Kevin Bresnahan

I seem to be over it after day 6, but this morning my wife tested positive and she's feeling pretty lousy already. Her only saving grace so far is that her symptoms don't include a throat that feels like it was slashed with razor blades. Apparently we didn't quarantine quickly enough.

I really wish I had done this. I've seen so many jazz greats over the years that I've forgotten more than I remember.

It's not making the news anymore, but Covid is still out there. And let me tell you, it still sucks. I had a lovely Memorial Day weekend... sore throat, fever, chills, body aches, coughing like crazy & a nose so stuffed up that I went through about 4 boxes of tissues. I am lucky if i got 4 hours of restful sleep over 5 nights. This was my second time with this & it was much worse than the first. Being up to date on my vaccine boosters didn't help much this time. Plus, they now consider me "high risk" because I've somehow become "senior".

I was not aware that Blue Note somewhat assigned these concept albums to Grant Green. Is this true?

I buy my coffee from Gold Star Coffee out of Toronto & like you, I prefer the less expensive Jamaican coffee from the foothills. I also like that this "Jamaican Estate Reserve" coffee is in the low acid line. As we've gotten older, my wife & I prefer these low acidity coffees. Less chance for acid reflux. They sell green beans too if you're into roasting your own.

3 coffees per day? Italy must have a different definition for not being a caffeine man.

Walton never let anyone measure his actual height & always had it listed as 6'11", supposedly so he couldn't be called a "7 foot freak" by anyone. I remember seeing him standing next to Artis Gilmore, who played with Walton during the Celtics 1987-88 season, and Walton was taller. Gilmore's official height was 7'2". It's pretty obvious in the team picture.

I find the coffee I press using my Aeropress is more consistent than my regular coffee maker. I heat the water, pour it in, stir for 10 seconds, fill it back up to the top and press quickly. If you don't do that last part - press quickly - you can get a more bitter flavor profile. My favorite coffee in the Aeropress is an Ethiopian Moca Sidama that I buy freshly roasted from a small coffee shop in Salem, NH called Coffee Coffee.

For a single cup, I always use my trusty Aeropress. Great cup of coffee without the grounds like you get from a French press. I reuse the paper filters and the coffee gets better & better with a well-used filter.

Bill Walton, one heck of a basketball player, has died after a prolonged cancer fight. He was 71. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/40229031/nba-champion-hall-famer-bill-walton-dies-71 While I vividly remember his playing years with the Celtics (when he was healthy) because I was a season ticket holder, his music taste was also newsworthy. He went to a lot of Grateful Dead concerts and notoriously brought several Celtics players backstage when the Dead played in Worcester. RIP Bill. Cancer sucks.

I bought a Tachnivorm Moccamaster several years ago and me & my wife love it. It makes a very nice cup of coffee and is easy to use & clean. Because of my experience with our previous coffee maker, a Bonavita BV1800, I ordered a spare glass carafe for my Moccamaster. That Bonavita was a great coffee maker but they went belly up and I couldn't get a replacement carafe.

I went with the gel solution because I've read that some liquid cleaners can break down the epoxy that is used to attach the stylus to the stylus tube. I have two Ortofon 2M Black cartridges and Ortofon specifically says to avoid cleaning the stylus with fluids. That being said, I don't know that the Audio Technica fluid is one of those fluid cleaners that does that.

I bought one of these: DS-Audio ST-50 Microdust Cleaning Gel. It seems to do the trick. Some have complained that their stylus stuck in it, but I only momentarily drop it into the gel & I've not had any problems.

I have on the few occasions but it was many years ago. One time was when I was part of a round robin of reviewers of a Joe Manieri CD, "Coming Down The Mountain", which I hated doing because it was not a good review and I knew a lot of others really liked it. FWIW, Joe Christmas re-posted it here back in 2003.

Not true. The worst jazz organ use I ever saw live was when Jimmy Smith pulled out a stop and left the stage, expecting Phil Upchurch to try and solo around it. It was terrible. Jimmy was laughing when he came back on stage to push the stop back in. He knew it sucked.

I don't know how many times we have to go over this... there's no way a few misread 1's & 0's in a digital bitstream is going to change the frequency response of any playback. Misread digital data that the error correction cannot correct will result in noise like clicking or blanking, not any sort of modified output signal. The chain of 1's & 0's to create just a few seconds of music is astronomically huge and to change those few seconds of audio would require 10's of thousands of those 1's & 0's getting flipped... and that's only if the aren't corrected by error correction system. The CD standard is 44,100 digital samples per second. Think about that and imagine how many those 44,100 bits would have to change in just the exact way to make that single second of music go from a 5 kHz sound to a 7 kHz sound. Not going to happen. People need to stop attributing analog signal analysis to digital.

Green gets "stuck" on other albums but not as much as he does on "Green Street". No matter if it's intentional or not, it's not enjoyable to me & that's all that matters when I pick up something to listen to, no matter what the Jazz police i.e. JSngry, have to say. Green was a known drug user so you have to wonder if he was a little more "mellow" for this session than he was on others.

Someone sent me a needle-drop of this LP. I'm digging it. The tune "Lolita" is my least favorite. It seem off from the rest of the tunes... not very bluesy. Also, it's too bad the recording engineer felt the need to add reverb to Edwards' sax. I wonder if there are tapes without it? The title track has some uncredited piano playing. If this is Jimmy, I'm glad he stuck to organ.

I believe new OJC CDs from Amazon are now CD-Rs. I know all Mode/V.S.O.P. discs sold there are CD-Rs. I had the label confirm that they were only going that route from here on out. I'm not sure if it's an Amazon thing, but I've seen a lot of Venus Jazz CD-Rs.

Many (all?) opening acts back then were often hampered by having to use the headliners sound system. A lot of them never even get a sound check. I can't tell you the number of times an opening act sounded terrible up on stage. I can remember at least a couple of bands apologizing for their sound because of it.

Just realize that what he died of, prostate cancer, is pretty easy to detect and if caught early, it's usually very treatable. Any man over 45, just make you get your PSA tested every year and don't avoid the finger test (DRE) during your annual physical because it's uncomfortable.

Al most all of the batteries I've had leak in remotes have been AA & AAA Duracell batteries.

I really hate that trio date, especially the tune where he gets stuck. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.

I can't think of any album that I ever got sick of playing but there is a song I never want to hear again. I had a friend who had a car 8-track player. We went out in it all the time in high school. It broke and got stuck with The Doors debut LP on track 4, which was the song "The End". Even the radio wouldn't work. I must've heard that song 50 times one summer. It got to the point where Morrison would sing, "This is the end" & everyone in the car would yell, "PLEASE BE THE END". I finally got it off that track one time by hitting the player right as it was supposed to switch back to track 1. It took a lot of tries but I finally did it. We got that tape out and we never put another tape in.

Jackson Browne - Running On Empty (Asylum). Listening to the 5.1 mix off of the DVD-Audio disc. Nicely done surround, especially on the live tunes.