Kevin Bresnahan

James Clay & David 'Fathead' Newman - The Sound Of The Wide Open Spaces!!!! (Riverside/OJC). Great rhythm section, Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones & Art Taylor. that rarely recorded together. I think their only other recording is Byrd's "Off To The Races". Is that Clay who keeps having reed problems? You would've thought after the first one or two, he would've gotten that straightened out.

But this is the first time I've seen it on YouTube. I don't generally buy every music DVD ever made.

Thanks to a Facebook post by @StereoJack, it looks like we now have a video of Tina Brooks playing with Ray Charles: This is supposedly the whole concert:

I ordered the LP box set of the trio sessions from the Blue Note web page. I thought it made for a nice package and the price wasn't too bad for 3 LPs. https://store.bluenote.com/collections/trio-of-trios/products/charles-lloyd-trio-of-trios-signed-box-set

Andre .Jaume / Barry Altschul / Barre Phillips – Giacobazzi "Autour De La Rade" (CELP). This is an unusual CD. It's really mellow, but it's avant garde mellow, if you know what I mean. There's a lot of dirge-like tunes but on a couple of tracks, Jaume burns it up. My favorite of the "burners" is "L'Arsenal", the closing piece of the "Point de Vue" suite. It's a tour de force for Jaume.

Art Pepper - Meets The Rhythm Section (Craft). Mono Record Store Day pressing. This sounds very nice. I wasn't expecting it to sound this good. I am not usually a mono fetishist, so I was thinking I might be a bit disappointed.

Have you tried different methods of connection to see if you get more sound out at lower volumes? You can switch between USB and the line out and see if one works better than another.

Ben Allison - Moments Inside

Ben Allison - Moments Inside (Sonic Camera Records). Nice mellow date.

I just got in Ben Allison's latest release, a vinyl LP of "Moments Inside". It arrived in an LP shipper with a large red FRAGILE sticker on it. It also arrived looking like it got ran over by a postal truck. Surprisingly, the LP only suffered a slight corner ding and another corner is slightly bent, but c'mon USPS, you can do better than this.

I've read all the books and watched all the shows. The books are better but the show is very good. Connelly even included a Jazz compilation CD in the first editions of the Bosch novel, "Dark Sacred Night". The tracks (from https://www.michaelconnelly.com/extras/cd/): 1. “Lullaby” – Frank Morgan, Mood Indigo 2. “Soul Eyes” – John Coltrane, The Gentle Side Of John Coltrane 3. “My Funny Valentine” – Art Pepper and the Hollywood All-Stars, Art Standards 4. “My Foolish Heart” – Bill Evans, Bill Evans Walkman 5. “Mood Indigo” – Frank Morgan, Jazz ‘Round Midnight 6. “For All We Know” – Sonny Rollins, Falling In Love With Jazz 7. “Lush Life” – Joe Henderson, The Definitive Joe Henderson 8. “Straight Life” – Art Pepper, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section 9. “Willow Weep For Me” – Clifford Brown, Clifford Brown 10. “What A Wonderful World” – Louis Armstrong, Pure Jazz

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1103013844/grachan-moncur-iii-trailblazing-blue-note-trombonist-dies-at-85

I avoided it for a long time but today I got the dreaded double line on my test strip. So far, it's just nasal congestion and some light-headedness.

Riki - Gold (Dais). During one of Bandcamp's sales, I liked the samples of this synth-pop singer so I picked up the vinyl. Reminds me a bit of an 80's rock band.

So one of the fallouts from the COVID pandemic is the shortage of semiconductor devices. It's causing shortages for everything from washing machines to cars. Car companies are reporting down sales and they are pinning it on low inventories. Guess what? They are lying. Their sales are down because they are gouging the heck out of their customers. For example, I got an E-mail from Toyota telling me about their new EV, the bZ4X. I went to their website and "built" a fully loaded car. It came up as $51,550, which is more than I want to pay but I figured I'd see what they offer. They called me back and said that they have the car I want coming in but in red (not my favorite color at all). I asked how much... $63,000! Screw that! I ain't paying that markup. No wonder everyone is buying Teslas. They put the price right on the website and that's what you pay. It's COVID's fault... No, Toyota, it's greed.

This is one title where the CD release is indispensable for the added material. The original 10" LP only had 4 tracks. The CD version has 12 tracks. On top of that, there 15 more tracks from this date on CD as "Live At The Hi Hat Vol. 2".

The Mulligan set contains: It's not cheap these days. The only one available from a US seller is $160.

For the last few years of his life, Phil toured New England's smaller Jazz clubs with Greg Abate. Because of this, I was able to see these two go at it many times.

I don't know that this story confirms that Mobley was not having money problems nor that he had a steady place to live. Not many people will admit to either condition in life, especially the guys from Hank's generation. I bet if the interviewer asked him how he was feeling, he'd probably say he was "fine". That's all my dad ever said until the day he died.

I just finished spinning a recently acquired SRX LP from Music Matters Jazz of Art Blakey's "Free For All". From my now limited hearing ability, this LP doesn't sound a whole lot better than my old 70's era Van Gelder pressing. If anything, it seems like Kevin Gray pushed the trumpet & trombone further forward in the mix during Shorter's fiery solo on the title track, one of my favorite Jazz tracks. While their fills are prominent on the older LP & every CD version of this date, they aren't usually louder than Shorter. I guess it's a good thing I got it in trade for other MMJ LPs, so the $$ were a wash.

I wonder why that Byrd TOCJ CD was being sold as a "cut-out" (priced cheaply in the bargain bin)? I also bought that same CD for a few bucks at the Tower Records store in Cambridge, MA back in the day. That one and Walter Davis Jr's "Davis Cup" were oddballs in that cheapie bin. I remember it vividly because they were pointed out to me by a guy who I'd seen in the store before but never met. He said I had to buy them. We became friends because of those cheap TOCJ CDs, although we haven't hung out in many years now as our lives went in different directions, but I still have those CDs. In the end though, those cheap TOCJ CDs ended up costing me a bundle, as they turned me onto that series.

I read somewhere that he was homeless and living on the streets near the end, so "got through the 70's" maybe isn't quite true?

That's a different cover than the version I picked up from McPherson's website:

Did he pull a Sue Mingus and take the record with him?

I didn't realize that Brown was a child prodigy on the piano, making his recording debut at 18, "A Total Eclipse" featured none other than Herb Alpert on trumpet. The rest of the band was pretty good too. A little on the smooth side... Sounds like something that would have done well on the GRP label... much different from his work with Garrett.