AllenLowe

sorry, wasn't trying to be overly dramatic. I am doing very well, definitely in remission, but the whole experience was so hellish that it enforced a certain sense of new urgency about getting certain things resolved -

I'm sure you would.

the problem is that if I donate the collection now I want it where I can get access, as I still have some things I want to to do and write. So I was hoping to find something in the New York/Connecticut/New Jersey area, but so far no luck.

and therein lies the rub - because of the historical projects I have been working on for 20 + years, my collection is organized like a step-by-step study of all of American vernacular music from about 1900-1960. My long term goal, toward which I am making no progress, is to find an institution that wants to preserve it and let me organized it for the purposes that I gathered it; for the short term I do want to sell off some of the excess. But there are parts of this collection, as with Schildkraut et al, that are irreplaceable. On the other hand, if I die in the next year or two there will be no recourse and this thing will likely just disappear.

thanks, this is illuminating. Not surprising, but illuminating.

on a private level most of my "audience" - and I use the term loosely - want hard copies, though I use Bandcamp and it has worked well. And since I am currently signed to ESP, I don't have to worry about all of it anymore, which is nice.

been so busy lately with the book, writing volume 2, recording and composing, etc etc that I feel like I have lost touch with the world of interest-in-jazz and its market (such as it is). I have a fair amount of CDs I want to sell, good stuff, mostly older jazz and I have no idea if anybody is buying these suckers any more. I ask because I would like to know before I go to all this trouble of collating, listing, etc. if anybody is purchasing anything any more in the time-of-download. Whaddaya think?

trying to get paid in this business is one of the most frustrating and humiliating activities known to man and woman. I've actually made money on the new book because I just did it myself, and even turned down one offer from a small publisher. I just won't go that route any more. Let me add, however, that ESP Records, my current label, is the first of any size I have dealt with that honors every commitment, financial and otherwise. Thanks to Steve Holtje, I should mention, who is in charge.

coincidence department: Trenner, an excellent pianist, had been living in this area for years and just died about a month ago.

one of the stranger moments of my life; I got a call one day, must have been around 1978, and the voice said "hi Allen this is Bill Evans; do you know where I can get some cocaine?" I was friends with his wife and he was visiting (she lived in a suburb of New Haven) and I guess he was strung out. I was unable to help.

just to note Simmons was part of a panel, maybe last Fall, at Lincoln Center. He was in a wheel chair, but mentally completely on top of things.

there's something about San Francisco street musicians; some time in the 1980s I saw DuPree Bolton playing out there.

yes, original source is about 80 percent of the battle. Transfer a mint 78 and you will sound like a genius. A lot of that first generation of restorationists like John R.T. Davies, as great as he was, had been able to, let us say, "borrow" some amazing things from the EMI vaults as well as pick things up from RCA that were about to be thrown away.

actually, true story; Dexter was dead two hours before he finished playing his last tune.

have not had the decay problem; might be a program issue.

it really depends; I start with a typical tune - 3 minutes average let us say - by setting the de-clicking with the before/after button, listening, in real time, for distortion of any kind. After a general run, if there are still left over noises, I enlarge the wave form and try to zero in and just de-click on that tiny fraction of time with the noise, and apply de-click. If this does not work I sometime have to snip it by hand, which is tricky because it can disrupt the time flow.

I always declick and decrackle first; and I do all de-noising by hand, meaning that one should NEVER use the program the way the program advises you to use it, by having it create a noise print in which it "learns" the noise and then eliminates it. This is always grossly destructive, and is why you hear these youtube guys who offer tunes in which they have created that horrible gurgling effect. De-noise can and should always be done manually, like a filter in which different frequency bands are individually de-noised. But then ALSO remember that you can never eliminate all noise without harming the sound, so you almost always have to leave some.

lotsa programs around, best I've used (and I used it on all 800 tunes I just restored for the new project) is de-click, denoise, etc from Acon digital. It was something like $99 and seriously it's as good as the $3000 CEDAR system (or at least the one that used to be $3000) -

isn't she in a movie with Judy Garland?

ah, too bad. Lenny Bruce's former girlfriend, also.

Shepp surprised on the Bird duo record he made in 1980: and his solo on this is superb:

Connecticut is doing shockingly well, though I still see things that bother me - young kids in groups without masks, adults dining with not nearly enough physical distance. As a friend (a doctor and brilliant drummer, btw) told me early on, the ruling factor in the severity of the illness seems to be not just getting the virus, but the amount of virus load contracted; meaning, if you are at one of these idiot parties with people back-to-back and face-to-face, your chances of not just contracting it but getting a serious, heavy dose are much increased. I have some immunity compromise (because of my chemo last year) but as the months go by that becomes less and less of a factor, fortunately. Also, I was tested about 10 days ago (before I could see my throat cancer doctor) and it came out negative.

we may be overthinking this; or under thinking. Or in between. Facebook has basically allowed me to revive my career as a musician and writer after I barely survived the hell hole of Maine, so I got no complaints. People get crazy, sure, but you block 'em or delete 'em.

as I like to say, "the more Yanow the less you want."

I think it would be a nice thing.