Kevin Bresnahan

I'm kinda bummed that Wallace retired before I got a chance to see him perform live. I don't think he came through Boston many times though.

How is Larry doing these days?

Blue Mitchell - Step Lightly (Blue Note). This is the LT-1082 pressing. While I've found that some of these LT pressings aren't in the best sound, this one sounds very nice.

The Modern Jazz Sextet (Verve).

I remember seeing The Outlaws live in Springfeild, MA during their 1979 "Bring It Back Alive" tour, with them riding high on the FM hit of the 20 minute live version "Green Grass and High Tides", which we jokingly called "The DJ needs to take a dump". I am almost positive that the show I saw had Nantucket/Molly Hatchet/The Outlaws but history seems to drop Nantucket from that show's listing (although The Outlaws had Nantucket on the bill during concerts right around then). I seem to remember the crowd booing Nantucket off the stage so maybe that's why they've been forgotten. I don't think it was their fault though. The stage was clearly not set up for them and we could barely hear them. But that show closed with The Outlaws doing "Green Grass and High Tides", with all of the band on guitars at the front of the stage by the end. It was one of the most exhilarating endings out of all of the live shows I ever saw. The LP doesn't hit the highs of that live show, but it comes close. Now spinning on vinyl, The Outlaws "Bring It Back Alive" (Arista).

Whenever I listen to Sonny Stitt's "Pow!", I think, I have to go see Kirk Lightsey someday.

As far as I know, Kirk has not played in the Boston area for as long as I've been going to Jazz shows, which close to 35 years now. I hope I get the chance to see/hear him live someday. Does he post his upcoming tour dates anywhere? A Google search only pulls up old dates.

Today, that might be true. But back in the 60's & 70's, a lot of music buyers wouldn't even buy a mono record. So record companies came out with fake stereo, which was considered an improvement over the mono by most buyers. Remember too, that "hi fi" was not really a thing back then, so not many people did the A/B comparisons that we read about regularly today.

Whenever I see that I cover, I always think it's Darren Stevens from Bewitched.

Gene Ammons - Blue Gene (Prestige/OJC). I do love the way Gene does the blues. Always swinging. I believe that this 1985 OJC LP was the first time this session was issued in stereo.

Someone is saying that he was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen of WWII fame. If that's true, I'm somewhat surprised that this isn't making the news. He would have to be one of the last of them that fought in WWII by now.

I had no idea he was still with us. I haven't spun one of his Epic dates in a while. I'll try to do that today in his memory. I seem to remember liking "Gettin' Into Somethin'" the most.

Jerome Sabbagh - Vintage (Sunnyside). This all-analog LP is wonderful. Kenny Barron is such an asset on any record date and that is certainly the case here. Sabbagh's tenor is backed by Barron, Joe Martin on bass & Barron's regular drummer, Jonathon Blake on drums. If I had to find any fault, I think Side A opening with a medium tempo tune followed by two slow tunes, didn't seem to fit. It seemed like it might have been better with the medium tempo tune as track 2? Maybe they didn't want to open with a slow blues or maybe it was a cutting thing? If all-analog vinyl is your thing (it's not one of mine TBH), you should pick this up. It does come with a download card, so I am happy for that too. I like having a digital version of my LPs. After all, I can't spin my records in my car.

Can someone contact the board software person and have them institute a simple redirect for www.organissimo.org to automatically kick it over to www.organissimo.org/forum? That is a pretty simple thing to do. Right now, if one of us gets onto a new PC and doesn't remember this forum's address, although a few guesses should suffice, they might never make it back. Also, it's hard to send someone here to try to get them to join up when the parent site is dead. It's a bit of a bad idea to click around a dead site. You never know what might lurk in the scripts.

Well, if anyone gets an extra "A Caddy For Daddy" Tone Poet LP, that's about the only one I'm thinking about picking up these days.

How things have changed. I ordered a bunch of Tone Poet & Classic Vinyl LPs a few years back and after about 4 months, I contacted them to cancel the order and they never responded to my e-mails. I ended up getting a couple of them in and then they cancelled the rest.

I had a cart full of those upcoming Kevin Gray mastered CDs but then I looked at my music library and realized I have all of them in at least one digital iteration with some of them on more than one digital release. I'm done chasing the next best sounding CD. More for the rest of you.

Merry Christmas everyone. This one is tough for me as it's my first without either my father or mother. It's going to be weird not being able to call mom tomorrow on Christmas morning. I hope it's not too bad. My daughters should keep it from being too blue. Great Christmas CD BTW...

I find the iPhone a hell of a lot harder to operate than my old Samsung Galaxy. It's harder to text. It's harder to call. It's hard to setup. It uses stupid shit like defaulting to HEIC pictures instead of JPEG pictures. Have you ever tried to send someone a picture from your iCloud? They likely cannot open it unless they have an Apple PC. It defaults to AIFF instead of mp3, most likely because they invented a format just because they're Apple & they want to force people to use their player app. One thing I really hate is that this iPhone has terrible predictive texting capabilities compared to my old Galaxy phones. I'm talking about when you're swiping a text to someone and you mention something like a winery, say Kinsella Vineyard. With the Samasung Galaxy, you type in Kinsella Vineyards one time and any time after that, if you type Ki, the Samsung pops "Kinsella" down at the bottom as an auto-fill option. After you select "Kinsella", it'll then pop up "Vineyard". The iPhone never gives that option. It requires you to type out the entire name Kinsella Vineyard over & over & over. It's very annoying. And I never had to do anything special to answer any calls on my Galaxy so I don't know what your wife did to her phone to make it act like that. In fact, this iPhone sometimes requires me to point it to my face just to get it to show up in my car for CarPlay. This is actually very annoying as the whole reason I was to use CarPlay is because I don't want to have to look at my phone at all. That's some bad photoshopping!!

Regarding "Am I Blue", I haven't spun it in a long while so maybe it's time to give it another chance. I remember it being kinda boring. More like "Am I Stoned" than "Am I Blue". I like slow blues & I love ballad albums, so it's not that. Like I said, I'll have to give it another listen. I do remember being disappointed in Joe Henderson's playing the most.

I can't tell if you're kidding or not but no, I am not going to install iTunes on my Windows PC. It's a sucky app and it takes over as your default player for everything. I don't want that Apple app anywhere near my music. The thing that bugs me the most is that all I want is my music onto my phone. I don't need anything else Apple "thinks" I need done. I don't need it sync'ed to their money-making cloud. I don't need to be prompted to buy anything from their store. But Apple decided that just letting me mount my phone as an external drive was not in their best interest, so they made it impossible to do. SharePod did just that, but Apple figured out how to block it on iPhones after the iPhone 11. I have an iPhone 14. I only got this phone because my daughters want to FacteTime me, otherwise I'd still have a Samsung Galaxy. FWIW, I use Exact Audio Copy to rip my CDs. I have for many many years. It's the best ripper ever made, especially if you like to tinker with the settings like I do. Some of the reverse sensors are really nice to have. I didn't realize how useful they were until I had to drive a car that didn't have them. They can save you from many parking lot idiots who fly around like they're on a highway.

How do you get your music onto your iPhone? I only recently got an iPhone and I am not going to install any special Apple music player app just to get my music onto this phone. I used to use Sharepod to get my mp3 files onto my iPod, but that only works up to the iPhone 11.

I just searched around Amazon and it's gotten really bad for these things. I've never heard of any of the top rated players and most of them have no shock protection, which means they'll skip.

It's likely just a rebranded drive from some Malaysian manufacturer. Also, that won't work as a car player. It's only for hooking up to a PC as an external drive. There's no way to play audio drives with this drive in standalone mode. There are no play/pause/stop/skip buttons or a display to show what track is playing.

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.