Kevin Bresnahan

Did you see the list price on these RVG CDs?? $17.99! No way! Their SACDs of these titles were barely above that list and there is a lot of extra manufacturing costs there. What the hell is RVG charging for his services these anyway? Big mistake on Concord's part if they think many of us are going to re-buy these. BTW, check out the "look" of these new Prestige RVG CDs, particularly the back. It's a Blue Note design! Same font, same layout. It was weird when I first picked up "Saxophone Colussus"... I thought it was a new Blue Note RVG. Then my memory clicked and I was really surprised. Kevin

Do you mind telling us how much they were? I am curious. PM me if you like. I am more curious to see if they come in and you find that they are US pressings of the hybrid SACDs. People over on the Hoffman forum have speculated that they might be. I can't believe they'd do that. Kevin

The CD has 6 tracks, totalling 42:50. They are: Out of Joe's Bag (Mobley) 5:07 I Should Care (Cohn-Stardahl-Weston) 7:44 Gettin' And Jettin' (Mobley) 7:46 Hank's Other Soul (Mobley) 8:44 Hello Young Lovers (Rogers-Hammerstein) 8:06 Three Coins In A Fountain (Styne-Cahn) 5:21 Three Mobley originals with Hank, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe? The Kelly/Chambers rhythm section was on "Peckin' Time", Soul Station". "Roll Call" and "Workout". The three of them were Miles' backing band at the time. I don't see how this could be considered an off-the-cuff blowing session. Well, I didn't rave about this one, if that's what you mean. I merely commented that the Japanese RVG CD sounded weird to my ears. As for the music, it's not one of my favorite McLean dates but I wouldn't dump it. Kevin

Couldn't disagree with you more on this one. There are days when I prefer "Another Workout" over "Workout". The 1960-63 era Mobley Blue Notes are my favorite and this one fits in perfectly. He was still blowing that hard bop but he was getting funky. I prefer it over the Mosaic material. Mobley's Savoy and Prestige sessions sound like blowing sessions to me. Kevin

I just got the planned RVG titles for this summer. I know a lot of people have wanted "Here To Stay" and there it sits! FWIW, I am so glad to see Mobley's "Another Workout" coming back into print and Lee Morgan's "The Cooker" has some killer Pepper Adams. The titles are... drum roll please... AUGUST Donald Byrd – Royal Flush Kenny Dorham – Trompeta Toccata Johnny Griffin – The Congregation (includes bonus track) Lee Morgan – The Cooker (bonus track) Hank Mobley – Another Workout Ike Quebec – It Might As Well Be Spring SEPTEMBER Donald Byrd – Off To The Races Freddie Hubbard – Here To Stay Bobby Hutcherson – Happenings Jackie McLean – Demon’s Dance Lee Morgan – City Lights Horace Silver – Doin’ The Thing At The Village Gate (includes bonus tracks) I have "Trompeta Toccata", "The Congregation", "The Cooker" and "Doin' The Thing At The Village Gate" (I think) on Japanese RVGs. All of them sound very good. I once owned the Japanese RVG of "Demon's Dance" and I thought it sounded like AM radio. We'll see if this new version gets it right. Kevin

Slashes mess up the file naming routines since in PC lingo, a slash identifies a directory tree. Rename the ballad medley with dashes (-) and you should be fine. BTW, you are much better off using Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs. If you did, you'd know if there were read problems and the audio extraction is much more precise. However, EAC is not an easy program to master so if you are not feeling like learning something new, stick with what you have. Kevin

Apparently real but these photos were taken by the vet. In the bigger pictures around the 'net, you can see the stainless steel vet table in the background. Kevin

From Snopes.com (the Urban Legends website): Origins: An alternate version of this e-mail provides the additional information that the dog pictured above is a female bull terrier named Inca who had her memorable encounter with a porcupine in May 2005: "Inca apparently did not know when to quit when she encountered the porcupine on Victoria Day, May 23rd. These are the pictures the vet sent before the long (and expensive) procedure to remove the quills. She had thousands of quills, and her tongue was so covered, she could not close her mouth." "It was pretty scary at first. She is doing okay now, but looks like a World War III survivor as they had to cut some out in places, stitched between her toes, and many quills bled on removal." "Here are still quills buried in her, but they should work their way out over time (I pulled four more today). She is on antibiotics and pain meds and thankfully is doing quite well. Maybe she was showing off for her new boyfriend, Rocky, I don't know; but he only got a few in him, which friends were able to remove. Ike, of course, had better sense." "I sure hope that the Queen of Quills has learned her lesson..." BTW, all dogs are dumb! I thought I had a smart one until the day she decided that skunk looked like a playmate. Kevin

The thing that's weird about that eBay LP is that from everything I've read, these labels never stayed on the record. Those Transition LPs were made of polystyrene or something like that and the glue they used on the labels supposedly never stuck well. These photos on eBay make it look like the labels are stuck right on there. Also, the vinyl looks like... well, vinyl. Chuck Nessa mentioned that he had an original of this. Maybe he can tell us of that eBay auction is for an original or not. Kevin

No, not Lon. It was me and it was 6 boxes at a Sam Goody in Revere (?) Massachusetts and the price was $1.51 EACH. I read about the deal on the rec.music.bluenote newsgroup one night and when I got to the bottom of the post and the guy said, "So if you're near the Revere Sam Goody store", and I ran out of the house. My wife thought the house was on fire! BTW, I left two boxes behind. Another member here bought them. Kevin

That's weird... the Japanese CD, TOCJ-5885, has a reproduction of the LP artwork and it says: Songs...Side A: RETURN TO PARADISE Tiomkin 12:52 PHINUPI Burrell 9:24 Side B: PHIL T. McNASTY'S BLUES Traditional 4:53 MORE OF THE SAME Jones 10:01 PANONICA Jones 3:49 For TRANSITION... Bob Guy/Engineer Tom Wilson/Cover Art, Photos A Live Concert Jazz Production by Tom Wilson

You lost me Chuck. Private joke maybe? BTW, I don't understand why anyone would want "The Jody Grind" RVG'ed. It's been revealed that "The Jody Grind" master tape is gone and that all CD releases have used an LP master tape (known in internet parlance as a "needle drop"). I suppose RVG did a nice job with Duke Pearson's "Sweet Honey Bee", which has the same problem, but from what I heard when I compared the original CD to the RVG, it wasn't a dramatic improvement. Kevin

Norah's "film debut" was a cameo in Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock's "Two Weeks Notice".

Yeah, you could mount that F: drive in another machine (or externally to another machine) and get the info off of it. However, if that drive fails, you won't be able to recover that info off of C: unless you have the system set up as a dual hardrive RAID. If these files are that important to you, you should have them permanently backed up on optical (CD-R or DVD-R) media. I recently switched over to DVD-R and I am amazed at how much information I can store in 4.7 GB. However, I have also found (rather painfully) that cheap DVD-R discs fail prematurely. Stick to Taiyo Yuden-made blanks and you should be OK. Kevin

The XRCD of this date is one of the best-sounding CDs ever made. It comes out of my speakers like I'm there. I also picked up a 24 bit-96 kHz DVD-Audio version on an expensive Japanese import and it sounds very similar to the XRCD. BTW, the Pablo CD says "Stereo" but to my ears, it sounds mono. If it's stereo, it's not panned very much. Was Granz experimenting with stereo in 1956? Kevin

No SACD layer just sucks. A label like Mosaic should be doing something to differentiate themselves and SACD is the way to do it. I see no reason to re-buy these sessions. Why would I re-buy Blakey's "Hard Bop"? For stereo? The mono sounds fine, thanks. JJ Johnson's "JJ!" on the Spanish RCA CD sounds very good to me. I just can't justify spending $15 each for these. Now, if these discs had an SACD layer, I'd be pre-ordering them NOW. Kevin

FWIW, effective July 2005, no cell phone service company can activate a cell phone in the US without a GPS locator circuit.

I had an MRI and they let me wear headphones to listen to some tunes. Luckily I anticipated this and brought some of my own CDs. Their "Jazz CD"? Kenny G! I am pretty claustophobic (having two older brothers stuff you into closets/hampers etc. will do that to you) but I just closed my eyes and listened to some tunes... just vegged out. Kevin

If I remember correctly Michael Cuscuna has said that this series won't be revived because of poor sales. I don't think it was Cuscuna who said that the West Coast Classics bombed. It was Tom Evered (tomatbluenote) who said it bombed. Cuscuna is still trying to get the PJ stuff out as evidenced by his work with Mighty Quinn. Kevin

This is one of my favorite CDs. I've been pushing this under people's noses for years. I didn't know it went oop. What a bummer. BTW, the US CD has 4 bonus tracks from a JATP show that adds to it's value over a Japanese reissue that'll likely stick to the original LP track listing. Later, Kevin

Back in the early days of CD, Toshiba/EMI in Japan issued The Beatles' "Abbey Road". I bought a copy since it was the first and only (at the time) release of any Beatles music. Over the years, EMI has released a remastered version of this title and this mastering is copied for every released version of this title all over the world. Well, it turns out that many listeners prefer this old Toshiba/EMI CD. It has a unique "black triangle" design, making it easy to spot. The prices on these black triangle "Abbey Road" CDs began to go through the roof. Of course, now that the value skyrocketed, it caught the eye of the bootleggers. eBay is now flush with these cheap knock-offs. It has gotten nearly impossible to know if you're getting a legit copy or a fake. The price for real copies has gone even higher, once proper legitimacy is established. What has eBay done to the bootleggers? Nothing. No matter how often people point it out to them, they allow these bootleggers to continue to sell their fakes. eBay's feedback system is broken. They refuse to address "feedback hostage taking" incidents. Sellers hardly, if ever, give feedback after the buyer fulfills their end of the bargain. Instead, they wait until the buyer leaves feedback first. That's bass-ackwards. Buyers know that they can't ding the seller for risk of getting a negative right back. One negative is enough to get your future buying ability killed. So bad sellers continue to get away with ripping off sellers. All eBay has to do is put in a system that requires a seller's feedback first. It would be a piece of cake. But eBay won't. They love their "Power Sellers", even if some of them are thieves. All eBay cares about is lining their own pockets. They care not if anyone gets ripped off. Kevin

I really like this date. Mobley shines. Great tunes too. However, the title track has that hi-hat squeek that just annoys the hell out of me. Of course, it might just be my ears. I seem to zone in on it and it just drives me nuts. BTW, I have owned the TOCJ, the JRVG and the US CD. All of them have the squeek. When I compared them all, I kept the JRVG. It's one of Rudy's better jobs.

WOW!! 1000 Yen for these? I paid waaaay more than that for Ervin's "The Book Cooks" back when it was first released in Japan.

Rita, I replied to your request for help over on Jazz Corner. Unfortunately, I am in Taiwan right now and I will be unable to help a lot because I will be in meetings most of the time. Kevin

I know what you mean, Jim... having Land instead of James Clay is not a bad thing at all.