lipi

Spoiler: KING? I'm sure there are some others here who'd have no problem with the answer, but it does seem awfully out of the ordinary. It's not even an uncommon combination of four letters that it's hard to make a clue for... Is the L.A. Times Sunday puzzle that difficult?! (Highlight to see--it's white type on white background.)

Nah, that's what Eefers, Eb clarinets, are for. Aside: though almost all soprano saxes are indeed in B-flat, there are C soprano saxes, too (one octave above the C-melody (tenor) sax). They're not common, but they exist.

Would love that ragtime set. Isn't the Frémeaux complete for early Armstrong? What's missing?

Well, I should have looked at the Wikipedia article for "Basin Street Blues", because it has an image of the 1931 Charleston Chasers record! It also heavily implies that the 1928 Armstrong recording is the first one, but I'm at a loss as to how to confirm that. :/ Maybe someone with a subscription to Lord's discography can do an exhaustive search on "basin"? Yes, the melody on the verse is new, as far as I can tell. It does not appear on the 1928 or 1929 recordings, nor on the 1931 Cab Calloway one.

Teagarden claims that it was Red Nichols who asked Miller and him to write an arrangement on the (then lyric-less) tune. It's in the spoken bit at the end of the track preceding "Basin Street Blues" on "A Hundred Years from Today: Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1963". The only date he gives as reference is 1927 ("joined the Benny Pollack band, it was about 1927"), but it's not clear how much time later the BSB arrangement came to be. He does mumble something about "our next recording session, which happened to be *mumble*mumble*I'm*so*Texas*cool*". It sounds like "Charleston taster record", but I don't know what to make of it. The earliest recording *I* have is Armstrong's 1928, which has a scat/hum lyric. The next one I have is the Louisiana Rhythm Kings (a Red Nichols group) one from 1929 with Teagarden singing a clearly improvised lyric, and not the lyric we know. Calloway scats his way through it in 1931, and Armstrong does the same again in 1933. The first recordings I have with the standard lyrics are from 1934: Joe Venuti with Louis Prima singing, and the Dorsey Brothers with Bob Crosby singing. So my, fairly half-assed, guess is that the lyric was written and first recorded in 1933 or 1934, by a group under the leadership of Red Nichols. Some casual leafing through a discography or two didn't bring me any closer, but I'm curious now, so maybe I'll dive in deeper this weekend. Edit: I just listened to the Louisiana Rhythm Kings one again, and that lyric is so dreadful it should have immediately prompted a request from Nichols for a new one... AHA, found it. "Charleston Chasers"--I'd forgotten about that particular name used by the Five Pennies on Columbia. If Teagarden's story is accurate, then this is the first recorded instance of the lyrics. New York, 1931-Feb-09, "The Charleston Chasers":

[jazz nerd mode engaged] Milburn recorded it as "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer". The permutation of the drinks is due to John Lee Hooker. [back to normal] Also, someone should buy this, because it's great.

Some are, yes. They do get throttled (i.e., they slow down the data rate, they don't cut you off) after a certain amount of data, but that amount is usually so huge that it won't be an issue for streaming music in your car--even if you do it every day on your two hour commute.

To stream? No, you use your cellular data plan. To connect wirelessly to your car audio system? No, not WiFi, but BlueTooth.

Car audio options are definitely a generational and geographical thing. Geography: I can't remember the last time I saw a new-ish car with a CD player here in Silicon Valley. Generational: the young'uns (which, shockingly, on this board I might be reckoned to be part of!) don't use CDs. They don't even use downloads that much anymore: streaming is the future. Spotify and similar will always beat the number of tracks you can download on your phone. (Yes, for jazz and classical the streaming services aren't very useful yet.) Finally, I don't know whether this is generational or geographical, but I don't know anyone who does not plug their phone in when they get in their car. USB to charge and to get GPS navigation playing over the car speakers. (Actually, I lie, I do know people who don't plug in their phones when they get into their cars: Tesla owners, because they use the onboard navigation and music streaming!) On a technical note: you don't need to plug your phone in in most cars now, anyway: you can just use BlueTooth, and it'll pair as soon as you enter the car. You can use the radio just like you would for a CD--so no extra steps at all. (Arguably fewer, since you don't have to deal with jewel cases and discs.)

It's a pseudonym of Mills's.

Try the Amazon third-party resellers, maybe? I've had pretty good luck with Zoverstock (ships from UK, but usually quite quickly) in the past, apart from a cracked jewel case or two (they just use flimsy envelopes for their international shipments).

I feel like I'm being included in the "if somebody had done a project on Trane..." train (haha...) here, and I want to be very clear that I couldn't care less about Trane or Ayler or Dolphy, and that Bechet is one of the five jazz musicians I care most about. My misgivings about this kind of presentation have nothing to do with the artist and their importance. Further arguing about gilded boxes and the collectors' market for another day and another thread.

I applaud your efforts and am glad this music got a release. That said... It turns out that many people don't care about awards for "best reissue" or "best boxed set" or "most over-the-top presentation of rare music that you will now never hear because you don't have the money or the space for a limited edition quarter sawn oak cabinet with platinum hinges filled with 78s specially made by melting down Black Pattis". This set isn't nearly as bad as those Third Man "Rise and Fall of Paramount Records" sets from a few years ago, but in my mind it commits the same crimes (or mistakes, in my more charitable moods). So, serious question: why only a limited edition with a book? Is there some licensing deal that prevents the music from being released on its own, too (on CD or as a download)?

"Night Train" (1962) and the first album he did with Count Basie, "Satch and Josh" (1974).

Great, thanks! Amazon seems to carry most of these.

I can't help you with the personnel of Andy Kirk's band, but I can tell you the dancers at 52:30 are Frankie Manning, Ann Johnson, Russell Williams, and Willa Mae Ricker. Frankie later complained that Andy Kirk played their music "too damn fast".

Names/labels/links for said compilations, please? I would like to explore but know not where to start. Especially interested in earlier things.

"Mississippi Goddam". I also sang my own covers including "Florida Goddam", "Pennsylvania Goddam", and "Michigan Goddam".

Almost certainly because Lazaro Vega copied the link from a Facebook page. Just ignore the warning, it won't log you into Facebook or anything silly like that. Or, if you prefer, just type www.bluelake.org/ondemand in your browser. (Though you're too late to hear the 1930's drummer shows, I'm afraid.)

This was a wonderful series. Thank you for posting (and maybe for programming, too...?).

I don't recommend converting to MP3. Going from a lossy format (AAC) to another lossy format (MP3) is almost guaranteed to introduce audio artifacts. In other words: you'll lose quality, sometimes to the extent that even those without the mythical golden ears can hear the difference, even at high (variable) bitrates. If you must convert, I suggest WAV (or ALAC, though that doesn't make much sense for compatibility reasons).

Article is behind paywall. I will let others make delightfully ironic remarks at this point.

I think there's a basic misunderstanding here. This is not a good reason to convert to WAVE. iTunes (and any modern equivalent you care to name) will burn to an audio CD from any source. That is, it will burn a red book audio CD--a CD that can play back in any CD player--by default. You do not need to manually convert to WAVE. (In fact, if you *don't* want to burn an audio CD but rather a data CD you have to jump through some hoops.) Most of your points are valid, but the last statement is not. If you want to edit an audio file to remove a spoken introduction, or fade out a long track, or remove noise you will want to use a lossless format--even when your source is lossy. We appear to be drifting a bit off-topic. Apologies--I fear I've derailed this thread.

No, converting from lossy (in your example MP3) to lossless (in your example WAVE) will not introduce additional artifacts. You just get the same signal in a bigger file. (Going from lossy to lossy (e.g., AAC to MP3) will degrade the signal, though.) Like Dan said above, any audio file can be burnt to an audio CD. iTunes will happily burn natively from AAC (Apple's compressed format, which is what the collection is released in).

I'm intrigued: what's the purpose of converting to wave?