mjzee

I think it's worth it. There's something about Bird's alternate takes that are sui generis. It's also fascinating to see how a tune evolves during the recording session. The booklet's essays are excellent. Another thing to consider is the state of the CD business. Who knows how long this will be available, before they go to all downloads?

This is a fun thread. Let's see... Shotgun, by Jr. Walker & The All Stars: I was in love with Top 40 radio when I was a kid in the '60's, listing first on my 2-transistor radio, then on my 6-transistor, each glued to my ear. Shotgun thrilled me, but it was a few weeks until it dawned on me: I loved this song, but it had no words! How could that be? Is that allowed? Strictly Personal, by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: As a teen, I was into Zappa and all his offshoots on Bizarre/Straight, though the records themselves were awfully hard to come by in Brooklyn. Then my brother brought me home this album, which I had never heard of. I hated it; all the songs sounded the same. But something compelled me to keep listening (maybe it was Gimme Dat Harp Boy, which had a great groove). Then, one day, it was like a door opened, and I was able to get inside the music. I really understood it, loved it, and never heard music in the same way after that. The ESP Sampler: It was 99 cents (printed proudly on the cover), and I bought it as an impulse purchase on the same foray to King Karol on 42nd Street when I bought Uncle Meat and Trout Mask Replica (forget about finding those in Brooklyn). The ESP Sampler was a disk I played as much to laugh at what I heard as to enjoy - each track was 30 seconds long, there were like 30 tracks on a side, so what emerged when you played a side was more a pastiche of sounds, little snippets and impressions. It was almost certainly the first time I heard true "out" music, and I laughed at it: this people were crazy! But enough of it lodged in my head, I guess, to help me understand the language. Music from Charlie Chaplin film shorts: Back in 1971, there was a Charlie Chaplin revival, leading up to his receiving an honorary Oscar. Channel 13 (the PBS station in NYC) often played his early shorts, I think 3 in an hour program. This was before the archivists "corrected" the shorts, so they were the ones in super-fast motion with the music with all the funny sound effects - you know, the ones we grew up with. I found myself taking an interest in the music, so one day I used my portable cassette recorder with a microphone up to the TV speaker to record the music from a few of them. I often listened to that cassette, and that led me to an appreciation with the style of music from the '20's and '30's. Vivaldi: Concerti Per Mandolini, I Solisti Veneti, Claudio Scimone: Growing up, I hated classical music. You know, the stuff they forced you to listen to in school, and the stuff that TV and all the authorities insisted was the only real music. Yuck and double-yuck. All those lugubrious orchestras, Leonard Bernstein lecturing you how to appreciate music (you know, how to bear listening to something you really didn't want to listen to)...you get the idea. Still, I often tried, on my own, to sample various things, as per the Frank Zappa dictum: go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. So I'd haunt the bargain bins at Alexander's Department Store and come home with something on Westminster Gold and try to like it, really I did, without any success. There was a longstanding ad campaign by the Musical Heritage Society that offered 2 classical albums for a buck or something, and one of them was this Vivaldi album, which they claimed sold tens of thousands of copies when played on some European pop station. So I got it, and it really did help me to love Baroque music. (The album is available on compact disc on Erato.)

December 31: Jonah Jones, trumpet, 1908 John Kirby, bass, bandleader, 1908

It is 40 years since the American record producer Creed Taylor acted as midwife to the quintessential 1970s soundtrack for a generation in love with freshly fitted in-car entertainment. Taylor’s brash, soulful and sophisticated sounds accompanied slick kids with wheels on their search for night-time revels, resonating with an urban America easing back from recent confrontations. Taylor’s flair for production and market savvy was already proved when he laid down his soundtrack. He had signed John Coltrane for the Impulse record label in 1961 and, while managing the Verve label, brokered bossa nova – “The Girl From Ipanema” won its Grammy in 1965. Nevertheless, his idea that luxuriously packaged street-scene rhythms and soulful jazz would be commercially viable had few takers in 1970, the year CTI – for Creed Taylor Incorporated – went fully independent. He launched an earthier label-mate, Kudu, a year later and dominated the jazz charts for the next decade. More here: FT.com

December 30: Jimmy Jones, piano, arranger, 1918

An appreciation by Will Friedwald in WSJ

December 29: Snub Mosley, trombone, 1905 Cutty Cutshall, trombone, 1911

December 28: Earl Hines, piano, bandleader, 1903 Michel Petrucciani, piano, 1962

You might be thinking about this one: The liner notes give the date as November 2, 1949, but the actual date (as asserted by a poster on the old BNBB) was February 11, 1949 (2/11/49 rather than 11/2/49, in American parlance).

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