Kevin Bresnahan

Wow! Oscar was a BABE! Who knew?

I am so beat today. I went to both Patriots playoff games... first time I've ever done it. Seeing the post game Lamar Hunt AFC Champion trophy presentation live was pretty awesome. It wasn't as cold in the stadium as I thought it was going to be. But there was someone nearby who ate something that smelled pretty bad when converted to a gas. On to Arizona! Go Pats!

I'd own the both of them if they were 33 1/3 rpm LPs. I am not getting into this 45 rpm fetish. And I still don't agree that cutting them at 45 rpm makes them sound any better. It just adds cost and makes them more expensive.

With the announcement today that EMI (owner of Blue Note) is planning to slash their staff in half tomorrow, I have to wonder if these "small fry" releases that Blue Note has planned will even happen. I don't see these beancounters giving a guaranteed low-selling Jazz release the go. I wonder if there will be a Blue Note after tomorrow?

Same dream - but substitute 'Mole Jazz' (RIP) for 'Stereojacks'. But if you do drop in at StereoJacks you can get that mole right next door! And that mole is excellent too! I usually order the Enchiladas Tres Marias. They also have excellent German beer on tap. Spaten Oktoberfest was there the last time I went. Yum.

It's sounds like you have some Japanese RVG CDs. Do the obi strips say "RVG" in large letters? $15-18 is about right these days for these RVG discs. Some titles could bring more, particularly if it's a title that only came out in Japan. The US market seems to have soured on these discs, especially with many of them coming out domestically. It could also be that it's because they pressed so darn many of them. If you have a list, I'd like to see it as there are a few titles that I might go for. Feel free to PM me with it. Kevin

Happy belated birthday. I hope your January first was better than mine. You wouldn't want this head cold for a present!

We spinning Oscar's Christmas disc as I type. One of my favorite Jazzy Christmas CDs. RIP Oscar.

If you truly enjoy Christmas music and have lot of it, Brubeck's disc would fit in wonderfully. But be aware - it is solo piano. If you like solo piano, it great. Do you have Oscar Peterson's Telarc CD? I find myself grabbing that disc more often than Brubeck's.

I believe that is on CD as "Jazz á la Bohemia" on the OJC label. The cover now looks like this:

I saw one in a window in Haverhill, MA last week and nearly drove off the road because I was laughing so hard. When I was a kid, my aunt had one with one of those motorized color wheels. My whole family used to laugh about it every year, especially when we watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and Charlie sees a metal tree in the tree stand.

Wah? The CD backer uses the same font as the original LP. The cover is reproduced. The liner notes are reproduced (in the same font). What makes this Connoisseur CD release look like a "bootleg label"? Everything is tiny, but that's what happens when you cram 12" square LP artwork into a 4.5" square.

I'm using Firefox but I tried switching to IE and it still happened once yesterday. I'll try messing with my cookies today but I have little hope that will work - it's happening on 2 different PCs.

Man, I am sick of having to log in every time I visit now! Has anyone else been having to do this? I check the box saying "Keep me logged in" and cookies are enabled. I never figured out why this happened back in October so I doubt I'll be able to figure this event out either.

Easy. Download the free program Audacity. You can find it at download.com. Open Audacity and then open all of the files you want to join. Then, it's a simple "cut & paste" to piece all of the parts together into one long file. Kevin

Yes, some of her watercolours were on ebay shortly after she passed away, I recall. 'Seamstress' was my recollection of her occupation in later years but I may be wrong. In any case, a sad waste after making that move to N. America but maybe that was he preferred occupation after some time in the NYC clubs, who knows. Seamstress it is. My mental file on Jutta Hipp needs some updating, however I am interested in knowing if anyone knows anything about the Lee Konitz angle. Tom Evered of Blue Note Records posted about this on the old Blue Note board. At the time, probably the late 90's, Jutta Hipp's royalties had accumulated to almost $50,000, mainly due to her records selling well in Japan. Someone mentioned this to Lee Konitz, whose wife was from Germany and knew Hipp. It turned out that Lee's wife was still in touch with her. Tom drove to Queens and delivered the check personally. I was talking with him on the phone about it later and he was so happy to have found her.

The 3 Stooges used to tour the US as a sort of vaudeville act. My mother went to see them and the thing she remembers the most about them is that they were shorter than she was. My mother is 5 feet tall.

I'd be willing to pay as much as $50 for a vinyl copy of this. However, I'd be doing it to support Organissimo. I won't go that high for other LPs. BTW, as much as many perusing this thread are going to hate hearing this, if you want a guarantee of a few hundred sales, have Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray press it for you. Find out his price and see if the premium is worth the extra sales. He has a large following and they buy his work.

It's amazing how many of these artists are now dead, with many of the causes of their deaths reading like the side of pack of cigarettes, "Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema". I'm glad my generation got ample warning of the dangers of this habit. Nowadays, we just pickle our livers.

A few years back, Jim Sangry highly recommended a live Lockjaw date on the Jasmine label called "Oh Gee: Live in Manchester 1967". I picked it up at Stereo Jacks, put it on my stereo and immediately zipped off a PM to Jim to thank him for recommending it. It's smokin' stuff. Absolutely insane blowing by Lockjaw in a couple of places. Well worth picking up if you're a fan.

Hopefully with that annoying shrill-ness taken out of the sound? Looking forward to those 3 bonus tracks on the 'Head On'. But it was only earlier copies of The Soothsayer that were affected, right? This was discussed many years ago, probably on the old BNBB. I know my copy doesn't have any sound problems. Not only "discussed" on the old BNBB, but it was our discovery of that tape distortion caused Blue Note to pull the master tape back out and re-do the CD to fix that nastiness. It was too bad that they never pulled the original mucked up discs. I bet I bought 3 copies of it before I got one that was "fixed". That was back in the days when the BN board was doing its thing to help BN succeed. FWIW, Organissimo.org has taken over from that old BN board as the place to get the word to and from Blue Note for many years now. Another reason to be thankful to Jim and the guys. Kevin

I'm going to add this info here... unless everyone thinks this deserves its own thread? Anyway, I heard back from Michael Cuscuna about the upcoming Horace Silver date and I asked him what was in store for Blue Note in 2008. He replied back with quite a few titles, with both RVG and Connoisseur CDs listed! Blue Note's reissues are not dead (yet). As always, these are the preliminary titles. Unless Michael includes UPC numbers, they aren't ready to go out the door. But I would think these are pretty firm. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> from Michael >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> March 11 RVGs Jimmy Smith – Live At The Baby Grand V. 1 Jimmy Smith – Live At The Baby Grand V. 2 Ike Quebec – Blue And Sentimental Jutta Hipp With Zoot Sims Here Comes Louis Smith Stanley Turrentine – Look Out! Freddie Redd – Shades Of Redd Horace Silver – Further Explorations Lou Donaldson – Here ‘Tis Wayne Shorter – The Soothsayer May 13 Connoisseurs Stanley Turrentine – Return Of The Prodigal Son (the June 23 & July 28, 1967 sessions) Louis Smith – Smithville (first time in stereo with two bonus tracks) Bobby Hutcherson – Head On (includes three previously unissued tracks) Art Farmer – Brass Shout (includes Aztec Suite) Dizzy Gillespie & James Moody with Gil Fuller & The Monterey Jazz Festival Orchestra (includes Moody's Night Flight album) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Some very interesting titles in that Conn batch. Kevin

I just heard back from Michael Cuscuna verifying the Feb. 5 release date. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Feb. 5 release ICPN: 5099950316328 HORACE SILVER – LIVE AT NEWPORT ’58 LOUIS SMITH, trumpet; JUNIOR COOK, tenor sax; HORACE SILVER, piano; GENE TAYLOR, bass; LOUIS HAYES, drums. 1. Introduction by Willis Connover 0:44 2. Tippin’ 13:10 3. The Outlaw 11:48 4. Senor Blues 8:42 5. Cool Eyes 10:22 all compositions by Horace Silver, Ecaroh Music Inc. ASCAP Remote recording supervised by George Avakian Recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, Rhode Island on Sunday, July 6, 1958. Recording engineers: Adjutor Theroux and Buddy Graham Produced for release by Michael Cuscuna Remixed from the original three-track tapes and mastered in 24-bit by Mark Wilder, Sony Studios, New York City. Photographs by Francis Wolff © Mosaic Images Special thanks to Larry Appelbaum and Steve Berkowitz. Visit www.horacesilver.com for more information about Horace Silver’s career, discography and news. LINER NOTES Horace Silver is a dichotomy. He is one of the most meticulous and organized musicians in modern jazz and yet one of the funkiest. His Virgo-driven (born September 2, 1928) sense of order never dampened the soulful passion of his music; in fact, it enhanced the precision and impact of his work. In 1955, he formed an alliance with Art Blakey to form a co-operative group entitled The Jazz Messengers with Hank Mobley, Doug Watkins and Kenny Dorham (later replaced by Donald Byrd). While I can’t think of two more different people than Horace and Art, their musical sites were set precisely on the same target – to bring the audience back to jazz by using the time-honored language and feeling of blues and gospel music to do it. The group jumped from Blue Note to Columbia and had a healthy degree of success before inevitably disbanding in the summer of 1956 due to the widely varying personalities and degrees of responsibility among its members. Co-operatives can’t survive in an art form that demands individuality. Essentially Blakey kept the name and Horace inherited the sidemen. That November, he returned to Blue Note to record Six Pieces Of Silver with Byrd, Mobley, Watkins and Louis Hayes. One of Horace’s new pieces was Senor Blues; never had anyone in jazz come up with a tune that was so Latin, so funky and so unyieldingly hip. Silver and producer Alfred Lion must have known the potent commercial power of this tune at the session because they cut a shorter 45-single version at the date. The album was rushed out within weeks of recording and met with great reviews. Senor Blues received unrelenting airplay in every major city in the United States. In 1979, Horace told me about its origin, “I have always been turned on by Latin music as well as blues and gospel. I used to listen to Tito Puente at Birdland and other bands of that type. I was always fond of Latin rhythms.” As airplay of Senor Blues spread, offers from clubs around the country came in and suddenly, a ubiquitous New York freelance musician became a bandleader. The Horace Silver Quintet was born as a working enterprise, as an outlet for Horace’s brilliant compositions and as an influential and shaping force in hard bop. Horace hit the road with Art Farmer, Mobley, Teddy Kotick and Hayes, his first real working band. In May 1957, they cut The Stylings Of Silver. But by late summer, Clifford Jordan replaced Hank Mobley who would leave to join Max Roach’s group. When Further Explorations was cut on January 13, 1958, the group with Farmer, Jordan, Kotick and Hayes was intact. Five months later, Horace would make the first of many group changes in his career with Louis Hayes as the only holdover. Junior Cook, whom Horace had met in Washington D.C. when they both sat in with Lou Donaldson, came in on tenor. Gene Taylor was the new bassist. By the time they went into the studio on June 15 to cut a vocal version of Senor Blues with Bill Henderson, the trumpet chair had yet to be filled and Donald Byrd came in for the record date. By the time of this Newport appearance, Louis Smith was hired as trumpeter. Smith had come to Blue Note in 1957 when Alfred Lion bought a number a masters from Tom Wilson’s defunct Transition label, including an unissued album by the superb young trumpeter. Smith was born in Memphis on May 20, 1931, attended Tennessee State University majoring in music. He eventually transferred to the University of Michigan where he met many of the musicians on the fertile Detroit scene. After an army stint, he accepted a job teaching music at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta. And that’s where he was when he came to New York in February 1957 to record the Transition album that would become one year later his Blue Note debut Here Comes Louis Smith. The album included Cannonball Adderley, using the pseudonym Buckshot LaFunke, and the first recorded composition of young Atlanta talent by the name of Duke Pearson who would, beginning in late 1959, figure large in Blue Note’s future. Alfred Lion certainly liked what he heard and recorded a second Smith album Smithville on March 30, 1958 and used him on Kenny Burrell's Blue Lights session of May 15, which also included Junior Cook. It’s likely that Alfred pulled Horace’s coat to the dazzling talent. And by the end of June, he was in the band. Unfortunately, at the end of the summer, Smith decided to leave the group and return to teaching music. Except for a 1959 album called Down Home Reunion with fellow Mempheans Booker Little, George Coleman, Frank Strozier and Phineas Newborn, he would not record again until the Danish label Steeplechase sought him out in 1978. While auditioning tapes at the Library of Congress recently, I came upon this Newport performance and was struck by the fact that a full performance during Louis Smith’s brief tenure with the group existed and that they actually performed Tippin’, a little known Silver original that was recorded three weeks earlier as the flip side of the vocal version of Senor Blues. Horace told me in 1979 when that single was issued on LP, "We were between albums, so I thought I should write something for the back side of the single instead of using something off the older albums. I guess that it was forgotten by the time we began planning the next album." That next album was Finger Poppin’ done on February 1, 1959, by which time Blue Mitchell was firmly in place in the trumpet chair. Having known that George Avakian supervised the recording of the entire Newport festival that year for Columbia, I scoured their vaults and found a pristine three-track masters of Horace’s 44-minute performance which closed the Sunday afternoon program that year. It is a testament to the popularity of this young bandleader that he was afforded over 40 minutes of stage time when most bands were held to 20. Tippin’ is a typically wonderful and memorable Silver line with a traditional 32-bar, AABA structure. Clearly, Gene Taylor and Louis Smith had already locked up as a rhythm section by this time. Junior Cook, like his predecessors in the band, never used an excessive amount of notes, built his solos methodically and always swung. Louis Smith’s gorgeous sound and fluid technique betray the influence of his favorite trumpeters Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown. And the ever-quotateous Horace is playing here with the kind of drive that one was more likely to hear from him on a bandstand than in a studio. It’s a shame that he didn’t choose to record live more often. The Outlaw, like some of Horace’s most ingenious compositions, has a more unusual structure but flows beautifully. It is essentially a 13-bar line, the last six of which are over a Latin rhythm, played twice, then a ten-bar bridge, a 16-bar Latin vamp and two-bar tag. And the musicians solo on the structure! Cook, Smith and Silver take three choruses each, before they share a chorus and then return to the theme. George Shearing recorded this tune in 1960 and performed it frequently. Silver alumnus Brian Lynch cut a version in 1986, but it is woefully neglected piece in the Silver canon. Horace’s Senor Blues is a magnificent creation, a sly, funky minor blues with a spare, memorable theme played over a captivating triple-meter Latin beat in an easy medium groove. Cook, Smith and Silver all solo in the pocket and maintain the tune’s understated tone. The trumpeter sounds eerily like his successor Blue Mitchell on the first few bars of his solo. Cool Eyes, which was also introduced on Six Pieces Of Silver, is another ingenious Silver composition that became the quintet’s theme song. Horace has always been a unique and exciting comper, but he outdoes himself here, driving the proceedings as much as Hayes. All five men solo brilliantly on this swinger. Less than three months after this concert, Louis Smith returned to teaching and Horace hired Blue Mitchell for the trumpet position in the band. Except for one personnel change, when Louis Hayes left to join Cannonball Adderley in late 1959 and was replaced by Roy Brooks, this band lasted more than five years, becoming one of the most popular and recognizable groups in jazz with a legacy of six-and-a-half classic albums on Blue Note. At this writing, Junior Cook and Gene Taylor are no longer with us. Louis Smith has retired from teaching and a stroke has ended his playing career. Louis Hayes is still working constantly and sounding great. Horace recently authored his autobiography Let’s Get to The Nitty Gritty (University Of California Press). In 2005, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) gave him the President’s Merit Award. He is also the president of Ecaroh Music Inc. and is actively involved in his website www.horacesilver.com. It would be easy to call this Horace’s golden era, but he never stopped writing great compositions or putting together great bands. But this early chapter in the history of his longest-lasting band is a wonderful performance and valuable addition to his discography. Michael Cuscuna May 2007 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I'll be buying this one! Sounds like primo Horace Silver. Kevin

I looked all over the US Blue Note page and I couldn't find anything about this. Where is the announcement? Kevin

I wonder what this one sounds like? In checking out Horace's discography, this appears to have been originally issued on a Spotlight LP. One of Horace's best bands, with Cook in the tenor chair. I'll have to consider this one. I put a call into Cuscuna to see if they're thinking about issuing it in the US any time soon. Kevin