Kevin Bresnahan

They are selling out of almost every set and don't seem to be re-stocking too many others. If they don't announce any new sets soon, this sounds a lot like a "Going out of business" sale.

I remember this topic came up when Blue Note decided to release a bunch of unissued sessions in the Connoisseur Series in the late 90's. I asked Michael Cuscuna and Tom Evered how they were able to release these unissued sessions but couldn't release others, like Horace Silver's "Live at Pep's" or Wayne Shorter's 1970 session. The explanation I got was that they could if they really wanted to, but in these cases, the artists asked them not to. In fact, Michael told me that he gave the master tapes for the "Live at Pep's" sessions to Horace so that he could destroy them himself, which seemed very weird to me at the time. Afterward, I figured that Michael wanted to prevent someone in the future from issuing a session that the artist himself clearly did not want issued because as they said, the label could issue it if they wanted to. I wonder if he did the same with Wayne's 1970 session tape?

I understand the "get paid" part, but is permission really required or is it just a matter of courtesy? I've had many conversations with insiders at Blue Note and the impression I got was that they could legally release pretty much anything in their vault but they always get permission if the artist is still alive. Does the union contract specify that the label needs to get permission first?

We have some music insiders here like Chuck so maybe they can clarify how it works with unissued material. I was under the impression from several conversations I've had over the years regarding the Blue Note vaults that since they paid for the music in their tape vault, they can issue it if they want to. I've often wondered if this is true.

Time is just flying by these days... another birthday gone. I don't feel 55 but the calendar doesn't lie. Wow.

So you're still working too? Man, I hope I don't find myself having to punch a clock at 76. I would like to be able to retire and do what I want, not get up at the crack of dawn, jump in a car and head off to the plant for another day of meetings, spreadsheets and lab excursions. I sometimes wonder if I'll even be alive at 76. My dad died at 70 and I've already inherited one of his health problems.

Even if Roscoe's 401K got wiped out in '08, he's still 76 and eligible for his full Social Security benefits, right? He should be able to retire if he wants to. These days, it seems like so many people get stuck working until the day they die. It doesn't seem right.

I got my copy in from an English Amazon seller named OxfordshireEngland for about $16 delivered. It arrived in about a week.

I still have 2 old Plextor (the real Plextor) external drive cases.

One of my weirdest interactions with an artist at a gig was when I saw Harold Mabern and he had his latest Venus CD, "Don't Know Why" for sale. I wanted him to sign it and I kinda looked at him and my face clearly said, "Do you really want to sign this?" We both laughed. I asked him what the hell was up with the cover and he said something like, "Not my choice, man, that's the way the label does it". But I do now have Harold's signature scrawled across a boudoir photo. BTW, it's a very good CD and I'm glad I bought it regardless of the weird cover. I still haven't ever asked Eric Alexander to sign any of his "Gentle Ballads" CDs.

How do you get "young" from that photo of her bare behind? I guess I'm no expert on guessing age from shots of bare buttocks. And for what it's worth, Jan Saudek has some pretty disturbing and yes, pornographic photos among his "artwork", including some of very young nudes, that I would not like to have grace a new Venus CD cover. Quite honestly, I think that they'd get Venus in a bit of trouble if they tried using one of them, no matter how "artsy" it might be. The McPherson photo is by another art photographer, Irina Ionesco, who is even more controversial than Saudek because she used her young daughter for many of her nude shots, though the shot on the cover of the McPherson disc is not one of them. Weird cover for sure but I don't get creepy from it. Now, if she doing something other than playing that saxophone... Please don't get me wrong... I think these covers are very odd and don't belong on a music CD, but I also see why Tetsuo Hara is doing them this way. As I said, many of these photos hang on the walls of art galleries all over the world. Whether or not we see the "art" in them doesn't matter, the rest of the world seems to. He sees his covers as some sort of work of art when he puts these images on them. I'd prefer Monets myself.

It may not be art to you or me, but the cover art for David Hazeltine's "Cleopatra's Dream" and "Alice In Wonderland" are photographs by Jan Saudek. His works hang in many art galleries around the world.

Soft porn? I guess you've never 1) seen soft porn or 2) gone to an art museum that has nudes. These covers are art, not porn.

Laptop drives are very thin by necessity. As such, they have to cram the same functionality into that thinner space and they make compromises. One of those compromises is how close the laser assembly is to the disc. I have had discs scratched by certain laptop drives as well. The only fix is to replace that drive with a new one and hope it's assembled a little better. There are accepted errors during assembly (tolerances) and every drive can be better or worse than another. Of course, your best bet is to get an external drive for ripping.

I do like song "Hey Jude" but not a big fan of the "Nah nah nah nah naaaah, Hey Jude" run out. Like fingernails on chalkboard sometimes. The worst version out there is the one someone posted of Linda McCartney's isolated mic when Paul McCartney played it during one of his early 90's tours. Shudder...

It looks like whoever ran the forums at http://stereocentral.tv deleted the forums' contents or else they got hacked. It's too bad as it had some pretty funny stuff there.

I have the first 8. I agree with romualdo that only the first one has LPs listed but be aware the LPs listed are only LPs that were still in print in 1992, which was not a lot. There are only a few labels that were still keeping LPs in print by then. I won't be buying the 9th as I think it's not really the Penguin Jazz Guide but the Reader's Digest Penguin Jazz Guide. In fact, once they stopped having the index in the back, the usefulness of the guide dropped quite a bit. Impossible to cross-reference without that index.

And people wonder why hard media is dying. This CD is for sale at Bull Moose Music for $27.97!

I am fairly positive that the original list price was $350. As I said, I pre-ordered from Bull Moose Music at $250 and was psyched i got it at all. The first run sold out in hours and since it was originally announced as a limited edition, many people freaked out and eBay started going crazy. I came very close to selling mine when they regularly started selling for $500. Then the Chinese knock-offs flooded the market. Then Capitol mysteriously erased all mentions of the limited availability from all of the press releases about it and set about pressing hundreds of thousand of more boxes. BTW, I am pretty sure the first Chinese knock-offs had some spelling errors on a few of the CD sleeves.

From: http://www.danmillerjazz.com/studentresources/chat_george_coleman.pdf FJ: Playing with Ron Carter and Jimmy Cobb is old hat for you, but it was your first time playing with guitarist Mike Stern. GEORGE COLEMAN: Oh yeah, that was the first time with Mike. To me honest and frank with you, Fred, it was a little bit out of character from what I normally like to play with. I always like the keyboard. Now, if we had a keyboard in there, I think it would have been much more suitable for me, but since it was a quartet and the only person playing any kind of chords and he wasn't playing that much to say you the truth. He didn't give up too much accompaniment. It was almost like I was playing with a trio to tell you the truth in some instances, to be honest and frank with you. It worked out and he's a good player. He's a young player. There were some things that we tried to get him involved in, but it was spur of the moment stuff. You can't get certain things overnight. But under the circumstances, I thought he did quite well. His solos were good, but that wah-wah effect on the guitar was a little bit out of character for me as far as what I like to hear. FJ: So you would have preferred Harold Mabern. GEORGE COLEMAN: I would have preferred Harold Mabern or some other keyboardist. Harold Mabern would have probably been perfect because he would have anchored everything and give us that real meat that we needed and if Mike had been there along with that, it probably would have enhanced it even more. That is one of those things. That is all history now, so we have to deal with it the way it is. Upon a listening, it came off pretty good. It makes you stronger when you're in a situation like that and you've got to put your best foot forward so to speak. If you're a performer or musician, whatever instrument you're playing, you've got to have creativity, good technique, and harmony, those three things is what goes with the music. Some guys may have one or two, but when you've got all three, that makes for a good performer.

If you're talking about the CD version of this box, I assume that are aware that the market was literally flooded with cheap Chinese knock-off box sets back when this supposed "limited edition" box was first issued and listed for $350. I paid around $250 at the time, as I assumed it was going to be impossible to find once it sold out. The bootleggers must have though that too. There are probably 100's of thousands of these Chinese knock-offs. There was a time when almost every eBay listing was a knock-off. There used to be a web page that helped identify them, but I have no idea if it's still active.

Based on the recommendations in this thread, I pre-ordered this from Amazon. I just received a cancellation notice due "a lack of availability". Did this release get cancelled?

I have a CD-R of a needle-drop of a Japanese copy of that 10" LP. I have no idea how the Japanese arm of Blue Note was able to reissue that LP, but they did. It's actually a nice date.

I was once told that the Fats Sadi date was only licensed by Blue Note for that 10" LP, which was why it was never released on a Blue Note CD.

A few tributes/obituaries have come out... http://wbgo.org/post/mickey-roker-dynamic-hard-bop-drummer-and-philly-jazz-institution-dies-84#stream/0 https://jazztimes.com/news/drummer-mickey-roker-dies-at-84/