Kevin Bresnahan

I didn't know he was sick but it sounds like his suffering is over. The few times I saw him, he put on a great show. He's my mother's age... for some reason, I thought he was a lot younger than that.

Lucky Thompson - Body & Soul (Nessa). Nice date but I missed that side 2 has a large scratch across the entire side. My biggest complaint about vinyl.

I've had those two Henderson CDs in cart a couple of times but... I just don't spin those CDs enough to worry about an incremental improvement in sound. I have played to the DoubleTime CDs since these SHM versions came out and they sound OK to me. Even if these are "night & day" better, I don't think I'd play them any more than I play these old discs. I've also had "Out To Lunch" in my cart a few times but that is not one of my favorite Blue Note dates either. Yeah, my Jazz musical taste are a bit on the conservative side, I know it and live with it.

I have held off this bandwagon for a while now. It sounds like I might want to try a few of these after all. Is there a list of 5 or 6 titles that are "must have"?

They say men spend the first 9 months of their lives trying to get out of there and the majority of the rest of their lives trying to get back in.

Great stuff but I have to wonder why they went with 3 separate volumes. This material easily fits onto 2 CDs. That's the way I have this material.

On a Windows 7 (and earlier) machine, go to the start menu and find Character Map. On my machine, it's under All Programs>Accessories>System Tools. You can find any typed symbol there is in there.

I didn't realize that Billy Mitchell was playing with Horace in 1957. Most biographies say he was in Miami until 1958. Not sure where you came up with Billy Mitchell in my post? Look again and you will see that I wrote BLUE mitchell. I meant to type Blue Mitchell. Most *Blue* Mitchell biographies list him as being in Miami until 1958.

I didn't realize that Billy Mitchell was playing with Horace in 1957. Most biographies say he was in Miami until 1958.

Not in my book. The Hendrix family reissues are maximized to the point of inducing a headache if you make the mistake of listening with headphones. Unfortunately, the earlier CDs were no sonic jewels either. I'm beginning to doubt that anyone will get this catalog to sound its best in the digital world.

As an added bonus, a lot of those late 70's/early 80's red-label Savoys were cut by RVG and sound pretty good.

I had a Billy Harper Fan Club CD-R fail on me. It was Billy's "The Believer". I never backed it up (forgot that it was a CD-R) and went to play it the other day and none of my players would recognize the disc. An e-mail to the fan club asking for a replacement was met with "Sorry, can't do it". Of course, they no longer sell CDs, so that might have something to do with it. But still, selling CD-Rs in the first place sucks. If anyone buys one of these CD-Rs, make sure you back it up digitally. You never know.

Thank you, everyone. Another year gone. They are flying by at this point. Later, Kevin

I picked this one up a few weeks back and I don't know what it is about LeDonne's organ playing on some of these tunes, but I'm not liking it as much as I have on other dates he's used the organ. It has a sound that equals "old fashioned" to my ears, like something Doc Bagby would play. Maybe someone can explain it to me. Is it the recording or am I just so used to people playing like Jimmy Smith that when I hear a different approach, it sounds off?

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/the-2000-cd-made-from-glass-1/ You would think that someone who "designed and built CD (and Laserdisc) mastering machines" would not blame a digital readback fault (which did not change the digital bitstream at all) into a change in frequency and amplitude of the analog output. If these two digitally-identical discs sounded different, then it was something in the player's D-A converter. That's the only place where analog changes can come from. You'd have to have a very, very special and unique set of digital shifts to make the resulting analog output that different... and he should know this.

It's funny that the Wiki article fails to mention his nickname while in Boston: The Gerbil.

Jimmy Heath - The Gap Sealer (Cobblestone). Kenny's electric piano still doesn't do a lot for me but I've gotten more & more used to it by this point in my life. I'd still rather hear him on an acoustic piano. Jimmy's playing is all right though.

Lee Konitz - Very Cool (Verve/52nd Street).

Try an experiment with someone behind a sheet moving the wires up and down as you listen to the music. If you can hear an active shift, maybe you're onto something. Even if you do hear a shift, I would still blame something in your rack rather than the speaker wire. Are the wires being taped up near AC power cords (not that I think it matters - just curious)?

Phil Woods - Song For Sisyphus (Century Records). "RECORDED DIRECT-TO-DISC"!! Still doesn't sound all that great. It probably has something to do with it being recorded in 1978, a year when it seems that many bass players felt the need to make their instrument sound like a manic bumble bee. It suffers noticeably in comparison to the previous record, which was recorded with a nice, warm bass sound.

Scott Hamilton - Remembering Billie (Blue Duchess). A beautifully recorded date of well-know Holliday songs. The coolest thing (for me) is the rhythm section, which is a local one that I hear quite often. I probably see pianist Tim Ray 10 or 15 times a year.

This doesn't surprise me at all. Many years ago, I saw Roy at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, MA. In between sets, I went to ask him for an autograph. I was told he stepped outside. Figuring maybe he went out for a smoke, I went out to see if he could accommodate my request. I saw him get out of a car and he was sniffing like crazy. Not wanting to assume anything, I went up and asked him for an autograph. He just hopped back & forth in the balls of his feet and looked around like a psycho. He didn't answer me at all. He didn't seem to understand what I was asking. This went on for several uncomfortable seconds so I just turned around and went back into the club.

I read an article a while back that nearly all of the "Gillette" blades being sold on Amazon & eBay are counterfeits. I once gave an Amazon seller a try and the results were not pretty. I hacked my face up pretty bad. I went back to Walmart-sourced blades and things are fine again. BTW, I use Gillette Sensor blades. I avoid the Sensor Excel blades (the ones with the rubber strip) because they catch on parts of my chin and leave divots.

Also the cover for the DMM US LP from the early 80s. I agree with your assessment.

Tonight at the Sahara Jazz Club in Methuen, MA, Ralph Lalama.