Kevin Bresnahan

I was listening to my cable TV system's Music Choice Jazz station, when I heard a good tune from a CD titled "Live @ The Loft" by a tenor player by the name of Michael Pedicin. I Googled him and found out that CD Baby carried several of his recordings ( https://store.cdbaby.com/Artist/MichaelPedicin1 ), including a couple of ballads CDs. I like spinning ballads at dinner time. So I ordered three CDs. I've played one of the ballads CDs already and it is excellent. So thanks Music Choice - you turned me on to a player I've never heard before and likely never would have any other way.

I'd like to thank those of you who went and voted for Hank in this year's poll. The poll is now closed and we wait to see if he made it. I hope he at least got more than the 618 he got last year.

You are right when you say that they are not doing it right. Most pf them don't know right from wrong on their PC. I think that you are making an incorrect assumption that many (most?) people are as computer savvy as those of us here on organissimo. I am often called upon to help friends with computer problems and when I bring up their lack of backup, I almost always get a blank stare. And when I start pricing out some external backup options, their answer is usually, "No, I'm OK for now". Lately, I've started buying inexpensive USB drives at BJ's for when I go out on one of these PC repair road trips. I usually back up their pictures and important documents and leave it behind in a desk drawer. Even though these drives are not supposed to be used for "permanent" storage, I figure it's better than nothing.

Are you saying that you don't know anyone who has lost music due to hard drive failure? Really? If so, you have some lucky friends. I know a few. I lost a hard drive with all my music on it. Luckily, I had it backed up. If that back up drive failed before I backed it up, I would have lost everything. One time, my oldest daughter accidentally downloaded a virus onto our home PC. I had to scrub the whole thing and reinstall Windows. I thought I had everything backed up. It turns out, I hadn't backed up my photos folder in a while, so I lost all of my youngest daughter's high school graduation photos. That still hurts. All hard drives are vulnerable to failure. Backing up to a single external hard drive is not enough. I have my music backed up onto several hard drives, with at least one of them located in another place other than my house in case my house burns down.

One of my neighbors is 86 and he runs at least 2 miles daily. He amazes me. I am in no condition to run 1 mile, much less 2 miles *daily* and I'm only 56.

That goes with walking. BTW, when I saw him last, they nearly had to carry him down the hallway after the show. To be honest, it was pretty sad to see. He looked to be in some pain.

As I posted 5 years ago after seeing him live: I saw him one more time after that (in 2014) and he looked even worse but still played incredibly. I don't think he's been back to Boston since then. Don't forget that he is a 79 year old man playing a physically demanding instrument. I hope I can walk when I'm 79, never mind playing a piano.

I would tend to agree that you want well-made speaker wires. But I doubt that those who sell super-expensive wire are merely "people who take their work seriously". I think you give them too much credit. I'd bet that most of them are people who take making money very seriously. If these beautiful heavy duty audiophile cables didn't sell, they wouldn't make them. But I'm probably not the person to be asking about this as I've done many audio installations over the years with bare wire on both ends of regular ol' wire. This used to be the only way to wire up speakers. I always thought that they sounded fine. The regular use of wire terminations started in the late 70's. Back then, banana connectors were considered "audiophile". When I first started putting lugs onto my wires, it was for use in car audio and if you can believe it, I soldered them on with lead solder. Sacrilege!!

Electrically, lamp cord works fine. However, not all cheap wires age well. I've found that some standard, off-the-shelf lamp cord oxidizes quite a bit with age. Like this: Now, I'm not saying that even this will affect the sound, but it certainly looks ugly. I'm not an advocate for "Just get some cheap lamp cord from Home Depot and be done with it". Maybe years ago, that would be me. Today, I'm more of a "Get some good quality wire and be done with it," guy. Whether it's super-expensive wire that looks incredible or some cheaper Belkin or Monoprice cable that looks like plain ol' wire - just get good wire. Up in this thread, I recommended Blue Jean Cable. They use Belkin wire for their speaker wires. Recently, I needed to wire up the rear speakers for my surround sound set-up so I bought a spool of 16 gauge Belkin wire from Parts Express: https://www.parts-express.com/belden-6200ue-16-awg-2c-cable-plenum-rated-in-wall-speaker-wire-100-ft-usa--102-1102. It looks good and works fine. Relatively cheap too, as I had a 50 foot option when I bought mine. The other thing to remember about audiophile grade speaker wires is that some of them use ridiculously heavy gauge wire. This results in wires that look like jump ropes laying across your floor. You can forget about making tight radius turns with these "wires", as they just don't bend. They're nice to look at - almost a work of art - but functionally, they're a bitch to work with. In my recent surround installation, I had to run the wire above a dropped ceiling and down the wall on both ends. Heavy gauge wire would have made this difficult and probably would've looked ugly.

Not where it snows. They're just support structures for ice dams.

I'm seeing Chick for the first time in September, when he brings his trio to Scullers. It's weird to hear that he's 77. It seems like yesterday that he was still in his 60s. I haven't seen Dave Holland in quite a while. I used to see him every year at the Regattabar but I haven't seen him on any of the Boston-area clubs' schedules in ages. His quintets were something to see. Actually, I see that he played at Berklee Performance Center back in May. I'm not surprised that I never heard about it. They are terrible at promotion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Parker He's 74. Heck, Dave Holland is 71.

You can sample this here: https://daveholland.bandcamp.com/album/uncharted-territories After sampling several tracks, I can safely say that this is not for me. This is not a style I dig at all.

I didn't think that Transition pressed their records in anything other than styrene so I wonder why yours looks like vinyl? I've been told that some owners of these records glued the labels back on themselves. Maybe that's what you have here?

Hey, at least you know they're unfiltered.

If Barton still reads organissimo, maybe he has already voted for Hank? EDIT: Although I highly doubt that he gets any internet access!!! The political stuff stems from several Jazz artists who have recently released recordings with political messages. DB did stories about these recordings and the artists got very political in describing the recording. Several anti-Trump stories seemed to get a pass but when Terence Blanchard went with a "Black Lives Matter" stance, the letters to the editor started up. You can read it in the July issue: http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2018/DB1807/single_page_view/30.html

http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2018/DB1809/single_page_view/10.html It looks like Bill Barton still gets to read DownBeat while sitting in the minimum security Federal Penitentiary in Seagoville, TX.

I was always under the impression that the lousy bass sound from this era was due to the advent of cheap electronic pick-ups, the "direct bass" days? I thought I read where they went away from pick-ups and back to mic'ing the bass in the early 80's?

I found a track today. The sound is pretty good with the exception that it has lousy bass sound that's so typical of that era.

No, it was definitely a US/Canada thing. There was a lot of pressure from the environmentalists to eliminate them too. The record labels knew that the end was coming when they started individually sealing the CD inside the sealed longbox. They put a special sticker on the outside to let the retailer know that it was double sealed. The sticker was the yellow & red square sticker you see in this picture:

The "Black triangle" CD shown above was an early Japanese-only issue. I bought many early CDs from Japan and I don't remember any of them coming in any kind of holder. They were just sealed CDs like all of the stores use today. The longbox was a US invention, done to allow record stores to re-use their LP storage bins and (supposedly) to prevent theft. This link shows some early Japanese CD issues where you can see that none of them had any sort of additional packaging: http://www.keithhirsch.com/cd-gallery/sealed-cd-gallery As for the first US pressing of Hancock's "Maiden Voyage", the so-called "McMaster", it was issued in 1986, which puts it in the era where there was probably a longbox. After all, "Speak Like A Child" first came out on CD in the US in 1987 and as this picture shows, it came in a longbox. I have no idea if having the longbox would add value to the CD.

Thanks for the reminder... I had that one too!! (EDIT - I just checked and I sold this one on the Hoffman forums for $50 back in 2008) Ha ha ha... just looked in my .mp3 file area and I see that l also had (or have) the TOCJ-4195 version. Jeez, I've owned a lot of versions of this recording!!

Hmmm... I'll play. I've had an early 70's RVG pressed LP, the late 90's "all analog" Wally Traugott LP pressing, the McMaster CD, the BN box (also McMaster), the RVG CD, the Hoffman SACD and finally the Music Matters 33 rpm LP. I'm done too.

Original Transition LPs??? If true, just that Watkins LP with inserts alone is worth about $1,000, especially if the labels are somehow still attached to the plastic record.

Herb Ellis - Ellis In Wonderland (Verve). What a nice record. I am really digging this one. Swingers mixed with nice ballads.Foot tapping music.