Kevin Bresnahan

I looked into buying a portable CD player with USB output capabilities but like Lon says, most of the reviews say that most of them skip fairly easily. Also, buying a known name is no guarantee that you won't get the exact same drive if you bought a cheap, no-name drive. There are only so many manufacturers making these things today. Even the big names just rebrand these junk drives as it cheaper for them than designing/building their own. I do understand it when you get a new CD in and you want to simply spin that disc, but it's not that hard to rip it to mp3 (I use VBR Q0) and copy those files onto a USB thumbdrive (~$5 for a small one these days) and bring that out with you. As an added benefit, no skips.

I was given this book to read many years ago and I've only just gotten around to reading it.

Mistletoe Magic - Holiday Jazz Improvisations - Various Artists (Palo Alto). This is such a good Jazz album it's almost unfortunate that it gets called a "Christmas album". Sure, the melodies are all well-trodden Christmas tunes but these artists take them well away from those melodies. A couple of times they even skew outside a tiny bit. If I had one complaint it would be the excessive use of reverb on some tracks/instruments. On the first track, Hino's trumpet sounds horrible. If reverb had a setting, it would've been set to 11 on this one. It sounded like he was playing in an airplane hanger. Great bands here: 1) Elvin Jones Quintet - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Terumasa Hino, cornet; Dave Leibman, soprano sax; Kenny Kirkland, piano; George Mraz, bass; Elvin Jones, drums. 2) Free Flight - Silent Night/Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Jim Walker, flute; Milcho Leviev, keys; Jim Lacefield, bass; Ralph Humphrey, drums. 3) Larry Vuckovich Sextet – We Three Kings Of Orient Are Tom Harrell, trumpet; Charles McPherson, alto sax; Jerome Richardson, soprano sax; Larry Vukovich, piano; Ray Drummond, bass; Eddie Moore, drums. 4) Full Faith & Credit Big Band - O Holy Night Soloists - Jim Benham, flugelhorn; Dave Eshelman, trombone 5) Richie Cole Quintet - Sleigh Ride Richie Cole & Art Pepper, alto sax; Roger Kellaway, piano; Bob Magnusson, bass; Billy Higgins, drums. 6) Meredith D'Ambrosio/Hank Jones Duo - The Christmas Waltz Meredith D'Ambrosio, vocal; Hank Jones, piano. 7) Mal Waldron Quartet - The Christmas Song Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Mal Waldrom, piano; David Friesen, bass; Billy Higgins, drums. 😎 Les DeMerle Sextet - Little Bebop Drummer Boy Bobby Shew, flugelhorn; Don Menza, tenor sax & flute; Lanny Morgan, flute; Jack Wilson, piano; Bob Magnusson, bass; Les DeMerle, drums. 9) Full Faith & Credit Big Band - We Three Kings Of Orient Are Soloist - Paul Robertson, alto sax

That looks like a killer band but I have to say, if I saw that CD cover in a bin back in the day, I would've skipped right over it. What a horrible cover design. It's like a graphic arts major vomited all over it.

This is the time of the year when you really should expect shipping delays. Every shipper is trying move a ton of packages right now & unless the shipper paid the extra money, it may get put on the back burner as everyone tries to get their packages in before Christmas. It'll get even worse over the next week. I try not to ship anything after Thanksgiving unless I really have to.

It contained: BST-84029 The Big Beat BST-84049 A Night In Tunisia BST-84054 Meet You At The Jazz Corner Of The World Vol. 1 BST-84055 Meet You At The Jazz Corner Of The World Vol. 2 BST-84156 The Freedom Rider BST-84245 Like Someone In Love BST-84258 The Witch Doctor BST-84347 Roots And Herbs GXF 3060 Pisces (Japanese)

Mosaic already put out 6 CDs of that material:

Just ask Jordi to do it. He can probably even create a Mosaic box cover to give that extra oomph.

Or, let's be honest here... US buyers either.

I was told that their biggest problem near the end was not their international expansion but instead a few bad business deals they made with some of the big labels. They agreed to buy large quantities of new titles (like that Britney Spears you mention) as well as quite a few expensive box sets, like the Miles Davis boxes with the metal spines, and they forced each location to stock some crazy number like 100 boxes. Because these boxes were expensive, they busted the local buyer's monthly budget for anything else and because these sat on the shelf, they couldn't order much of anything for months at a time. They forced the stores to stock stuff they couldn't sell fast enough.

Hank Jones also played harpsichord on his Impulse! LP "Happenings". I am not a fan of it and from the face Hank made when I handed him the LP to sign, he didn't either, asking me, "Did you really like this"? I replied, "I thought the black part of the cover would look good with you autograph on it". He smiled and signed.

I'm hesitant to use SSDs for long term backups, as I've read that they should stay powered up or they can lose data. It makes sense when I think about it. Currently, all of my SSDs are attached to PCs that I leave on mostly all the time to save wear & tear on the internal hard drive. I've had good luck (knock on wood) with internal hard drives. That being said, I always have a back up HD with my system image on it in case that changes. My third backup SSD drive is not really being set aside as a backup. I have it attached to a Raspberry Pi mini PC that I have Volumio on and I use it as a music player in my main listening area. I access the music using my laptop web browser to access Volumio and it's pretty good. A bit cludgey with my large music collection and it doesn't find every single folder so I won't say it's perfect, but it works well for me. Total cost was about $225, including the external 1 TB SSD.

The links still work if you don't have these tunes. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the 3 Pledgemusic tunes in a recent PC switchover & I never did print out the artwork so that's gone too.

4 TB for under $100: https://www.newegg.com/seagate-ironwolf-st4000vn006-4tb/p/N82E16822185030

The thing that's weird is that the action of playing music off of that external hard drive should be enough to keep it playing anyway. Usually they only go to sleep when there's no activity. I actually used an external hard drive at work in my office for years & I never had an issue with it shutting down mid-play. I did have it "disappear" when I'd go to play some music off of it after a period of inactivity but never when it was playing. On my Windows PC at home, I only use external drives to back up my music & data though. On my Windows mini tower PC (I know - who has a mini tower these days?), I installed a second 1 TB internal hard drive (not RAID) that I use as an internal "external" hard drive that I only use for my music. Because it's on the internal PC bus, it's faster and it never shuts down due to any power saving features. Internal drives like this are really cheap these days. BTW - on my Windows PC, I use the old "Windows Media Player" app to play my music. As dated as it is, it handles a huge library like mine better than any other music playing app I've tried - and I've tried a lot of them.

If this new PC is a Windows machine, you change change the power setting so that the external HD never goes to sleep. It's probably under the USB power setting where it asks if you want to shut off USB ports to save power. You'll get a nag message when you turn it off but just ignore it. I turn off pretty much all of those power savers because of things like this.

Did this ever get released? If it did, I must've missed it. Michael Cuscuna told me that he put out that John Patton Mosaic Select box set to help Thelma pay off some of John's medical bills. I wonder if it helped? And whatever happened to Soul Stream (Mike Flanigin) here on the forums?

I've recently got a Raspberry Pi streamer working in my main listening area with a 1 TB SSD drive that most of my music on it in Q0 VBR mp3 format. I've been using this for about a year now and I'd guess I'm using this more than any other playback mechanism.

The designer of the cover of the original LP, Richard Mantel, clearly didn't honor Don Hunstein's copyright on that photo, as he didn't even give him credit in the liner notes. Of course, he made sure he got design credit.

It was likely taken at a 1957 session?

If you're curious, here's an un-cropped photo.

While there are other pictures of Mobley with that striped shirt, there aren't many pictures of him with glasses. Except...

Just finished spinning Tina Brooks - Minor Move (Tone Poet). Now up, Cannonball Adderley - Live At The Lighthouse (Riverside). This is a good one. I forget how much fun this record is until I spin it again. I'm hearing that the Tone Poet series might be doing some Capitol titles in the coming years. As this is one of the Riverside dates that Cannonball took to Capitol, it would be an excellent choice.

It was closed for a long time. Did they renovate the club at all? Maybe put in some comfortable seats? My first show isn't until next March 9th (Danilo Perez).

Richard "Groove" Holmes - Get Up & Get It! (Prestige). I wanted to like this date more than I did. This is my second time playing it & my opinion hasn't changed much. It has a killer band with Groove, Pat Martino, Teddy Edwards, Paul Chambers & Billy Higgins but they don't always sound like they're on the same page. There are some good things on here. The blues on side 2, Groove's Blues Groove (B2) is nice. The title track has it's moments as does Broadway, but I am really not a fan of their cover of Pennies From Heaven (B3) and from Teddy's solo effort here, it sounds like he wasn't either. It also has some weird multiplexed organ stuff during Groove's solo that sounds awful. It's like Van Gelder split the feed and delayed one channel versus the other but reduced the delay as Groove kept going. And Groove hits this sustain note during the out chorus that makes me think he's just fucking with my dog. The other tune that just didn't sound great was Teddy's original (A2) Lee-Ann. I didn't find it to be a good attempt at a bossa tune & Groove's organ effects (Van Gelder's?) really don't fit the tune. So I guess it's just 2 out of 6 tunes that I wasn't digging.