Big Beat Steve

Predictable and understandable, those waxing musings. Though I admit I often find the 60 or 70+ minute time limit of a CD very convenient even when compared to LPs with generous playing time per side, I would not trade my vinyl for the same in CDs, let alone downloads (which no doubt are fine for "consumable" and tehrefore expendable music but much less so for really LONG-term storage and possession, i.e. COLLECTION ). Besides, though opinions and preferences may vary I still find the feel of the actual ANALOG object as well as its cover in FULL size light years above most CDs. And as for those pops, warps and crackles, true, this was and is a nuisance on vinyl but don't nobody tell me CDs will withstand the same degree of careless handling (and pressing defects aren't totally unknown on brand-new CDs either). I do have quite a few (otherwise unobtainable) vinyl platters which clearly have seen LOTs of party use in their former lives and might rate VG- or G to G+ at best by Goldmine standards and yet, for all their pops, ticks and crackles they do play through without skips. Would CDs that have seen the same kind of (ab)use play at all anymore? I doubt it. Very strongly so. And ever since the occasional CDs (from reputable labels) have started to skip on my CD player or have yielded a "No CD" message on the display I do wonder if this kind of intermittent fault is really the CD player's fault only. In the case of vinyl at least, when the actual vinyl is there and an actual stylus is on the pickup then I KNOW the platter will play. But each and every CD (NOT CD-R, that's a different matter) a few years further down the line from now? I can only hope so ... As for availability, like MG said - there ARE tremendous amounts out there, but a HUGE lot worthy of reissue still has not been covered on CD (let alone downloads). And honestly, "complete works" availability often is nice, but haven't you all wondered if it always was worth it getting each and every snippet of this or that name artist? Are those few tracks constantly bypassed by vinyl-era reissue compilers really that essential, or aren't they just DROSS that will satisfy fanatical completists only? Not to mention that collector's satisfaction of having unearthed more material to fill this or that gap in one's collection with minumum overlap? Sometimes getting everything in one go on CD is extremely convenient but sometimes this way of almost mechanically accumulating material rather reminds me of a bookkeeper's attitude. And am I the only one who feels reissues on CD often tend to go OOP even faster than in the vinyl era? So there's pros and cons both here and there and not all progress is gold that glitters.

No doubt about John Broven ("Walking To New Orleans" hit me rather early on) but my doubts about Mike Leadbitter probably are due to the way he excluded R&B in a very wide sense from the early issue of his discography, and other quotes from his early publications found in the "How Britain Got The Blues" book seem to indicate it took him quite a bit of time to see the light, or else he had a slightly skewed picture of the "Unlimitedness" of the "Blues" (pun intended ). Signs of the (selective awareness of) the times, I guess ... About this "Maybeth Hamilton book" that you mention - can't recall it here on this forum but is this MaRybeth Hamilton"'s "In Search of The Blues"? Is it a worthwhile read? I have yet to start "The Land Where The Blues Began" by Alan Lomax (bought a couple of months ago) so maybe I ought to get this one too for a BALANCED view?

I think that's what Steve was saying, though he didn't put it neatly, as you did. Indeed that's what I was trying to say, MG. And I agree with what you said about the "jazz" content too.

Sorry, everything I've read and heard, then and since, leads me to believe that R&B (in the way it's being discussed here) and soul (ditto) are part of a continuum. Yes, there were differences - a Civil Rights factor, for instance. But for many, many of the participants at the time, I doubt such a "change" was barely worth remarking on. Bobby Bland and Solomon Burke are just two that come to mind as having s stake on both camps. Bland and Little Milton recorded for Sun before going to Duke and Chess/Stax respectively. To me, Bobby is an R&B artist AND a soul singer. As for R&B, well in one of those odd twists, it may have actually been easier for a teenager in NZ to latch on to that stuff than a likeminded soul in the US, at least one who wasn't already to scouring joints for 2nd hand discs or hanging out in black clubs. Not that we had the records in our shops (plenty of blues, but no R&B). But through reading the likes of Blue Unlimited, I certainly became quickly aware of the likes of Joe Liggins and Floyd Dixon. And this Specialty comp (and its Vol 2), from the early '70s, were hugely influential on me: And after that came the Route 66 label with releases by Wynonie Harris, Dixon, Roy Brown and many more. (Yeah, yeah, I know - this timeframe is a little later, just saying ...) As well, while the Brit R&B/mod bands did a heap of Muddy and wolf, as well as Burke and Irma Thomas and so on, it wasn't unknown for them to also cover this type of R&B - as well as Buddy Holly. Uh oh ... been away from my PC for only a couple of hours to tinker in my garage and pow! the thread explodes and it becomes real hard to catch up ... :D I would not really disagree with you, Kenny, so let me just elaborate on a few details so my earlier post is not misunderstood: - IMO Muddy Waters would be one of those who MIGHT fall into the R&B category but IMHO he was not always perceived as such. The entire Muddy/Little Walter school is what I would file broadly under "Chicago blues" or "electric blues" as a sort of opposite spectrum to all those "down home" (acoustic/contry) blues artists "rediscovered" from the early 60s. But where was everything else from the field of blues in between these two poles that had been around and in full bloom a decade earlier? You know if Muddy, the Wolf or Elmore are about as far as these white blues boys would get into R&B then they only caught a glimpse of the whole field of R&B and, what is more, one extreme of R&B that in many regards and according to quite a few blues scribes might as well qualify as some kind of electrified, updated "down home" blues) - No doubt that there were quite a few R&B artists and hit makers in the STRICTER sense of the word who continued neatly into Soul music (e.g. Bobby Bland). However, stylistically speaking there was much more to R&B, and a lot of it did NOT evolve straight into Soul. Now, speaking of the early or mid-60s when the white boys latched on to the blues, would it really have been EASY to find non-OOP records in the stores by all those R&B artists ranging from Amos Milburn to Wynonie Harris to Joe Liggins to Big Jay McNeely to Big Maybelle to all those blues shouters (beyond Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing) to whoever you'd care to name ...? In short, the entire field of what is also termed "Jump blues" must have passed largely under the radar of those white blues boys of the 60s. See what I mean? Remember the mid-80s three LP volumes of "Jumpin' The Blues" that ACE released with late 40s/early 50s "jump blues" R&B of the shouters and (some) honkers variety. Would you believe German Brunswick had already reissued tracks that all later resurfaced on these ACE LPs on a 12in LP in the early 60s? Must have been EXTREMELY odd among the usual blues vinyl fare of the 60s and really one of a kind. And this cannot only be a matter of these artists not having been on the R&B hit parades anymore. Down home blues artists (you know .. the typical image of the weary, guitar strumming oldsters in the gutter ) weren't exactly the hottest thing in the black U.S. ghettos either and Robert Johnson or Leroy Carr were even farther down the road in the mists of history than were, say, those early 50s blues shouters ... any yet they struck the fancy of those white boys trying to get into the blues whereas the (jump blues) "core" of R&B for the most part did not. How come so much R&B remained off the radar of many blues enthusiasts? Stylistically overzealous purist attitudes (or narrow-mindedness) on the part of early white promoters of the blues such as Mike Leadbitter and his ilk? Maybe .. but they were only part of a long line of blues "purists" who apparently found it hard to accept R&B (especially the more jumping small combo variety) as a legitmiate style of the blues. Period music press features seem to bear ths out. (As if every blues record is to be a tale of woe and sadness ...) And strangely enough, somebody quite narrow-minded in other respects such as Hugues Panassié seems to have been one of the very few prominent writers on this music who gave R&B of the above kind its due and a relatively O.K. measure of appreciation (read his early 60s Bulletins of the Hot Club of France and you will see). Finally, those Specialty LPs you showed above were a major revelation to me too when I stumbled across them in '75 or '76, just like those mid-70s reissues by Roy Milton and Joe Liggins on U.K. Sonet that came shortly afterwards (and the contemporary reissues on the French Riverboat label, and then of course Jonas Bernholm's Route 66 labels). But like you said, this was more than a decade after the British blues boom. And if i remember correctly even in the mid-70s anything on vinyl connected with either downhome blues or Chicago/electric blues outnumbered the "core" of R&B not by 10:1 but rather by 100: 1, I guess.

Each to his own. I'm no fan of either, but this strikes me as both absurd - and inaccurate, in the sense that the cultural landscape was so different. Even if you consider Winter a "white boy playing (at) the blues", he nevertheless came up in era quite different from navel-gazing that attended WM's career. Each is concerned with only a small fraction of the past of the music that they love, which they believe to be the crucial bits of those kinds of music. For example, has Johnny Winter ever shown any interest in Joe Liggins, Charles Brown, Roy Milton, Harmonica Fats, Esther Phillips, Big Maybelle? (I don't know the answer to that question, by the way, so it isn't rhetorical.) MG I simply don't see it as either/or situation. I don't know either, but I DO know that among the likes of the Allams and the Muscle Shoals guys in their formative years, Bland's Two Steps From The Blues album was a massive influence. So, no, I don't think they spent all their time digging Elmore James. Let's face it, through most of the 60s and 70s that particular kind of the blues that had that BIG "Rhythm" in its name was very much a no-no to those "real" blues fans - not only the Whites who took their inspiration from the ol' Black masters but also to the (younger) Blacks with whom R&B had fallen out of favor even before that "classic" Chicago, "electric" blues (or whatever you call it) had become outdated when Soul bcame the #1 music with the Black people. R&B did live on in a way in some elements of Soul but still ... So how were those young Whites really to discover R&B if everybody else just proclaimed all those (rediscovered) down home / country blues artists on the one hand and the modernized Chicago-style bluesm en ont he other were what the ENTIRE spectrum of blues was all about? R&B somehiow ended uop in a sort of no-man's land and it must have taken some special appreciation and awareness to really get deeply into rediscovering R&B - which by the late 60s was very much a "historical" style of the blues in the same way that "hown home blues" actually was a historical style too, eccept that quite a few "down home" blues artists still were around (or had been rediscovered) and still playing their music, whereas those R&B men who still were around had gone on to much more modern styles (cf. Johnny Otis etc.).

Suggested reading: http://www.amazon.com/How-Britain-Got-Blues-Transmission/dp/0754655806/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267298780&sr=8-2 (Search me why its price has become so inflated. My copy bought last fall wasn't cheap but certainly nothing like THIS ... Still it's an interesting book)

Personal preferences aside, they DID inject some new life into the blues (and their older exponents) and created some new awareness in those days - more so than in the States, and those who did it in the States had to come in from the heart of Europe to show how it's done. :D

Same feelings here. Make the contributions your own, LP, say what you yourself have to say and dont recycle other people's (sometimes flawed) statements and you will generate a lot more positive feedback. So, Moose, just on a side note, how about tackling things from a slightly different perspective to see what Mooses have to contribute to jazz (or to the evolution it takes): Bullmoose Jackson Moose John Walker Moose The Mooche etc. :D A bit off the trodden path of the big names but of merit and interest nonetheless. ;)

Yes, I doubt squatting works for OOP sets (hence my qualification), but it *might* work for in print used Selects if one were looking to just a few dollars and indifferent about new vs. used. Just thought I'd put it out there in case people are bidding on common items when they're finished setting up their Mosaic snipes.

Jepsen sez: Sweetenings: Two thirds YES (the rest was Kenny Drew) Patented by: NO (it was Tommy Flanagan) Good company ...

Just to round out the picture (literally), some images can be found here and elseqwhere on the same site: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/I?gottlieb:5:./temp/~ammem_LdrK::displayType=1:m856sd=gottlieb:m856sf=04671:@@@

In a way you are right - actually I might as well have called them a "DEUTSCHROCK" band (which is the label used domestically), but who knows what non-German-speaking forumists might have made of THAT? ("So this is the DEUTSHE ROCK?? Do you SPREKEN SIE DEUTSH?") :crazy: Anyway .... a label is a label, and be that Krautrock or Deutschrock, both terms as used over here (the first one tongue-in-cheek, because WE were well aware of its implied connotations, the second one more straightforward) refer to that brand of genuinely German post-Beat rock bands form the late 60s to the mid-70s or so. And both labels as understood here do not only include hard rock-like bands but also pretty far-out stuff such as AMON DÜÜL or TANGERINE DREAM. Ha, this is strange ... though I never dug the music of those bands, it does bring back memories from my teen days when they are evoked now. Though it seems you cannot bring back those times anyway; Kin Ping Meh (to get back to the topic) had a reunion tour 2 or 3 years ago but according to internet forum comments it was a major disappointment all the way. A bit like when they tried to bring each and every arthritic, long-inactive, rusted up 20s blues singer back on stage in the 60s. Some just couldn't cut it anymore.

Early 70s German KRAUTROCK the hottest thing in 2010 Florida?? Wow! Never went for that kind of "home-grown" psychedelic rock but of course remember them from the time my interest in music really started in 1975 as quite a few of my age peers were heavily into all those long-haired fuzz-guitar Krautrock bands. Wonder what kind of money their original albums fetch these days? (And I understand there is a 4-CD box out too)

I have the following European jazz mags for sale: ORKESTER JOURNALEN (Sweden) - 3 euros apiece: 1946 - Jan, Feb 1948 - Dec 1949 - Sep 1951 - Oct 1955 - Jun, Jul, Oct, Nov, Dec 1957 - Oct 1958 - Jan, Mar, Apr,. May , Jun-Jul, Sep, Oct, Dec 1959 - Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul-Aug 1960 - Full year 1961 - Jan, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec ESTRAD (Sweden) - 3 euros apiece: 1949 - Feb 1952 - Oct 1953 - Jan, Mar, Apr 1954 - Apr, Oct 1955 - Jan, Mar, Sep 1956 - Feb, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Nov 1957 - Feb, Jun, Sep 1958 - Feb, Nov 1959 - Feb, Nov 1963 - Jan JAZZ PODIUM (Germany) - 1 euro apiece: Most issues available from the following years: 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1990 Plus issue 12/1956: 4 euros Shipping is extra but rates for parcels up to 2 kg are fairly affordable within Europe. Contact me by PM if interested and we can work out a deal.

Well, since we all seem to be talking about various reissues, maybe THIS might settle the case: I dug through my "Down Beat Record Reviews" reference books, and Vol. I has a review of ABC-Paramount 111 (rating is 4 1/2 stars, by the way ), and in the track listing it says "Tricrotism" too.

Don't know what pressing/issue/reissue you have, but on my Jasmine (facsimile) LP reissue of the ABC Paramount release (ABC-111) the spelling is Tricrotism, and this seems to be a straight reproduction of the original back cover typeface and layout complete with liner notes by Burt Korall. So it might well be that some reissuers did not get this right.

I have a "Tricrotism" somewhere in my collection (can't recall the artist right now) but remember quite distinctly that it DOES have that second "R" (because in fact if you just glance over the word you tend to "drop" that second "R" but then you note it IS there). Are you sure your source isn't just misspelled?

What do you expect? Press releases (even if on virtual media) are not supposed to be argued with or discussed. They are supposed to be swallowed as is.

It's a good set. But I had to make a compilation out of it that omits all the "singing bass" solos. Major Holley, if I recall correctly. I could never get with those bowed/sung things. My loss, I suppose Very much your loss if you otherwise like that mid-40s small-band swing. You really have to allow that humming-singing-bass soloing to grow on you. I remember an extended weekend in my very young collecting days (age 15 or so) when I was more or less locked in a weekend cabin due to heavy rain during a family excursion so just to pass the time I got busy with that handful of records and turntable there. Among a couple of jazz and pop oldies LPs there was that "Bowing Singing Slam" album on Savoy. Much as I liked swing music even at this early age this one really sounded odd to me and made my head just dizzy so I had to take it off. Many, many years later (long after having been exposed to Slam quite a bit more, not least of all thanks to the 1945 Don Byas recordings), I picked up a secondhand copy of that "Bowing Singing Slam" album myself. And indeed by then it had become perfectly standard swing combo fare to my ears - very enjoyable and certainly nothing to make you feel dizzy.

Can't say I am an expert on original covers but from all I have seen (either in my own collection or elsewhere) I'd say that 50s U.S. covers with a "white" base color rarely really were THAT bright sparkling white (e.g. if the degree of "whiteness" noticeable on those unworn edges of the front paper folded around the seams and glued over by the back cover paper - which may have come unglued at the edges, revealing the edges of the front paper - is anything to go by, for example). Any shade of "off-white" seems to fit it far better. I'd alsssay it sometimes depends on the pressing run. One pressing of the 50s may have been whiter than another only marginally older or more recent. At least I remember having seen records in comparable condition that did differ noticeably in that respect although the country of issue was the same and they really were of virtually the same age as far as anybody could tell. Interesting project, BTW, neveronfriday. Trying to go Gokudo one better?

I used to enjoy Mr A on British TV years ago, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration MG Indeed. Svend Asmussen was quite a figure in European small-band swing of that period and of course has a long career second to very few but naming him alongside Pops, Duke and Monk really is a bit over the top. As for that new compilation CD on Storyville, given that these seem to be non-commercial recordings made for radio I assume, then, that this CD does not overlap with the earlier Asmussen CD series on Phontastic and on Swan Music (the latter one a whopping 18-CD series AFAIK) that covered at least a good part of that era too. Honestly, though I'd love to hear those mid-50s German radio recordings made by Bengt Hallberg and the Almstedt-Lind Quartet again, for example, I am a bit wary of what German radio would have recorded in those days. Usually the swing content was watered down noticeably in favor of the appeal to the "general public".

Just what I figured as one of the uses/target groups for these compilations. Agreed that it's better than a lot of other kinds of "dinner music" but still ...

LOL again, Aggie! That's what everyone said four years ago. Yet I noticed this afternoon that it had 1,170 views when I resurrected it. Maybe that's because so many would be interested to see why anybody would drool about (obviously) rehashed things like this ... Anyway, that's what I figured this was all about before I viewed this thread for the first time today (and lo and behold, I wasn't far off ). Mind you, I am not really familiar with THIS series but this "lover/smooching/fireside" jazz compilation CD thing has been besieging the less well-stocked racks of shops on on a variety of labels for quite a few years. Though the artists are alright and their tracks would make sense in some other (i.e. their original album) context they just become a major drag when forced into packages like this. Evidently you can water down things in a lot of ways ...

More power to people like him!

The only answer I have to that is that jazz is so fragmented today you cannot possibly take in all and everything without straining your own musical preferences waaaay beyond all limits. And even if today's artist XXX in all his artistic sincerity would be worthy of every bit of support he can muster and would be the only living exponent of what is considered jazz today but happens to follow a musical path that is nowhere near what I would ever prefer to listen to in jazz in all its varieties that suit my PERSONAL tastes, then - sorry, no go. It's for others closer to his music to provide that support, not me ... Worse yet - so very many fans of Michael "The Bubble Boy" Buble who have never even HEARD Bing Crosby. Nice example. But I was not only referring to those who listen to copies of the real thing instead of the original but rather to those who really are oblivious of what went on beyond before the times of their preferred artists. Can you really appreciate and understand Trane to the fullest if Bird is old hat to you, for example?