ArtSalt

My father was a big fan, indeed, once he caught onto the CD world his collection consisted on Van the Man and Bruce Springsteen only. Naturally, I never took to Morrison. But I caught him at the North Sea Jazz Festival a couple of years ago and was pleasantly surprised and he was joyous on stage and said it was the English press giving him a bad press.

We live in dark times and not only in the US, we have 7000 machine gun armed troops on the streets in France: permanently. This is the new reality. It seems to me we here in Europe are on the verge of a new dark age. Meanwhile, the US looks more like the Wild West everyday.

to see if ricardi's description of it is correct? the only thing that Teachout disputes about the description is that Teachout says that he did insert this line into the play: “It ain’t about the money, got me plenty of that,” . but i suspect that this line was spoken by the actor during the intermission, when the audience was getting coffee. Again, I feel that we are getting lost in historic fact, when the reality it is a play that has to be built on drama to hold the audience’s attention. Ricardi states that the performance is convincing. If it gets a few more people turned-on to Armstrong's music and interested in jazz, then it has served it's purpose. The relationship between Armstrong and Glaser was complex and multi-faceted, Teachout with his playwright hat-on, has to focus on drama. As Spike Milligan once said, “I've just jazzed mine up a little.”

Has anybody actually seen the play?

I agree that Teachout's Pops was magnificent, scholarly and well researched. But the Ellington biography, now there is the rub! Actually, I find Teachout's rebuttal convincing, it is drama and you have to take artistic license with the facts to get to the essence. It is a play, not a lecture on history. But what essence in this case? The dynamic of the relationship.

I agree that Teachout's Pops was magnificent, scholarly and well researched. But the Ellington biography, now there is the rub! Actually, I find Teachout's rebuttal convincing, it is drama and you have to take artistic license with the facts to get to the essence. It is a play, not a lecture on history.

I use to really dig Chet Baker's version which was released on the Pacific Jazz CD Embraceable You, with other unreleased tracks recorded in New York in '57, but not issued until '95. That song and the whole album was so laid back as to be horizontal, even more so than the junkie ballad album with Bill Evans Chet. The kind of music that only makes sense when the blue sky days of summer are here.

For the price, they're pretty much definitive, you can purchase with confidence Mr DeVries!

As it happens, I was back in Blighty on a business trip a couple of weeks back and in the hotel I was staying the DVLA were running personalised number plate auctions over several days. We got speaking to one of the auctioners one evening in the cocktail hour an the highest selling number plate that day had been GBP 168,000. Bonkers wot?!

I was joking there, somewhat. Chet's string album does get universally panned and cited as one of the worse examples of the genre.

80s synth-pop for me, stuff like Hey Little Girl by Icehouse, Living on the Ceiling by Blancmange, or Heaven 17's Come Live With Me love to watch those videos on Youtube. So evocative of that era and my teenage years.

This release hasn't excited as much as the Charlie Parker South of the Border CD that was released back in 1995 as part of the Verve Bird 75 series. That was the peak of CD reissuing art that could compete with 12" vinyl release in terms of art-work and content, a really magnificant CD album of Bird's latin-jazz side.

Bump for the English Ellington, Neil Cowley! Just got the Neil Cowley Trio Live At Montreux on CD and I notice the Blu-Ray is available at The Jazz Center in the Hague. A really, really superlative live recording.

You can't go wrong with a bit of strings, well, actually the Chet Baker album's not so great! My Mother-in-law really loves the Parker with strings, I just put on April in Paris on and she's sent. The only other jazz album that works for her is Don Pullen's Ode To Life. I will definitely get this album for the alternative takes.

It's worth a punt for the price, but if there's no Bird on some of the tracks, we've well and truly been had!

I'm invested all my bucks in the RVG edition revival which will surely come. I was pleasantly surprised to see today, a number of RVG Blue Note editions being sold for the dizzying price of €19.99 - €21.99, which is good inflation, considering they were selling for €4.95 in most other music stores in the Netherlands!

There's a full listing of the tracks and samples on Allmusic.

So what we are saying is that the Aphex Aural Exciter is a very bad, bad, bad thing? Is that because Rudy is using it? The time will come when the RVG CD's are rehabilitated in polite hi-fi listening society. It will likely start with Birth of The Cool and continue from there.

One of my sources informed me yesterday, that this set will be out by August. Which year he didn't say!

I've quite a few of these and some of the Columbia Miles Davis from the early 90's too - all transferred from the original master tapes and sound pretty good. I've come to the conclusion that it's not so much better or worse with different remastering, just difference. The much maligned RVG editions which everyone despises and who say sound compressed and awful, also sound pretty good to me on my set-up.

I so want this set! Everyone keeps on saying there's nothing left for Mosaic other than live gigs, I think not, the best is yet to come!

I recently purchased a Sun Ra album from a so called "bootleg" label, it was not available on any legitimate release. So what choice did I have, I wanted to explore the music and so any moral questions as to Sun Ra, up there in some galaxy getting his cut, seemed somewhat ridiculous. Ideally, I want my music mastered or remastered from the source tapes, or as close as possible, with due care and attention to packaging and liner notes and royalties paid to the artist or their estate. But I actually might not dig the estate, for example, I deplore the estate of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac whose treatment of his daughter, Jan when she was ill was quite deplorable leaving her to die. I care nought for them and wish them not a penny. Who has the estate of Chet Baker? I dunno'.

The Hague's record shops have been decimated in the last five years - there was a couple of discerning independents and they all went within about 18 months, including the one by the new wave lady who was in with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads. The heavy metal one disappeared overnight, some might say, thankfully. There's a few vinyl and second hand shops left, plus Media Mart, V&D and the Jazz Center hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Sounds in Delft is good for box-sets, I picked-up the 14 CD history of Sun Ra box-set on Transparency for a good price, small jazz selection, but now stock a few of the Blue Note SHM's.

Don Pullen - Random Thoughts, Kele Mou Bana and Ode To Life Wynton Marsalis - Big Train Stan Getz - People Time Couple of good Tom Jobim one's around - Brazileiro, Jobim and Friends Monty Alexander - Yard Movement, Stir It Up Charlie Hunter Trio - bing, bing, bing!, Ready....Set....Shango! Lee Konitz - Another Shade of Blue Gerry Mulligan - Re-Birth of The Cool Bill Holman - A View Fom The Side And on the jazz reissue front, a wonderful, wonderful era for Verve.

Popular music, as in chart music, is utterly debased now and I am surprised that people are still listening to it in their early 30s. It is dead and no longer the vanguard of popular culture or the zeitgeist of our times as it was during the last half century of the 20th century. That is the real dilemma and question: how to reinvigorate it? There was an article in the British media last week, about how people at the age 42, return to the pop music charts. I find that very hard to believe, you don't leave manufactured pop for higher things only to return buzzing for your teenage kicks in early middle age.