Face of the Bass

Hello, I have the following two box sets for sale. Both are in like-new condition. PayPal only, PM if interested. I highly recommend both sets. Prices include shipping to the US. Various -- Africa: 50 Years of Music, 1960-2010 (18 Discs) $70 Various -- Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM (Dust-to-Digital) (4 Discs) $40

One thing I'll say: if you want to get a jumpstart on an African music collection, you could do worse than just ordering a bunch of these. I'm getting rid of them really only because I have to downsize.

Bump with Sun Ra book added.

In addition to my box set sale going on, I also have the following available. PayPal only, PM if interested. All items are used and have normal shelf wear unless otherwise noted. Prices include shipping to the US. Minimum order of $12 in order to earn free shipping. Otherwise, add $4 for any shipping costs. King Sunny Ade -- Gems from the Classic Years (1967-1974) $5 Bembeya Jazz National -- The Syliphone Years, Hits and Rare Recordings (2 discs) $7 The Black Hippies -- S/T $5 Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafarian -- The Spiritual Roots of Reggae (2 discs) $7 Destroy All Monsters -- 1974-1976 Box Set (3 discs) $40 Duster -- Capsule Losing Contact (Numero Group) (3 discs) $20 Ná Hawa Doumbia -- La Grande Cantatrice Malienne (Awesome Tapes from Africa) $5 Edzayama -- Projection One $5 The Funkees -- Dancing Time: The Best of Eastern Nigeria's Afro Rock Exponents, 1973-77 $5 Joni Haastrup -- Wake Up Your Mind $5 Dexter Johnson -- Live à l'Étoile $5 Joseph Kabasele -- Le Grand Kallé (2 discs) $7 Kusum Beat -- Sweet Talks $5 Les Ambassadeurs Du Motel De Bamako -- S/T (2 discs) $7 The Lijadu Sisters -- Afro-Beat Soul Sisters (Soul Jazz Records) $5 E.T. Mensah & The Tempos -- King of Highlife Anthology (4 discs) $15 Youssou N'Dour -- Egypt $5 Tunji Oyelana -- A Nigerian Retrospective, 1966-79 (2 discs) $7 Rail Band -- 1: Soundiata (2 discs) $5 (crack on front and back of jewel case) Rail Band -- 2: Mansa (2 discs) $7 Rail Band -- 3: Diode (2 discs) $7 Ebo Taylor -- Life Stories: Highlife & Afrobeat Classics, 1973-1980 (2 discs) $7 Lobi Traoré -- Bamako Nights: Live at Bar Bozo 1995 $5 Various -- Authenticité: The Syliphone Years (2 discs) $7 Various -- Haiti Vodou: 1937-1962, Folk Trance Possession (3 discs) $7 (back of outer jewel case is cracked in lower left-hand corner) Various -- Ivory Coast Soul: Afrofunk in Abidjan from 1972 to 1982 $5 Various -- Ivory Coast Soul 2: Afrofunk in Abidjan from 1976 to 1981 (2 discs) $7 Various -- Marvellous Boy: Calypso From West Africa $5 Various -- Rastafarian: The Dreads Enter Babylon (Soul Jazz) $5 Various -- Something is Wrong: Vintage Recordings from East Africa (2 discs) $7

Bump with some price drops.

Hello, I have the following sets for sale. All items are in like new condition unless otherwise noted. PayPal only. PM if interested. All prices include shipping to the US. It's been a couple years probably, but I have often sold items here and have, I believe, a good track record and reputation. Thanks for looking! Modern Jazz Quartet -- The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet, 1956-64 Mosaic #249 $95 Various -- Classic Black & White Jazz Sessions Mosaic 273) $100 (Discs 5 through 11 still sealed.)

I actually think the Miles Blackhawk sets are underrated. Other than the Plugged Nickel box, it's probably the live Miles I prefer the most, at least from his pre-electric era.

Thanks for the info. I've dug back into the Sonny Rollins' bio, but I haven't read the Paul Chambers book yet and I really should. Years ago I nursed delusions of writing a biography of Paul Chambers. I am glad somebody actually took the time to do it.

Wanted to tap into the hive mind here for a moment. What is the best book that covers the milieu surrounding Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s? It could be either a book that fixates on Blue Note as a label, or a book that fixates on the style of music that Blue Note centered on, or a book that is a biography or autobiography of a particular musician. Asking because I haven't heard good things about Richard Cook's Blue Note book. Also not looking for a book that is mainly cover art or photographs. Thanks.

Does anyone know how many leaders of Blue Note sessions pre-1970 are still alive? Off hand I can only think of Rollins, Burrell, Dizzy Reece, and Hancock. Anybody else? For me, what's great about the Tone Poets is the cover art. Blue Note cover art is iconic, and the Tone Poets do a fantastic job of presenting that in full size. I prefer CDs to vinyl in general, but I like the Tone Poet series a lot. I honestly wish they would put the same production standards on all their catalog.

I hope he's able to do it! Biographies are hard, but jazz I would argue is really suffering from good biographies outside the obvious ones (Coltrane, Davis, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, etc.) It was great to see the Sonny Rollins bio that came out not so long ago, and the Thelonious Monk bio that Kelley wrote is fantastic. Jazz needs much more of that kind of thing. More books on Davis and Coltrane ain't it.

In all seriousness, anybody think the world needs an Andrew Hill biography? I think among all but diehard jazz fans his name and work don't resonate as much as they should.

Between this and the upcoming Michael Veal book, somebody needs to alert the publishing industry that we don't need more books on Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Give me a book on Andrew Hill and Eric Dolphy.

That's a good point, but if you want a new vinyl copy of the more common titles, what super-duper versions are in print right now? I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like to see them do the Tone Poet treatment for their whole catalogue from the 1950s and 1960s.

I like the Tone Poet series. The quality is very good and I just pick out the albums I really love as it's nice to have them in vinyl with the larger cover art. Blue Notes does seem though to be in a bit of a logical conundrum. The Tone Poet series tends to focus more on more obscure releases, the kinds of titles that used to come out in the Connoisseur Series on CD. Meanwhile, they also have the Classic Vinyl series, which is good but doesn't have as much artwork. So they are doing nicer releases for the obscure stuff, and more ordinary releases for the most popular items in the BN catalog. Kind of seems backwards from what you might want.

I have the following for sale. PayPal only, PM if interested. Cost includes shipping to the US. International deliveries would cost more, depending on location. Thanks for looking! All discs, booklets, cases, etc., are in excellent to like new condition. No scuffs or scratches of any kind. Mosaic #249: Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet: $110 Mosaic #208: The Complete Roost Sonny Stitt Sessions: $115 Thanks for looking!

Hi Clifford, I really enjoyed the podcast with Marc Masters. I'm looking forward to reading this very soon and doing a lot of exploring of Shipp's work on Rogue Art, which I haven't listened to that much until recently. Congratulations!

Just came to +1 this. This site should rename itself as a Mosaic Records fan site. As near as I can tell, that's the only thing people want to talk about here that is related to music. And the threads are no more substantive than the ones at the Hoffman forum. Just people getting excited about getting tracking numbers, telling everyone when their set arrived in the mail. Then...nothing. No discussion of the music, no discussion of anything of substance. This Sonny Clark set also just exemplifies everything that is wrong with Mosaic now. Recycling releases on CD that have mostly been easily available for years, mining the exact same musical territory to increasingly diminishing returns, refusing to branch out into different genres and eras of jazz or ways of presenting the music. Mosaic's catalog is the best argument I know of that jazz as a genre really is dead, and Organissimo's devotion to this label has killed the discourse here. Alright, I'll go back to the hole I crawled out from now.

I deleted my original posts because one user decided to attack my ability to do my job, during Teacher Appreciation Week, in a time period (post-pandemic) when it is extraordinarily difficult, demanding, and stressful to be a teacher. (Dan Gould). Honestly, I don't want to be on this board at all anymore and don't want anything to do with Organissimo. I reached out to a moderator asking to have my profile deleted (this is apparently not possible on my end). This will be my last post and I ask that no one contact me anymore from here. My life is stressful enough as it is. If the thread cannot be deleted by moderators, if the profile cannot be deleted, just leave it alone.

No. What I was trying to do was to address the historic underrepresentation of female instrumentalists by the label. I wasn't the one who complained about the price (Mosaic prices are very reasonable and honestly I would pay more for the sets if they would upgrade their packaging). The point of the thread is to start a conversation about the gender bias in jazz and in how it is understood historically and documented (or not) by Mosaic. I am not a "disgruntled customer." I only mentioned selling the two recent sets when someone pointed to them as examples of Mosaic still doing good work. It is amazing to me how resistant people here are to analyzing the politics of this music in any way, shape, or form. One thing I have taken away from this discussion is that putting it on Mosaic is pointless. The label is what it is and honestly it would be better if other labels did the sets that we need, like the Dorothy Ashby set coming out next month. I imagine this would have been a more fruitful discussion somewhere else, perhaps a forum that isn't crawling with Mosaic fans who just want to document the growth of their collections as consumers rather than think about the music more deeply. There also seems to be a general resistance here to talking about the politics of representation in jazz, as this is now seen as "woke," which I don't think anyone who uses that term would be able to define. Whatever.

I guess part of my issue is that none of the currently available sets are interesting to me. I've never liked the JATP concept; the musicians who played in it are obviously great, but the vibe of the recordings is kind of monochromatic. Those Dial and Bee Hive recordings disappeared many years ago. Their rate of putting out sets has definitely decreased significantly.

So, I deleted all my previous comments from this thread. I don't really want to be engaged in this board anymore. I understand that Mosaic has done a lot of work of historical value over many years. What I also believe is that Mosaic, despite being a private company, sees its mission as more than profit but also as providing the world with a public good. Mosaic is not Wal-Mart. They are a small business interested in the historical preservation of jazz. My initial post specifically identified the problem as the underrepresentation of female instrumentalists (ie non-vocalists) in their catalog. We know that jazz historically has excluded women from these roles, in ways that have undoubtedly hurt jazz by depriving it of who knows how many women pianists, drummers, trumpeters, saxophonists, trombonists, bassists, etc. etc. For this reason, I think it is doubly imperative that those women instrumentalists who did manage to record have their work documented and preserved. I don't at all buy the excuses made here on Mosaic's behalf. Mary Lou Williams's discography is a mess as far as reissues are concerned. A Mosaic set would have happened if it had been a priority for the company. Same for Jutta Hipp (they could have done a set long before the Be! one came out, which has had scant circulation in the United States anyway). A Shirley Scott set would be particularly valuable because it documents a woman who did many dates as a leader that are actually pretty difficult to find in decent condition now. Mosaic had no problem releasing a set devoted to her husband, Stanley Turrentine. Why not Shirley Scott? It's a worthwhile question. Years ago, I identified a similar problem in the work of the Criterion Collection, which has as its mission the preservation of important works of world cinema. Until about 8 years ago, the Criterion Collection had not released a single film by an African director. Implicitly, Criterion was saying that African films were not significant to the art of cinema. As someone who has a doctorate in African history, I knew that there were many powerful and important African films, and I strongly felt that Criterion needed to rectify this. They have improved somewhat in recent years, but not nearly enough. Some people call this "woke," a term that has now been abused by conservatives to the point of unintelligibility. It is not "woke." It is simply asking that artists overlooked by historians have their work valued and respected. There has always been a tendency in jazz circles like this one (or the old one at JazzCorner) to reject any attempt to politicize the music by bringing these issues up. But I strongly believe that these are the exact issues we should be talking about and debating. The hostility to my initial post has me feeling that a majority of people on this board do not agree with me about this. I guess this really just is a Mosaic fan site, where people get together to brag about their collections, anxiously document their purchases, and otherwise engage in consumerist fetishism of the sets as objects. Look at most of the threads about the individual Mosaic sets. They usually start out with the initial announcement of the set, then either posts expressing excitement or disappointment in the concept of the set. Then people document their orders, when they get tracking numbers, and when the sets arrive. Then, the thread kind of goes away. There is little actual criticism, analysis, or meaningful discussion of the music itself, let alone its broader historical context or political meaning. I find this disappointing. But I think most people on the site prefer it this way. So, my own dissatisfaction with the quality of discourse on the music being what it is, I think any further participation from me on these questions will just be taken as trying to ruin the mood. So, I will stop talking about this here. My apologies for starting the thread in the first place. If there is anything positive that has come from this for me, it is that I want to hear much more from women artists in jazz. It matters to me. I picked up the Craft recordings set of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis with Shirley Scott. I got the expensive vinyl version. The sound is excellent and the liner notes are economical but enlightening. I recommend it. Scott has an approach to the instrument that allows it to breathe within the broader group, rather than dominating the band as many organ players do. I also have placed a pre-order for the forthcoming Dorothy Ashby set. Yes, it is expensive. But it costs about the same as ordering the last two or three Mosaic sets combined. I'd rather have the Ashby set than any of those Mosaics, so that's a fair trade. Quality over quantity. As I am a historian and researcher, I am hoping to use this conversation as a jumping off point for better understanding the music and lives of women instrumentalists in jazz. There is not nearly enough written on the subject. As I have previously published books and done much oral history in my life, I am considering starting a broader project on the subject. That's what I can do to put my "money" where my "mouth" is. I'd be terrible at running a record label, but I can write and try to make an impact that way. Have a nice rest of your week, everyone.

That Texas Monthly article is really good, thanks for posting.

I picked up the vinyl version of this a couple weeks ago. It's very well done. Excellent sound quality and the booklet has great photos without being unnecessarily wordy. I am sure they could have included other albums, but the older I get, the more I appreciate box sets that are shorter and more curated.

I finally started reading this a week ago. This might be the best jazz book I've ever read. It's up there with Szwed's Space is the Place. The reason is that it flows very smoothly and offers an incredibly detailed portrait of the jazz world in the 1950s. It's much more than a Rollins biography; in fact, I don't know of another jazz book that does a better job chronicling the hard bop scene and particularly the drug scourge. Incredible stuff.