Kevin Bresnahan

I'm thinking about seeing Nick Goumas and Jason Palmer at Arthur's House of Jazz in Methuen Thursday night, but I just saw them at The Press Room a few months ago. Plus, no one seems able to go to this one, so I'd have to go solo.

I seem to remember late (like December) of 1996 but it may have been later. No matter when it started, it wasn't around for very long. I hung out at various Jazz forums back then and even the AAJ and The Jazz Corner forums held on longer than the Blue Note board.

The Blue Note forum was only around for about 7 years (1996-2003), so this forum has outlasted it by quite a bit.

The way-too-short "Way Out West" ended, so it's on to Kenny Dorham's "Live At The Cafe Bohemia" 2-CD set. I'm listening to disc 1 of the Ron McMaster CD set now and it sounds pretty good... well, except for the piano, which sounds a bit off. Sustained notes have a bit of warble. Probably on the master tape. This is coming out as a 3 LP/2 CD Tone Poet reissue soon. I'm going to pass on this one, as I think my old double-CD set will suffice. Sometimes it's good to have lost that upgrade itch. I think I've finally come to realize that my ears are fucked up enough at this point that it's money poorly spent to upgrade anything. That said, even my shitty ears can hear the lousy piano sound here.

Sonny Rollins Way Out West (Contemporary/Analogue Productions) SACD version mastered by Doug Sax. I enjoy these SACDs, as they seem to try and mimic the original LP sound.

Nope - I have days where the back button takes quite a few seconds to do anything. A couple of times, I went to another tab with a different website to see if that website was also slow (meaning my internet connection was slow) and found that it was only organissimo's forums that wasn't loading.

In the past, Jim Alfredson has said that the board is sometimes attacked by spam bots and this can cause DNS (denial of service) for users. I've had days recently where the board's response was very slow. I do not see any anti-spam tools for the moderators to mess with so if it gets really bad for everyone, we'll have to have Jim look into it again.

I'm sure a search of these forums will find some discussion of it. I have never been a fan, as it saddens me to hear a weak Hank Mobley struggle to blow his horn. Others hear differently.

I almost went but the prices were a bit rich for me, especially considering I just saw them a couple of times last month on the McBride's World At Sea cruise.

Because Greg is somewhat "local" to my area, I get to see him quite often. He's actually playing at Arthur's House Of Jazz in Methuen, MA on April 9th. Every time I catch him live, he plays great.

Sabbagh's best effort yet. Killer rhythm section.

Would love to hear this but it's impossible to find, even as a download. Paid download on bandcamp that is... https://smokejazzclub.bandcamp.com/album/the-smoke-sessions-10th-anniversary-limited-edition-4cd-box-set

Rumored to have been changed due to a threat of a lawsuit, which I believe was denied by Hefner. The answer is blowing in the wind.

I guess Pittsburgh is aiming to be the heart attack capital of the US?

Another example of why the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was such a bad law. Before this stupid law was enacted, no one entity could own so many networks. It allowed for independence. It prevented any one corporation from skewing the news. What will happen now is anyone's guess, but recent history (CBS' recent BS moves) has shown that it will not be good when it comes to reporting on real stories.

I could have sworn that I had this CD in my collection but a search brings up nothing. I bet I haven't heard this in decades by now. I remember liking it. I wonder where it went?

If you've ever thought of taking one of the many Jazz cruises out there but wondered what it might be like, here are the activity schedules from the McBride's World At Sea Jazz cruise that took place Jan. 20-27 of this year. I had a blast and truth be told, got a little more Jazz than I could handle by the end.

I would not consider the first one as it only has 4 GB of RAM. If you want Windows on your machine, skip the second one, as Windows 11 is a free upgrade from 10 and the only reason they wouldn't have done this is because the core processor is too old and isn't supported on Windows 11. Windows 10 is no longer supported by Microsoft. So that leaves #3. Although I do wonder about the seller. Who specifies a minimum monitor size? If I were buying one, I'd probably check Dell's Outlet first. Here's one there: OptiPlex 7000 (7020) Small Form Factor Newegg.com is a place where I've had good luck. Here's a decent one there: Acer Aspire Desktop Computer

I have to add something here as a cautionary tale. I have Ubuntu running on several laptops & have installed it on quite a few more for family & friends. Dell laptops make it pretty easy. You just press F2 or F9 after you press the power button, go into the bios screen and change the boot order, boot from the USB drive and install Ubuntu. Hp laptops on the other hand, can be a huge pain in the ass. Some Hp computers have the bios "locked" to a Windows operating system. I managed to hack a couple of these to get Ubuntu onto them but it was incredibly difficult. It took me days to figure it out. Installing & re-installing Ubuntu with different configurations in the bios until I finally got it to stick. I have little interest in doing that again. The worst thing about it, is that I managed it on one, duplicated the process on a second, and it didn't work. Ha ha ha.

This is a good album that I found sealed in Stereo Jack's dollar bin years ago. I still laugh when I see the cover picture because I thought it was a sunny side up egg at first.

I don't believe that you can download Ubuntu onto your computer as an operating system. What I have had to do is download the .iso file and "write" that to a USB thumb drive making it "bootable", using something like Rufus. Then, you boot off of the thumbdrive and you can try it for a bit or install it. I would recommend trying it first. When you install it, you can make your PC capable of "dual boot", which will let you choose which operating system to boot into (Windows or Ubuntu) but I have never done that so I can't tell you if it works well. If you choose to use dual boot, you might need to worry about how much memory you allow Ubuntu to use, as Windows runs using "virtual memory" that grabs extra hard drive space to run smoothly. If you take too much of your hard drive for Ubuntu, you Windows system might run very slowly.

Here's one of my early favorite "Smooth Jazz" dates.

At the risk of getting a bunch of shit for this, I'm still going to say it... if the stuff free-blowing players like Brötzmann play is "Jazz", then why shouldn't the stuff smooth players play be labeled similarly? Because let's be honest with ourselves - Smooth Jazz is a lot closer to Jazz than a lot of the really out stuff being labeled as such. I used to think I knew what Jazz was. I stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago. One of the albums that turned my head was The Bad Plus' "These Are The Vistas" with their cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". If Jazz can include covers of grunge metal, anything goes, right?

I tried Mint a few years ago. As I understand it, Mint is a graphics overlay onto Ubuntu that gives it a "Windows" look & feel. I used it on one of laptops and liked it. I was going to install it on several more machines but then an update happened and that Mint laptop stopped working. I switched it back to Ubuntu and I haven't tried it again since. I might try it again just to see if they've fixed that bug. The main reason I use Ubuntu/Linux is because I used to get old laptops from various corporate places and these corporations deleted the Windows operating system, so I needed something. Additionally, these older laptops run super fast with Ubuntu.

I have about 6 laptops running Ubuntu. It's perfect for what you describe. It comes standard with Firefox and Open Office for surfing & basic office stuff. Ubuntu is free. You just need to make sure you have at least 8 GB of RAM for the latest version to run.