Big Beat Steve

Seems like we are more or less in agreement here. I admit I have a couple of Proper sets too (and there seem to be reissue projets where more effort and research of their own are invested so I gues nt all of their reissues fall into this category), but there are cases that make me shudder and which more or less echo the feelings stated above about current JSP practices. Is it really coincidence that there is a "Complete" Milton Brown box set released AFTER such a box set was issued in the USA (forgot the label but it was a real collector's label), or how about that "Accordeon Jazz" box set that had an OUTRAGEOUS number of duplications and overlaps with a set issued by Fremeaux Associés a good many years ago (but still in catalog)? Is that really a coincidence (with there being SO MANY other accordeon jazz recordings worthy of being reissued) or is it just a case of somebody going the easy reissue route by taking advantage of previous reissues? To me this duplicating policy looks very much like what happend with the Bird & Diz "1945 Town Hall Concert" release on the Uptown label, with 3 or 4 identical releases on other labels all of a sudden competing with the "original" on Uptown.

I'm going to think about what I buy, how it stacks up against copyright laws in its locale, the the locale where it's licensed... Of course, I'm going to be buying the clearly legit issue, when I can, and will pass on anything that offends my sensibilities. Does PROPER offend your sensibilities too, BeBop, or do the rock-bottom prices of their CD compilations make any guilty consciences go away at once? It may of course be debatable if complying with the European 50-year Public Domain rule (as it still stands now) is reason enough to okay ALL those reissue labels, but it keeps baffling me on THIS forum how many labels from Continental Europe are being bashed here every now and then yet everybody (especially from the US of A) seems to drool about Proper. Are they really THAT more legitimate than those others? Anybody ever notice how they re-reissue previous reissue packagings with duplications with (slightly) previous reissue projects that are bound to drive you up the wall?? And I have yet to see any conclusive proof that their staying just beyond the 50-year cutoff date in their reissues is just coincidence and proof of obtaining all authorizations, etc. and NOT the same policy that other reissue labels also follow, i.e. take advantage of those recordings falling into the public domain after 50 years.

So it seems like we DO agree after all. I'd never doubt that those studio musicians welcomed the opportunities of cutting loose at jazz sessions. So I guess we can agree on using the term "hack" in the sense of them doing their "hack" jobs in the studios and adding "art" sessions after finishing those day jobs.

Uh oh ... seems like I did not nearly put enough smilies in that sentence ... It WAS meant tongue-in-cheek. So NO, I am not denigrating anybody. Even as a simple onlooker on that part of music history, I do know that securing a steady studio job did mean much more regular and predictable working hours AND better pay than with many touring bands, even "name" bands. All quite understandable and all very well. It just is a pity that a lot of those men were lost to the creative aspects of jazz that way. But now that the subject has come up, let me mention one thing anyhow: Backing genuine touring acts in the studio such as e.g. in New Orleans R&B (with its supply of studio musicians - such as Earl Palmer - for many chart and touring acts) was one thing as those musicians were part of a living and vibrant musical style and therefore close to the pulse of the music being made by regular touring bands (so Earl Palmer, Lee Allen, etc. certainly aren't what I would have referred to as being "buried in the studios"), but how does this compare to musical jacks of all trades (read: musicians turning out literally any style at the push of a button) in Hollywood or other major studios quite a bit further removed from what you might call the center of R'n'R/R&B recording action of those times? There may have been a lot of relatively renowned studio musicians, maybe with former jazz credentials, who'd do e.g. orchestra arrangements churned out by the majors to cash in on covers of the originals done maybe on some indie label. Sure, no doubt those studio musicians were technically perfect in their craft, but really, did they at all times and in all settings have the immediacy, spontaneity and urgency that would have made them play their hearts out in the same credible manner as the creators of the originals (or those really deeply rooted in that particular musical style) did? To put it bluntly, that studio orchestra backing up e.g. the McGuire Sisters doing a whitewashed cover of some R&B original for mass pop consumption may have been technically perfect but was it THE REAL THING? Not in a zillion years - it was what even in English has become known as "ersatz" (a substitute of the real thing) and, hence, a hack job. And believe me - I AM familiar with quite a bit of that part of music history because - if only for historical curiosity's sake and on the lookout for collector's obscurities - I've listened to a lot of those borderline acts hovering on the edges of 50s R&B and R'n'R and usually backed up by studio orchestras no doubt often staffed with former jazzmen who had opted for the security of the studios. (Understandably do, but as far as their output in those "cover record" styles was concerned, it was just an imitation compared to those really ROOTED in the style of the originals - technical proficiency notwithstanding). Do you really think it is a coincidence that a tongue-in-cheek compilation of that kind of 50s R'n'R/R&B imitation music reissued some years ago was called "Rockin' is NOT our Business" ? It's a bit like some Hollywood studio orchestra normally associated with backing pop crooners all of a sudden recreating "The Greatest Hits of Duke Ellington". How would this stand up with jazz collectors, I ask you? If you'd really care to see music history from THAT side of the fence (obviously the opposite of those involved in the production of such music), may I suggest you check out "The Restless Generation" by Pete Frame for your reading - a highly interesting book on how rock music "changed the face of 1950s Britian" - and he DOES dwell on the problem of many a rock act's performance being literally ruined by studio musicians who played technically competent enough but often simply without the proper feel for the idiom, which in turn resulted in a lot of those 45s being just pale imitations of their "live" sound - but it was that "stage sound" that the teenage audience expected finding on the records of their pop heroes. And going by all aural evidence I have little reason to believe the situation was all different in the USA e.g. when it came to pop covers of R&B songs. BTW, most of the guys on that list AREN'T obscure to ME, but not because they may have been with Frank DeVol, Gordon Jenkins or any other 50s studio orchestra but because of their presence in those orchestras that actually made it into jazz discographies and jazz record collections. Just my 2c (on the other side of the coin), and with all due respect ...

Did Cecil Taylor play sax too? BTW, West Coast jazz ain't no rut, it's a matter of conviction for a discerning few! :D If any jazz style finds people being stuck in a rut, it's much more likely to be Hard Bop! :D (Or is there any other style that is the beginning and end to an equally large number of today's jazz collectors? ) Anyway, it's true that many of those sax men aren't THAT obscure, at least not if you are aware of the bands they played in BEFORE they opted for being buried in the studios as session hacks.

BTW, I have a hunch "Carles Falkes" might be CHARLIE FOWLKES (long-time Basie sideman).

Ha, clearly it is so that to many of you folks jazz apparently did not really start before the 50s , or else you would have been aware of a great many more. This list includes quite a few sidemen from the Big Band era of 1935-45 such as Babe Russin (not Bake!), Heinie Beau, Don Ladice, Chuck Gentry, Skeets Herfurt, Freddie Stulce (and these are NOT pseudonyms!), etc.. Floyd Turnham and Bumps Myers ought to ring a bell to anybody interested in 1945-60 R&B.

I agree, of course, and all I wanted to point at is that in a pinch it is better to have some needle-drop reissues that make this music accessible at all than to this music being totally inaccessible. And I still wonder if that media giant could have been bothered reissuing vintage material directly from the masters on a really comprehensive scale at all. I understand a box of early Armstrong recordings with astounding fidelity was reissued some time ago, but beyond that - what would they have done with other artists who'd appeal to an "in-crowd" of a scant few collectors only? Hence my regrets about all those unissued recordings too.

Great compilations (as are the others you list). The strange thing about those Blues Boxes issued in the 70s (bought them from my student's budget back and was glad I did) is that Robert Hertwig, the one who compiled those boxes back then and who now runs a small collector label and mail order service of his own (Bob's Music) has re-reissued a good sampling of that music on CD not too long ago. I wonder if he was just taking advantage of P.D. laws or if transfers of first-generation masters for this music exist elsewhere too. Otherwise, I fully agree that if all those Deccas and Brunswicks, etc. really went up in smoke it would be a huge, tragic loss. I'd rather not think about what actually was destroyed. Though I tend to be even more worried about post-1945 recordings than about pre-war recordings. Hasn't the pre-war blues reissue field been been covered pretty well by Document, RST and others, so at least there is SOME reissue available (even if the sound isn't always top notch), but a quick glance at post-1945 R&B discographies, for example, shows quite a lot of unissued and never-reissued material. So that's now possibly lost forever. OTOH, would we EVER have seen this unissued material? Would Universal have cared about comprehensive releases of unissued 30s/40s/50s minority interest material (that no P.D. label would have had access to) at all?

Yeah, but given the fact that re-re-reissue repackagings of P.D. material on obscure CD labels are a well-known occurence today, wouldn't it be a bit silly to assume that the target group of this "new marketing twist" is collectively plagued by Alzheimer's disease and unable to remember at least most of the titles of the tunes? Especially today when this kind of CD is not usually found in brick and mortar stores (where you are less likely to have access to your collection to check) but via the internet where you have all the time in the world to compare track listings, etc. with the records you already own? Or to put it quite simply: Do those scammers really think anybody hip enough to buy Frankie Newton recordings is THAT gullible?

Sounds treacherously like this is the material that's on that EMPEROR JONES LP issued on the Jazz Archives label in the 70s/80s. Some of it is lo-fi even for 30s studio recordings but it's great stuff anyway, BTW.

Inspiration for Monty Python's Lumberjack sketch? Gents, if you find this cover strange or unclassifiable you ain't seen many 50s/60s COUNTRY album covers. Covers portraying country-styled singers in the (perceived/imaginary) setting of the topics of their songs were a dime a dozen for some time back then. And this one below ain't that strange either. It DOES relate directly to the music contained in the grooves, after all. What I do find strange are those Music for Dreaming and Music for Gracouos Living covers above. That entire fad of those "Music to .... by" of the 50s would warrant a thread of its own. Wonder what a MUSIC TO LISTEN TO MUSIC BY cover would have looked like? Or how about "Music to mow your lawn by"??

There is some early Eraldo Volontè stuff on the JAZZ IN ITALY IN THE 40s CD issued by the Riviera Jazz label. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=415 I doubt that style-wise this is what you are looking for but it is an interesting CD that - given the early post-war limitations in Italy - shows they were capable of astonishing and original things there.

I like that recognition that something that 'doesn't work' might just not work because we're not used to hearing it. Again, relevant to the criticism of fusion musics in many forms. Yes and no. Sometimes it IS a matter of "not being used to it", sometimes it is a simple matter of taste, but sometimes it also appears to be a case of a musical dead end. Taking the example of woodwinds used in jazz, by coincidence the other day I listened to a few Chick Webb recordings featuring Wayman Carver on flute. By the sheer "oddity" aspect this must have been even stranger than woodwind recordings in 50s jazz but to my ears it makes perfect sense and fits in perfectly well even in that idiom. Same with 50s jazz: I am really not a jazz flute or woodwind fan but even on first listening I immediately took a liking to the early Herbie Mann recordings on Savoy whereas I never really got into all that flute'n'oboe etc. stuff by West Coast jazzmen such as Giuffre, Shank and Cooper, especially Bud Shank whose woodwind noodling and doodling I often find rather bloodless. And this despite the fact that I consider myself a HUGE West Coast jazz fan. How come, I wonder? Normally the more laid-back, cooler WCJ style ought to lend itself particularly well to woodwinds (at least more so than "bebop on flute") and yet ... somehow it just doesn't "fuse" with the idiom IMHO. Maybe the detractors of WCJ were right in that those woodwinds tended to accentuate the drawbacks of WCJ?? (I.e. a certain "laid-backness" just for the sake of being laid back - which I've never felt to exist to the extent the detractors of WCJ used to claim back then, but there just might be a grain of truth in it if woodwinds come too much to the fore?)

Too bad the Hawk and Red Allen never crossed paths in the studio (AFAIK) in the early to mid-40s when the Hawk was immensely productive in various small group settings and the Allen-Higginbotham group was hot too. No doubt they met at after-hours jam sessions. Being able to hear THOSE jams today would be a major GAS!

As long as there were quite a few male teens who had a crush on somebody as homely and unhip as the McGuire Sisters (and there MUST have been) there's nothing to be ashamed of. :D BTW, Dorothy Collins' vocal attempts at coming to grips with rock'n'roll are fun indeed (e.g. "My Boy Flat Top"). (Don't know if they were recorded with Raymond Scott's orchestra providing the backing, though)

I don't quite know where Kenton fits into the "Crossover" or "Third Stream" bag (except that there might be parallels between the "pompousness" of some classical and some of Kenton's music) but the key fault IMHO with people in dissing Kenton's output (whether they were "brainwashed" into this attitude or not ) is that they lump all of Kenton's music even of that era into one bag. Some of it WAS pompous, and sometimes the usual clichés are even increased by Kenton's own marketing. The other day I picked up the "Kenton Era" 4-LP set of 1956 (that was widely marketed and acclaimed at the time) to add to the not too few Kenton LP's I already have, and listening to those discs, the rhythm section work on a fair number of those tracks makes it quite clear why Shelly Manne "felt like chopping wood" when working with the Kenton band. But as the Kenton orchestra went through a lot of different "phases" from the 40s to the early 60s alone there was quite a bit of variety that ought to have "something for (almost) everybody" if you take the time to listen closer. That aside, I for one am glad that the attempted marriage of classical music and jazz into what was tagged the "Third Stream" did not evolve any further than it did. IMHO it would have taken too much of the lifeblood out of jazz, and the attempts at using "Third Stream" to "elevate" jazz to "respectability" (over here, anyway) were both ill-fated and totally off the mark if you really cared about jazz. Because this approach to using "Third Stream" could only have come from somebody who did just not do what Gioia did: appreciate jazz on its OWN terms.

Proper being what they are (rehashing of previous reissues where you can take advantage of the P.D. copyright rules), I'd venture a guess a lot of this material comes from the LPs with early Ronnie Scott material that were reissued on the ESQUIRE label in the 80s. I have several of these and find them very enjoyable, very creditable examples of bebop playing - a sort of "miniatures" where a lot of energetic music is condensed into the 3-minute playing time limits. Americans may sneer at them and dismiss them as "copycats" but I feel there is more to this music; they did develop their own ideas in the idiom in a quite convincing way. At the relatively low price of those Proper re-reissues you can probably live with the fact that you often are bound to end up with lots of overlaps and duplicates, and for others it's a good opportunity to fill total blanks in their collections.

Reading this thread and bieng of roughly the same age bracket (born in 1960) as quite a few around here when it come to awareness of 70s pop music, I wonder what I am to make of this thread? Do I have to feel guilty of having been a total outsider back then because I took only a very passing interest in the pop music of the day and otherwise was in the same camp as Ted O'Reilly (the details, histories and trivia of rock music that came AFTER the end of REAL rock'n'roll music in the early 60s were of little interest to me as got into jazz early on and otherwise was/am only interested in the music of the rockabilly era, i.e. music "before my times" in every respect) or - what might be worse - do I have to feel like a total fraud today because for all I know about jazz and jazz-related music (and I'd claim it is a lot) it is boards like this that make me realize how much I still DON'T know about this music compared to others? And going by that yardstick, how many "frauds" would there be around here anyway so aren't a lot of us in good company anyway? :D BTW: WTF were the Starland/Starlight Vocal Band??

Not according to Feather's bio entry (see above). Maybe Late confused this when he mentiond the WEST Coast?

Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of 1960 sez thus: JOHN WILLIAMS, born Windsor, Vt. 1/28/29. played with Mal Hallett's last band in 1945 around Boston. To NYC 1949; Army, Jan . 51-53. Later was with Ch. Barnet, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and other small groups around NYC. Not related to West Coast pianist John Towner Williams. Favs.: Powell, Silver, Brookmeyer. Own LP: Mercury. LPs with Nick Travis (Vict.), Brookmeyer (Storyville, WoPa), Getz (Verve), Cannonball Adderley (Merc.), Z. Sims (Argo, Dawn), Phil Woods (Pres.), J. Cleveland (Merc.).

Yeah, Mike is basically right - Crown often retitled previously issued RPM/Modern tracks when they re-reissued it on Crown. I have several Joe Houston LPs where this is the case. I think that up to a point Ace got into this too (they mention it in their liner notes to a Joe Houston CD) but I do think that in their research they go by the original session acetate info (and from the recent Ace CDs with Modern/RPM material there is lots of unissued stuff to be discovered there so this is keeping them busy). Besides, the tracks do not seem to be retitled but are just cover versions in the case of this Continental Jazz Octette and jazz is only a minor interest in the entire Ace catalog. So I guess this is why items like yours and mine (my Continental Jazz Octette LP, BTW, is Vol. 2 on Crown 5220) are not in THEIR focus. Discographer Walter Bruyninckx is pretty clueless about this too. He lists both of these Crown LPs but says the lineup is unknown and give an approximate recording date of 1954 (which I assume is just a wild guess - I figure it is a bit later but this is only based on the release number of the Crown LPs).

Have heard most of the Michel De Villiers material on those Jazz in Paris discs (and a bit more). No trailblazer maybe, but he certainly was no slouch either. Very solid, very swinging "modern mainstream" "Eurojazz" and really enjoyable if unpretentious, no-frills swinging music from that time is what you want.

Budget stuff as usual with Crown. Most of it shrouded in mystery. I have one of those Continental Jazz octette LPs too (may be the same one but I don't have my collection here at the office with me right now, of course) and this anonymous group may have been discussed here before (I dimly remember something). I agree it's not some reissue of Crown/Modern masters but some rerecording (jazzmen doing "cover versions") but I have no discographical information whatsoever. I picked up this LP for cheap a couple of years ago, found it amusing, and as it evidently was some 50s recording that was good enough for me at the time. But I'd be interested to find out more about the actual lineup too. BTW, anonymous recordings like this on budget LP's weren't that uncommon. I have a budget LP from the early to mid-50s on the GUEST STAR label which listens Sarah Vaughn and Billy Eckstine as the "featured" artists (Sassy has only one song on the LP and the Eckstine tracks are reissues of a couple of his mid-40s big band sides) and then "PLUS SELECTIONS BY THE FLETCH ANDERSON ORCHESTRA". Nice enough big band tunes with a 40s sound to fill out the album but would you believe there EVER was such a thing as a FLETCH ANDERSON orchestra? Obviously somebody tried to cash in on Fletcher Henderson's name (it's not him, that's for sure) but whoever hid behind that name hid pretty well.

Wasn't that 1948 Transcriptions disc originally issued on Hindsight? I like Hep's 1946-47 Performances, Vol. 2, which is HEP 74. Nice cross-section of his work at that time with most of the studio Evans and Mulligan material. "Anthropology," with that amazing Lee Konitz solo, is still one of my all-time favorite big band tracks. Greg Mo If the 1948 Transcriptions disc you are referring to is Hep CD 17, then the Answer is NO. I haven't been able to compare the track listings quickly but I'd say the source for this one is the previous Hep LP 17 that includes 14 tracks from 1948 and 1 from 1949. Hindsight LP 108 has tracks from 1947 (at least that's what the liner notes say).