Big Beat Steve

Seems like I have the reissue you are referring to. Before listening in I'd have said (based on my strictly personal preferences) that I cannot see any real use for a harpsichord (beyond pure gimmickry) anywhere except with Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five. But you made me curious so I had a listen to tracks 9 and 10 first. I agree that Ben Webster pulls it off any time, but I do not find that thing that sounds like an amplified harpsichord here (unusual ...) all that disturbing. Not necessary but not all that unpleasant. However, please note my (and maybe "our") stance on the use of the harpsichord in jazz from that era is clearly a Euro-centric one as we have been treated to that baroque instrument elsewhere in jazz from the late 50s/early 60s (Horst Jankowski - note I am talking about his PRE-"Black Forest" days here! - or George Gruntz, for example). The harpsichord was easily resorted to by those who were out to "thirdstream" European jazz. So IMO the jazzier licks (at times almost organ-like) that come from the harpsichord here are OK and do not bother me. So ... just my 2c. Will listen closer to the "rest" later.

Certainly, and agreed about a set made up ONLY of one alternate of each would not mean a loss of quality overall (and no loss of listening enjoyment, particularly to newbies with "fresh ears"). But taking this idea one step further, this would require identifying them as such anyway. Because the MASTER takes still are out there. So what would we have, then? - A potential set of master takes (which already exists but will continue to exist) - A potential set of alternates (ie. one alternate of each). Certainly an interesting package. But how to call this? "Bird - The complete preferred alternates"?? Hmmm ... (Because like I said I see no way of not labeling them as alternates at all, unless you're fine with muddling it all up ...) I'd not venture a guess about what the "typical suspects" among the Birdophiles would reply. Particularly those who'd clamor again to go the whole way when digging into the alternates. And as the discographies tell us that NOT EACH Bird tune recorded on Dial and Savoy has at least three alternates, what would be next? How to label them NOT as something like "The complete alternate alternates" if you want to avoid resorting to something like "The connoisseur leftovers" or "Scraping the Bird barrel" or ...? (A fun thought, but also food for thought ...)

I would not wager against this. But I would NOT wager either that the discographically inclined among the reviewers, in particular, or other more knowledgeable ones would not cry out scandal for "upsetting the commonly accepted wisdom". "Hey, that's an alternate, not the master, and it doesn't say so in the notes. Sloppy compiling! Horror of horrors!" Has happened often enough, hasn't it?

Along the lines of "The Alternate Goodman" on Phontastic? Except that this time there should be an alternate of EVERY master take ever released?

If you are in an analyzing and exploring mood, no doubt about the usefulness of alternate takes for direct or successive comparison. But there ARE other moments in someone's listening experience, just like there are those (apparently quite numerous) out there who seem to be more and more dissatisfied with the chronological "complete" reissue packages that abound these days and re-burn themselves their own CDs in the exact programming order of the original LPs ...

Being a vinyl man in this respect, I am rounding up one by one the 6 "Charlie Parker on Dial" LPs on Spotlite. So I'd second the recommendations for the 4-CD set which more or less duplicate the original LPs. Particularly at that price for U.S. buyers. However, personally adn after all these years I am still not sure if I'd want to listen to that many alternates for most of the tracks each time, so I still hang on to my "master takes" versions as well. And would do so for the Savoys as well. There are moments when the music still strikes you most intensely when you listen to the tunes in their original release context.

This one is among my recent arrivals here, but in the stack of the "to listen to" to-do list. Time to listen to it now, I guess. Same for the "Ben Webster Meets Don Byas" of which I obtained a SABA original. After having read what's been written about this session in the Don Byas biography I think you cannot help listening to this record with somewhat "different" (or should I say "nuanced" ) ears.

Ha, you're well stocked anyway (as ar eothers who've commented in this thread). By comparison I seem to ahve just a sampling of he bare essentials (the Blue Notes 1205 and 1206 and some assorted 50s on Verve and Riverside and the one with Papa Bue on Storyville, but that should do, I guess). But as a "period piece" in between it is fun every now and then to listen to a rare George Lewis track that surfaced on one of those CD-Rs with radio broadcasts and amateur concert recordings from local jazz events in the 50s and 60s that I was able to take home in recent months, in this case an excerpt from an airshot of 16 February 1967 featuring a local oldtime jazz band (The Goodtime Five) who played a "get-well" concert for George Lewis in the hospital where he had been hospitalized during a tour in Germany. And as the radio speaker announced at the beginning of this excerpt, George Lewis was well enough again so nobody was able to restrain him from joining in on the proceedings for their collective rendering of "Alexander's Ragtime Band". A slice of history that's not in every discography ...

Would really be interesting but honestly, I don't feel like registering on all these sites just for such one-shots. (But if anyone happened to have a download account and would be wiling to share a pdf of the article, then - yes, I'd of course be interested ) It's a subject that has been debated under countless angles through the decades and in order to understand thse debates it would always be good to know (or be told) what the "agenda" of the author(s) is. An all too "white WASP-centric" perspective to try to understand what happend when R'n'R popped up in 1955 IMO misses part of the point. But even if you stick with the "white" angle then the bottom line often just is that "the time was rife". Yet a LOT that clearly laid the groundwork had happened before.

More or less my impressions. I am not finished with it but did read it piecemeal too so far. So IMO it can be put aside safely for a while to tackle another one that might require a read in one go.

There also is a version of "On The Alamo" from November 1965 on the "Suitably Zoot" LP on Pumpkin 108. Plus one on the "The Swinger" album on Pablo from December 1979. Looks like a personal favorite indeed.

Would her brother Roy (+ Jackie) qualify as "Kral" too?

I'd believe you any moment it was "a bear": But did those photobucket overlays HAVE to be in there? THEY make part of the reading a chore. To the best of my knowledge there is no need for anything like this if you just upload a scan jpg or pdf file.

Comforting to see others share the same fate. Last week I searched high and low for a double CD with early 50s New Orleans revival jazz that I KNEW I had. Nowhere to be found. Annyoing because after I had obtained several dozen CDs with 40s and 50s N.O./revival/Condonites jazz from that estate here I decided it was high time I set up a corner specifically for post-1945 revival jazz in my CD filing boxes. Well, that N.O. double CD eventually did turn up - inside a box with original Trad Jazz EPs elsewhere on my shelves where I had filed it for lack of space in the CD corner. Along with a CD of "Sidney Bechet at Storyville", which it turned out was also included (as a different reissue with differently styled inlay) among the half dozen Bechet CDs from that estate. But oh well ... these recent CD arrivals had come my way essentially free after all.

Go to www.worldradiohistory.com , click on the Search button on the left and then check the "Music Magazines" section in the line at the top of the following page that comes up. At first sight I did not see "Cadence" but I might have missed something.

At any rate it's interesting to see this set is put into some sort of spotlight again. I must admit it's been an awful long time since I listened to it. I picked up a mint late 60s MCA stereo reissue of the 4 LP box set dirt cheap at a clearance sale years ago (a 50s original of Vol. III of the individually released LPs on German Brunswick had come my way at some point back then too), figuring that it WAS an important element of his discography and at that outlay you could not go wrong. But I listened to it once after purchase, trying to skip the narrations (not easy to do with no silent grooves proper between the tracks) which I found non-essential too (and even a bit wearisome over the course of 4 LPs) and that was that ... Louis Armstrong's All Stars just never were at the top of my priorities. Time to revisit that set at a leisurely moment now, I guess ...

Yes. Like several others on this forum. And the link provided by Andybleaden last night shows a fine way (again) to access individual issues directly. Wish they'd put more issues of METRONOME online too. But their archives still are as spotty as they were in 2023.

Visibly this site has changed. Sadly not for the better. We've had discussions here on this forum in Feb./March 2023 of that Worldradiohistory site and of the Down Beats accessible online there. I then started to download the PDF files of each mag one by one for the years of most interest to me. As did others, it seems. But one forumist provided a method and link of how to "bulk download" these files in batches of several years at a time in one go. So I then downloaded ALL the Down Beats up to the end of 1969 by this method in almost no time at all. There also was a note that Down Beat objected to these being accessible online, so maybe this is why they changed the site again.

The recent discussion of the "Oop Pop A Da" bebop tune in the Percy France Thread reminds me of a discographical question I had meant to ask here for a while: Among the records I obtained from the estate of a deceased jazz collector in recent months I came into possession of a number of home-made CD-Rs with jazz radio shows from AFN radio that the owner apparently had taped from radio in his younger days and in more recent times transferred them to CD. Some of these dated back to the early 50s, in this instance one airing of the "Hot House" jazz show hosted by the "Baron of Bounce" (Ken Dunnagan) - aired at the latest in September, 1953, according to certain indications. One of the tunes, in particular, caught my attention - no announcement was preserved but the track listing identifies it as the CHARLIE VENTURA orchestra performing "Good Rockin' Tonight" (the Roy Brown tune first made into a hit by Wynonie Harris)! A live recording before what must have been rather a large audience, clocking in at 4:53, boppish backing but with a boogie piano, plenty of sax solo work (though the sax sounds a bit high-pitched for Charlie Ventura's baritone sax), spirited "Good Rockin' Tonight" vocals that somewhat sound like an extraordinarily freewheeling Buddy Stewart - not totaly impossible; from what I have found online there may have been a small time frame before the departure of Buddy Stewart from the band and after the tune had been released and become a hit in 1948. The vocals then go into "Do You Wanna Rock Children", supported by handclapping and some exuberant yelling in the style of Chubby Jackson, and for the last minute and a half or so the singer goes seamlessly into an "Ool Ya Koo" bop refrain. My obvious question: Does ANYONE know of any such a live recording of "Good Rockin' Tonight" by Charlie Ventura that may have been preserved somewhere else out there too? Needless to say, all the discographies or online sites I have been able to consult yielded ZERO. I cannot upload anything so this description will have to do but it should give an idea of the proceedings. Who knows ... it may be a case of misidentification and a different band after all but at any rate it's another nice example of that post-WWII cross-pollination of bebop and jump blues.

Yes, definitely. Oop Bop Sh'Bam was first recorded by the Dizzy Gillespie sextet on 15 May 1946 and released on Musicraft. Oop-Pop-A-Da was recorded by the Gillespie orchestra on 22 August 1947 and released on RCA.

As far as I can see the line-up on the Storyville site is ONLY correct for track 17 (Muskrat Ramble) taken from the 1947 Boston Symphony Hall concert. The booklet of the 4-LP set on MCA gives several different lineups and recording dates for the tracks that are included in the set shown under the Storyville link (and that make up the first 1 1/2 LPs or so of that set, except for track 4 which was not on that 4-LP set). Most tracks are from various dates in December, 1956, and January, 1957. In short, the information on that site is only an approximation.

Great Story!

Ha, a prime example of how tastes and perceptions differ ... I got this not long ago and will keep it of course once it's here (I might warm up to all of it eventually), but the tracks with strings definitely mar my listening pleasure. In most cases strings just kill the jazz content IMO the way they were applied in the 50s. For its jazz content, I like the "Cosmopolite" 10" LP on French Blue Star (GLP 6977) (that I've owned for some 27 years now) much better as it couples the 4 tracks with Oscar Peterson with selected tracks from the August 1952 session that in their original packaging were included in the "Alone Together" album and dispense with the strings.

Contrary to what the announcer says, somehow the vocals and "lyrics" sound more like "Oop-Pop-A-Da" and not so much like "Oop Bop Sh'Bam" to me.

Looks treacherously like record no. 1 and not quite half of record no. 2 of the 4-LP set that has been released and reissued countless times since 1957 under the same "Musical Autobiography" name on Decca, Brunswick and assorted other labels that eventually came under the MCA flag. https://www.discogs.com/master/411024-Louis-Armstrong-Satchmo-A-Musical-Autobiography-Of-Louis-Armstrong Not a particularly rare item on the secondhand market. Makes me wonder why anyone would want to hop on THAT bandwagon now ...