Claude

"Crucifixion lasts hours! It's a slow, horrible death!" "Well, at least it gets you out in the open air." http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_sounds/lb/crux.wav

Python film to challenge Passion Monty Python's film The Life of Brian is to return to US cinemas next month following the success of The Passion of the Christ. The Biblical satire will be re-released in Los Angeles, New York and other US cities to mark its 25th anniversary. Adverts will challenge Mel Gibson's blockbuster with the lines "Mel or Monty?", "The Passion or the Python?" Complete BBC article Life of Brian - Pictures, Sounds and Scripts

Do you know if RVG mastered these tapes specifically for the LP reissues or if they simply took the JRVG CD masteres to make these pressings?

Wynton is not only a clown, he's also a clone!

Does this have something to do with the AMG SonicGuide? I wouldn't bet that AMG is becoming entirely a pay-site, because the risk of failure is rather high. It is difficult today to sell content that mainly consists in databases of freely available information (discographies, trackslists). The real selling argument would be the revews, but they are too sketchy right now.

Thanks for this interesting article, LAL. I think the lifetime expectancy figures above refer to optimal quality discs. With the cheapest no-name CD-Rs they may be much lower. I've had some discs become unreadable within a few years, despite optimal storage. So for data that are supposed to be stored a long time, such as digital photos or music, it is important to use good quality CD-Rs.

Some of the later Concord sessions are also very good. There is a cheap 2CD compilation available, or if you prefer original albums get Keystone 3, with the Marsalis brothers ... and Chris Albertson as "author" !!! If AMG is correct, I'd be interested in reading what Chris had to say on Wynton

I bought the european copyprotected CD for a friend (I had warned him ). This is the first copyprotected CD I was able to test. I played on my Sony SACD player (SCD-XA777ES). The recording quality is not great (very studio-processed), but I didn't notice any anomaly related to errors on the disc. But in my Philips DVD/SACD player DVD963SA it produced clicking noises throughout every track and was unlistenable. (BTW, I found the music to be dead boring and completely free of any jazz element). I know people who only have this popular player for their CDs. They would have been screwed with this copyprotected disc. I then put the CD into one of my PC drives, an older ACER CD-RW 12x burner, and installed the software player from the CD. The compressed files are 128kbs Windows Media files. It's the Macrovision CDS200 protection scheme. Now comes the odd part: I started my CD grabbing software Easy CD-DA Extractor 6.5 (not a piracy tool) and was able to see all the audio tracks on the CD, as well as a data track. The audio tracks could all be grabbed normally, and sounded fine. No clicking noises. So the copy protection was completely non functional on this CD drive. If my friend for who I bought the CD has problems playing it I will be able to burn him a clean copy. This would be an illegal act But on my Pioneer DVD drive, only the first track showed as an audio track within the grabber interface, the other as data tracks. When I grabbed the first track everything went normal until 99% of the process, then the drive locked completely up and I couldn't get the CD out. I had to reboot my PC. So it seems that the copy protection works well on DVD drives, but can easily be defeated by some CD-R burner drives. Because of the playability problems of CDS200 disc on my DVD player I will not buy any european EMI CDs.

My favourites are "Miles Away" and "Trio+One", both on Owl. It seems they are both OOP, but I had to mention them.

The music has also been circulating in filesharing channels for a few months. Someone could easily burn CD-Rs from those files and add some official-looking stickers. What does "reference copy" mean, and what about the text on that sticker? The Jack Johnson promo sets looked different, they came as manufactured CDs not CD-Rs.

Miles and Mahler (if classical composers count)

Great stuff, but 6CDs (6 hours?) is too much. I hope these will come out as seperate 2CD sets, as it was announced. Just like the Blackhawk sessions.

I don't know if these April 27 SACD releases have already been posted: *Thelonious Monk - Brilliant Corners - SACD hybrid (Fantasy/Riverside) from 1956 *Oscar Peterson/Stephane Grappelli/Joe Pass - Skol - SACD hybrid (Fantasy/Pablo) with Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson & Mickey Roker; from 1979 (from jazzmatazz)

What is "Weird Jazz"? http://www.cdbaby.com/sale?cat=9

Some people asked me where to get those CD drawers. They are not manufactured anymore. But I found this interesting US manufacturer, which offers very compact CD shelves holding up to 1500 discs, for only $225: http://www.thejungles.com/wallcdstorage.html

Not hip or cool behaviour, but it's surprising that Pacific Jazz left the passage on one of the Gerry Mulligan California Concerts albums where Mulligan stops playing and takes the microphone to tell an audience member to stop whistling to his solo.

Sony has silently replaced some early single layer SACDs by hybrid versions. On the jazz side, KOB, Time Out and Headhunters have been released a few weeks ago. It could be that they are not yet available in the US. KOB single layer KOB hybrid

I have written in this thread that the SACD versions are noticibly better than the K2 CDs, but that's not true of all of them. I've just compared the Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane SACD with the US K2 CD, and the latter has a much better remastering. The K2 CD sounds a bit brighter (that is usually the case with all XRCD and K2 remasterings), but also much fuller and dynamic. The bass is almost inaudible on the SACD. The overall sound is distant and thin in comparision. The biggest difference is on the stereo tracks from the "Monk´s Music" session. Here the SACD suffers from a strange dephasing effect between the channels, which makes the stereo basis exaggerately broad and creates a hole between the channels which reduces the impact of the sound. Either the K2 engineers have used different tapes or corrected this. The Monk SACD is from the first Fantasy SACD batch and has been remastered by Joe Tarantino. The same engineer produced much better results with the Art Pepper & Eleven SACD from the second batch.

I spent most of this week in Munich, and the weather was great (sun, almost 20 °C). Some Biergärten were already opening. I drank 2-3 liters of "Helles" (I can't stand the acid taste of Weissbier) per day, which is usually my weekly beer consumption at home. And it was a professional trip ... But I'm concerned about the increasingly extreme weather fluctuations in Europe. Only two weeks earlier, it was snowing in Munich.

I have 3 versions of KOB, the SACD (single layer disc released in 1999), the Mastersound goid CD (which I keep for the color photos in the booklet) and the one included in the Miles & Coltrane Columbia box set. My favourite track is - not surprisingly - "So what". But my favourite version of "So what" is the one played in the TV show of the same year.

A Quiche Lorraine contains a lot of bacon and so it's not a surprise that the protein-to-fat ratio is worse than that of a hamburger. But it would be extremely unusual to eat a Quiche every day, so it's fat content is not as relevant for the population's nutrition than that of burgers are today in the US and even in France.

The only problem you could encounter is that the DVD drive in your PC may not be able to read the disc. I have a Pioneer DVD drive from 1999 that ejects all hybrid SACDs. But I can read their CD layer without a problem in my CD burner drive. Hybrid SACDs are meant to be fully compatible to all CD-capable devices, but in practice there are occasional problems with DVD players and DVD drives. Many car CD players now use DVD drives.

Yes. I bought one at their Munich store this week.

Thanks for the tip, Tjobbe. I suppose it's this Ebay store? music-special-sale The shipping rate per order (3 Euro within Germany, 8 Euro within the EU, can include several discs) makes the SACDs as or more expensive than buying them from Amazon.de, where they cost 17 Euro and shipping is free to german speaking countries (which includes Luxembourg).

I arrange it mostly by style or historical relationship. So Coltrane is followed by Miles, and then come the Miles sideman (Hancock, Shorter). Bebop artists like Bird, Bud Powell and Dizzy Gillespie are also side by side, although I have more non-bebop Dizzy CDs. But as my collection grows and I have more and more difficulties in finding CDs immediately, I may switch to a strict alphabetical listing.