Kevin Bresnahan

Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt with Brother Jack McDuff - Soul Summit (green label Prestige with RVG side 2). It's funny to read Bob Porter's 1966 liner notes where he spends most of the time saying that a blowing session with Ammons & Stitt is somehow better than anyone else's when in reality, it isn't. Pretty much just a plain ol' jam session. LP was stored in a basement too. Musty basement smell that just won't go away. BTW, Ray Baretto goes uncredited on this reissue. Was he credited on the original?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/hurricane-sandy-strikes-east-coast-gallery-1.1194577 50 people dead (so far). Nowhere near Katrina numbers but still pretty bad.

I am pretty sure I have all of Hank Mobley's commercially released recordings with the exception of Archie Shepp's "Yasmina, a Black Woman", which I never got around to getting and don't seem to miss yet.

Harry Allen will be playing in a quartet setting at the Sahara Jazz Club in Methuen, MA tonight. This will be the 5th or 6th time I've caught Harry at this out-of-way little club and I've had a great time at every show. You can't go wrong for $10. Kevin

Pianist Ray Santisi is playing at the Sahara Jazz Club in Methuen, MA tonight. I want to go, after all, how many more chances do you get to see someone who played with Charlie Parker perform? Unfortunately, the last time I saw Ray (with Charlie Mariano in Cambridge), he was pretty bad, playing some sort of "doo wah" setting on his electric piano.

I got in 7 of these CDs yesterday and I've been spending some time comparing a few. One of the first ones I popped for comparison was Jimmy Smith's "Cool Blues", one of my favorite Jimmy Smith dates. Surprisingly, the RVG CD holds up better than I thought it would have. The RVG is a bit louder and it's definitely EQ'ed up on the high end. Whether this is better for your ears or not may have a lot to do with your age. The last time I listened to the RVG CD, I thought it sounded brash with too much high end. Maybe it's this cold I have or maybe my ears are starting to fail me, but the RVG CD sounded a bit more detailed. However, you really can't turn up the RVG CD. It hurts at volume. Not so with the LT CD. The other two that I have been able to compare are two of Stan Turrentine's sessions that are found in the Mosaic box, "In Memory Of" & "Mr. Natural". Both of these sounded better on the new Japanese LT CD. A bit softer but again, much better at volume. Lots of midrange on Ron McMaster's Mosaic CDs that makes the studio echo much more pronounced and a lot less bass. I get a lot less fatigued listening to the Japanese masterings than Ron's Mosaic masterings. So far, these new LT CDs from Japan are typical of Japanese-mastered Blue Notes - faithful to the original LP sound with maybe a bit of bass EQ to warm it up. I am not disappointed. Kevin

My order of 7 of the new LT CDs from Japan came in and it included Dexter Gordon's "Landslide". As I type this, I'm spinning it. It sounds very nice. It isn't as "in your face" as many of today's CD reissues, which helps a lot with the cymbals. In fact, it sounds just a bit muted almost like one Ron McMaster's old CDs. There's seems to be very little EQ at all. Flat transfer of the master tape maybe? Kevin

The plural of vinyl is vinyl. The plural of LP is LPs.

Art Blakey - "Child's Dance". Green label Prestige with RVG in the deadwax that looks mint but plays with snap, crackle & pop throughout. Good thing it was cheap. Edit: It has to be mentioned how crappy the bass is on this LP. "Bumble bee bass" is being kind.

I'm surprised that they didn't add the two Blue Mitchell dates that were excluded from the Mosaic box, "Collision in Black" & "Bantu Village".

I wonder if the band was playing "Out Of Nowhere"?

Now we know why he slept through the rest of the concert.

You switched the MD numbers for the Serge Chaloff & Paul Desmond boxes. The numbers should be: Serge Chaloff - MD4-147 - $100 Paul Desmond - MD6-120 - $175

I had some cdjapan credit to use up so I ordered a few of these. I'll see for myself how they compare to the other issued CDs.

Ok Allen, you find Fred boring. But did you have to burn down Scullers to stop him from playing tonight? http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/09/19/doubletree-suites-hotel-in-allston-evacuated-after-fire-knocks-out-power/

Baritone sax alert! Gary Smulyan is coming to Methuen, MA's Sahara Jazz Club. Should be a good time. He's bringing me an advance copy of his newest CD, The Ellington Saxophone Project. Kevin

It doesn't happen often, but there have been a few times when I've forgotten that I was listening to an LP instead of a CD. I only fell asleep listening to a record once. It was a bummer to wake up to that soft whisssk-thump. That stylus is long gone now and my new one, an Ortofon Black, is rather expensive to replace. This is worth just for that.

I just got an E-mail from Music Direct and they just got in a new product called the Q Up. It's an automatic tonearm lifter. Neat little thing too. Unfortunately, it's also $60. It looks like a great Christmas gift idea.

I would return a DVD-R to a seller. It's not as advertised. In my experience, yes, DVD-R's do degrade with age. I don't know if I've had one DVD-R play cleanly after a few years. They seem far more susceptible to damage than CD-Rs. BTW, if this DVD-R is a copy of a commercial release and the supplier included all the protections of a commercial release, a simple "copy" is not straightforward. You can't simply insert the disc in one drive, a blank in the other a press "copy". You'll have to use a hacker program like DVDDecrypter. Kevin

There were some (very expensive) CDs issued only in Japan. I may have more but a couple I know I have are Billy Mitchell's "De Lawd's Blues" and Sonny Criss's "Saturday Morning". I think that Charles McPherson was one them too but I don't have it. They were priced around $30 each so I was very picky when buying them

I used to play parts of Fred's 3 disc set "Songs Without Words" quite often but I have to admit, I haven't spun it in a while. I prefer him with a horn so I really like the work he's done with Jane Ira Bloom. "The Red Quartets", "Nearness", Modern Drama" & "Mighty Lights" (with Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell rounding out the rhythm section) are all very good as long as you are not soprano sax adverse. Their duet album, "As One" is pretty but I can see it boring some people. I guess it depends on what you want out of it. If you want some mostly mellow noodling, it'll fit the bill. If you want steaming, foot-tapping music, it'll be boring.

No duplicate threads is especially important for "RIP..." threads. I have been a member of a forum, now defunct, that allowed duplicate threads and when a name player died, there were usually 4 or 5 simultaneous threads about it, each with several replies. It was stupid and annoying. I am glad that most forums today stop this kind of stuff.

Jack's is very close to being a vinyl shop too. The new CD section is only a few feet long and the used bins aren't nearly as full as they were during CD's heyday. I've been buying more and more vinyl these anyway so I appreciate the change. I imagine if people were still buying CDs, his stock would reflect that. He stocks what sells.

I have 2500 pts at cdjapan so I was thinking about ordering a bunch of these new LT CDs but I can't seem to find *anyone* who can tell how they stack up against other CDs of the same material. I love my Mosaic boxes but there are times when I want to hear one particular session and I don't want to figure out which CD to load and which tracks to play. In particular, I am torn on Jimmy Smith's "Cool Blues". The Ron McMaster CD was cut with the tape playing too fast (which is why it was deleted) and the RVG CD doesn't sound all that great. If this new LT CD sounds good, I'll be all over it because I think the session is very good. However, I don't want a compressed pile of audio goop. Kevin BTW, in the vinyl realm, I agree with Mike that these LT LPs don't sound that great. Most of them suffer from some sort of weakness that later releases have revealed. For instance, the Connoisseur CD & LP of Hank Mobley's "A Slice Of The Top" are much better than the LT LP. The LT LP suffers from a weird stereo spread and a weak audio presentation, particularly with regards to the cymbals. Kevin

Some photos of texts from McLean's Consequence,that are common to all these releases: Alex.- Since you have this new Japanese CD, are you able to compare it to the CD from Mosaic box or even the regular US Blue Note CD issue from 2005? Kevin