not due to their relative fame. Kenny Burrell's campaign raised over $250,000. If that same money was in the non-profit Jazz Foundation's coffers, they could give support to many more musicians.

The Jazz Foundation of America was established just for situations like this. Has the family contacted them? If not, they should. They might be able to take care of this in a more private fashion. https://jazzfoundation.org/

As baseball writer Mike Petraglia wrote, "One more irony of this Mookie situation is that the problem with the 2020 #RedSox isn't their offense. They are still pretty loaded, even without Betts. Their rotation and bullpen look incredibly thin. Nothing has been done to address that this offseason - at all." Also, if Betts doesn't sign with the Dodgers, he can still come back to the Sox in 2021.

So you believe that the Red Sox should have signed Mookie to a 12 year/$426 Million contract? $35.5 Million per year until he is 39? When history has shown that players of his stature don't usually play well past 32? We'll have to agree to disagree on that. BTW - what did Mookie do for the Red Sox last year? His stats were there, so why did the Red Sox finish 12 games out of a playoff spot? One player does not take a team to the playoffs.

Price's departure is addition by subtraction. He's an a-hole. I am so glad he's gone. Mookie just wanted too much money and this is all happening too close to the ongoing Pedroia fiasco. The Red Sox did the right thing with Jacoby Ellsbury and got so much flak that they did the wrong thing with Pedroia. They don't want another one of these albatross contracts hanging over them. Sure, they are probably letting Betts go a year too early, but this way, they are at least getting something for him. And I say this as a big Mookie fan. He was a nice guy on top of being a great player. I just don't want to see him getting $30 Million or some such nonsense when he's 37 and sitting in an ice bath and not on the field.

Exactly. The problem is that it has now swung way too far in the other direction, with mastering engineers compressing some recordings so much that it's a wall of sound. No nuances. No soft passages. Everything is "right there" in an "in your face" way.

Which is why it was in the first batch of Connoisseur releases. Those first 12 Connoisseur releases were chosen specifically because of their scarcity.

https://www.wbgo.org/post/lucien-barbarin-soulful-trombonist-and-link-new-orleans-musical-tradition-has-died-63#stream/0 Lucien Barbarin, trombonist extraordinaire, has died after a 2 battle with prostate cancer. He was 63. I got to see him once with Harry Connick Jr.'s band and he was quite the entertainer.

But again, if you ever play a CD that goes out of it's way to take advantage of as much dynamic range as possible, the quiet passages will be extremely quiet and this is the problem, not the louder passages. If you touting this Feldman CD because it's explosive, you're not talking about a CD with super-wide dynamic range. I always liked Schubert's Symphony No. 8 - Unfinished, so when CDs came out, I picked this up: https://www.discogs.com/Mendelssohn-Schubert-Philharmonia-Orchestra-Sinopoli-Schubert-Symphony-No8-Unfinished-Mendelssohn-Sy/release/7516381 This CD utilizes a lot of those 96 dBs of dynamic range.

Drummer Bob Gullotti has died. He was 70. He will be missed by all of us around the Boston area. I have been lucky enough to have seen/heard Bob many times over the years as he played regular gigs around Boston with The Fringe and as a sideman. https://www.wbgo.org/post/bob-gullotti-drummer-and-teacher-known-legendary-tenure-fringe-dies-70#stream/0

Most of these claims stem from the fact that the most-used "Dynamic range meter" out there today, TT Meter, does not work well with vinyl. See the video below to see what a mastering engineer has to say. But... There is another thing at work here. In the digital realm, many newer releases are seriously compressed ("The Loudness Wars" at work) and when measured with TT Meter, the resulting dynamic range numbers are usually much less than what digital can theoretically deliver. So technically, you could have an LP released with the most dynamic range they could eke out of their vinyl pressing, which is around 60 dB, and then take an overcompressed digital version and measure less than that. BTW - you would probably not want to hear a musical recording that utilized the full dynamic range of 16 bit digital audio (~95 dB) because it's literally too much dynamic range for the human ear. I have some older classical CDs and the volume difference between the soft parts and the loud parts are so far apart, that I have to turn the volume up & down as I listen. I doubt that the difference between these two passages is anywhere near 96 dB either.

I've been to shows in larger venues where I've heard a little moan/groan when the band calls out a ballad. In general, people like the barn-burners and it's likely especially true when the band, JATP, is known for them.

In my opinion, the 80th Anniversary issues are just as good as the Tone Poet issues with the exception that they use cheaper LP art and press them at Pallas in Germany instead of at RTI on the US. Some would say that being pressed at Pallas is a good thing. Both are mastered and cut at Cohearant Audio by Kevin Gray and have similar audio signatures. Gray also mastered and cut the Music Matters LPs. I don't think you can go wrong with one of these pressings as long as sub-par artwork doesn't bother you. Some of the cover scans on these LPs are pretty bad.

I'll be seeing them when they play at the Shalin Liu Music Hall in Rockport, MA. I haven't seen them in a while so I am looking forward to seeing them again. That being said, I don't think I've seen them with Orrin Evans in the piano chair, so it'll be different.

Mr Creosote ate his last thin mint. Thank you Mr. Jones - you certainly got me to laugh like hell quite a few times.

I picked up the Tone Poet LP of Grant Green's "Born To Be Blue" and maybe it's just me knowing that Lion didn't release it when it was recorded, but to my ears, I'm not digging this date a lot. Green's playing is just eh and Ike Quebec doesn't sound that good at all. I guess this Tone Poet LP sounds good from an audio perspective, but I have stopped grading audio these days. Once again, side 1 has a huge amount of dead wax, making me wonder if Kevin Gray is ever going to get the hang of cutting in all analog without a preview head. It seems like he might be one to benefit from a digital preview circuit.

I was glad when Mosaic went to the lift off lids. Those hinges were a pain and it was almost inevitable that the hinge would break, particularly on the heavy LP sets. If you open the lid with the box sitting flat, the action of opening that lid completely causes the box with the LPs in it to lift off the flat surafce, putting all of the weight of the box onto the piece of paper that attached the lid to the bottom box. If you held the box in the air to avoid this, it would swing in the air off the paper and if you weren't careful, you could swing it too far and hear that tell-tale "crack" as the paper and/or glue let go. All in all, just a lousy design. Of course, that could just be the engineer in me.

Sanders is schedule to play at Scullers in Boston in June. It's been a while since I've seen him. I do hope he has a good night.

But you're missing something here - most of us did dump all of our records. Sure, not for downloads, but for CDs. LP covers can be nice but even these old LP covers are mostly nostalgic and usually because at some point, our eyesight goes to shit.. LP covers get dings by simply putting them down wrong and ring wear from simply putting them away. Seams split on your favorite records because you made the mistake of playing it too many times. To make matters worse, they are often the main reason your records got scratched. You have to buy special liners or vinyl sleeves for the covers, which of course makes them even harder to store and look at and in the end, sterilize the look. Nothing ruins an old LP more than haveing to look at it through a 4 mil vinyl sleeve. Yes, the CD artwork was smaller and took away from the "art" aspect of the LP cover, but you have to admit that the jewel case protected the CD and the artwork much better than the LP cover - an amazing concept! But this thread is not about LPs. It's about cassettes. You want to talk about tiny artwork? Cassette artwork had to be unfolded from under the cassette because it was so tiny. Even when my eyes worked well, I sometimes needed a magnifier for the printing in these things. I can't see anyone getting nostalgic about cassette artwork.

RIP Claudio. The pain is over. Damn prostate cancer claims another one.

A nice cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee from Gold Star Coffee in Toronto. Nice cup for not a lot of money - relatively speaking.

I was lucky to have seen him many times and I never left one of those gigs with anything but appreciation for his artistry. He didn't have a bad night. He was always smiling. RIP sir.

It's nostalgia, plain & simple. I understand it too. But don't conflate nostalgia with "everything's going to shit". That's what got us MAGA. I had a 1965 Chevrolet Impala when I was in high school and college. I loved that car. I experienced some great things in that car. Great memories. I have a nostalgic love for that car. In the late 80's, I fell into some money, so I decided I would get my 1965 Chevy Impala convertible that I always wanted. It showed up on a flatbead and I gleefully jumped into the driver's seat and started it up. Ahh, there was that sound of the 283 V8. Man, did that bring back memories! I was in heaven. Then I drove it. What a dog!! You could move the steering wheel back & forth for several inches and the car would still go straight. You turn and the whole front end nose-dives into the corner. No road feel. You float along. Hit a bump and almost bite you tongue. Put the top down and forget to unzip the glass rear window and it shatters. Snapping on the tonneau cover was a joke. Most of the snaps wouldn't snap and every other one ripped out of the vinyl. And then run out to the car in the sun with the top down and jump in with shorts onto that black vinyl bench seat. Mother %$##$!!!! The worst was those frickin' bias ply tires! You go into a corner on an exit ramp and hit a bump and the car walks off the road. Scared the crap out of me. Radials went on within days. Worst car i ever bought.

That is my very-experienced opinion and it is one shared by many other audiophiles who tried to make that format the best it could be. While I may not have had a Nakamichi Dragon, I had a very high-end cassette deck and I only used TDK or Maxell FerroChrome or metal tapes. No auto-level recordings, meticulous attention to detail and yet it never came close to LP, much less CD. All it ever did was add hiss to anything you recorded. Dolby A, Dolby B, dBx, etc. all took away from the music. I think I might have a bunch of old Blue Note prerecorded cassettes somewhere in a box. I couldn't wait to get that music on CD. Night & day.