mjzee

In the latest Oldies.com catalog, there's a page of Vee-Jay closeouts that are not being offered online. $2.98 each. The jazz titles are: Bunny Berigan 1909-1942 Eric Dolphy 1928-1964 Duke Ellington - Love You Madly Bennie Green & Gene Ammons - Swingin'est Bunky Green & Wynton Kelly - My Baby Eddie Harris - Lost Album Plus The Better Half Louis Hayes feat. Yusef Lateef & Nat Adderley Eddie Higgins Trio Wynton Kelly 1931-1971 Wynton Kelly In Concert MJT + 3 - Make Everybody Happy MJT + 3 Lee Morgan 1938-1972 Django Reinhardt 1910-1953 Art Tatum 1910-1956 Leroy Vinnegar - Jazz's Greatest Walker The Young Lions The Very Best of Jazz, vols 1 - 5

A fascinating life. Thanks for posting.

Also on December 26: Monty Budwig, bass, 1929 December 27: Bill Crow, bass, 1927 Walter Norris, piano, 1931

Anyone see this? If you're a Bruce fan (I'm not), it is a great price and seems legitimate: Collects together Bruce's 1st 7 studio albums onto 8 CDs in Mini LP selves all together in a cool simple red box. Albums: Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild the Innocent & E St. Shuffle, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River (2cd), Nebraska and Born in the USA. $18.45 from an Amazon reseller: Amazon

Happy holidays to all my friends here!

The Fargo recordings are simply beautiful - astonishingly so, considering the time and the circumstances. A remarkable life. RIP.

December 25: Cab Calloway, singer, bandleader, 1907 Don Pullen, piano, 1941

7Digital has some really good deals now (not jazz). I've never heard of the site before, but it seems OK: James Brown - Star Time, $3.00 Rolling Stones - Singles Collection, $6.99 Rolling Stones - Through The Past Darkly, $3.00 Elton John / Leon Russell - The Union, $3.00

December 24: Baby Dodds, drums, 1898 Ray Bryant, piano, 1931

Well, we have some progress on the encoding issue. This was posted on the eMusic bulletin boards: Hi Everyone: Here’s an update on your questions about UMG bit rate. We are arranging to receive all new content moving forward from UMG as FLAC files beginning early in the new year. These tracks will be on the site as LAME-encoded 256 vbr MP3s. We are also looking into getting a portion of UMG content already on the site re-delivered in FLAC (although this has not yet been confirmed). There are number of questions we cannot answer yet as they are still to be determined, such as when new UMG content will be available on the site with LAME encoding, if/when previously delivered content will be re-delivered, and how we will notify members of the encoding differences on various releases. Please be patient as we continue to work on this issue and we will get you answers as soon as we can. Thanks and happy holidays to all, Cathy eMusic

December 22: Nick Ceroli, drums, 1939 John Patitucci, bass, 1959

Captain Beefheart - A Rock Critic Fable The Day Captain Beefheart Outsold the Beatles, the Stones and Pink Floyd

Yay! Finally, an actual new release to talk about! Even if it is Miles Davis... And it's not even a boot! Bitches Brew Live - Amazon

Reads like an entertaining story here (middle-class version upon a theme à la American Graffiti, in a way - my recollections of the entire movie are a bit hazy): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083833/ Check out the cast list - this was the first movie for most of them. I found that film clip after looking for another one from the same movie - a guy's on the fence about proposing to his girlfriend, so he gives her a football quiz - if she gets 65 or over, he proposes.

Most people slow down as they age. Not Gunther Schuller, who turned 85 this year and continues to work in many realms at a pace that would leave many 30-year-olds breathless. The musical Renaissance man has had, by his own accounting, seven often-simultaneous careers: As a French hornist, he got his first job with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at age 17 and performed on Miles Davis's seminal "Birth of the Cool" recordings. As a conductor, he has served as musical director of the Berkshire Music Festival (now called Tanglewood) and has led orchestras throughout the world. He taught composition at Yale and as the dynamic president of the New England Conservatory of Music he doubled that school's size. For some years, he operated Margun Music and published a wide variety of classical and jazz music. As head of GM Records, he continues to work as a record producer. He is perhaps best known as a composer—he has written seven substantial chamber- music works in the past year alone, including a horn quintet and his second piano trio—and as the author of two landmark studies of jazz, "Early Jazz" and "The Swing Era," as well as a controversial survey of orchestral conducting, "The Compleat Conductor." A musical thinker with a compelling story and much to say, he recently completed the first volume of his memoirs, which takes his story to 1960, when he gave up playing the French horn and began conducting (it is in production at the University of Rochester Press). More here: WSJ

Also on December 20: John Hardee, tenor sax, 1918 December 21: Panama Francis, drums, 1918 Hank Crawford, alto sax, 1934

Diner - You Tube And check out the first comment.

From tomorrow's WSJ, an appreciation by Gary Lucas: O Captain! My Captain Beefheart

Great review! Congrats, Organissimo!

December 19: Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone, piano, arranger, 1919 Bobby Timmons, piano, 1935

Golden Birdies In the mid-90's Beefheart gave band member Moris Tepper a list called The Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing which was replicated in John McCormick's book Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-A Rama: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF GUITAR PLAYING as given to moris tepper by captain beefheart. they are not arranged hierarchically - each commandment has equal import. also, to help clarify their intent, each commandment is followed by an exegesis. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS that's where all the music comes from. birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. and watch humming-birds. they fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere. YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR your guitar is a divining rod. use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. a guitar is also a fishing rod. if you're good, you'll land a big one. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. if the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread. WALK WITH THE DEVIL old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as 'the devil box'. and they were right. you have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. electricity attracts devils and demons. [so now you know what you are, dear visitor of this page!] other instruments attract other spirits. an acoustic guitar attracts caspar, the ghost. a mandolin attracts wendy. but an electric guitar attracts beelzebub. IF YOU'RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU'RE OUT if your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. you should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. if you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing. NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE your instrument has more clout than lightning. just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. but make sure you are not standing in an open field. ALWAYS CARRY A CHURCH KEY that's your key-man clause. like one string sam. he's one! he was a detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. his song "i need a hundred dollars" is warm pie. another key to the church is hubert sumlin, howlin' wolf's guitar player. he just stands there like the statue of liberty - making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it. DON'T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT you need that stink on there. then you have to get that stink onto your music. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE when you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. if you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it. YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE keep that hat on. a hat is a pressure cooker. if you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.

My Turrentine box recently came with no number - not in the booklet, not on the receipt. I asked Mosaic for the #, and got this reply from Scott: "The booklets are pre-numbered and therefore we have no idea what each set is numbered. This is one of the downfalls of the economy as we are now just 3 people in offices, while a fulfillment house a few miles away is where the warehouse is. Sorry for the inconvenience." Music's still great, though.

More comments... BBC

Oh, and check out the comments in Clifford's initial post!

NY Times obit: NY Times And a mention in the Journal: WSJ