nmorin

Weren't Altlanta #1 rushing in the NFL this season? The Eagles shut that down pretty handily. Yeah, but Atlanta didn't have a serious passing attack to worry about. The Pats do. That makes an enormous difference.

The Sonny Rollins that I own, I almost uniformly love (for some reason I can't quite figure out, the 26 minute Bird medley doesn't knock me out). I have, I believe, all the early studio sessions in which he participated, from the sessions with Babs Gonzales in 1949 to Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders in 1958. But I don't own one note of music that contains Sonny Rollins from after 1958. I see the RCA box, which starts in 1962; a few albums on Impulse; another break; then a bunch of albums on Milestone. So, what's the deal: Did his playing change after his first break, or did the music change much? Is it as highly regarded as his 1950s work? How about the stuff from 1970s and after? Do folks who love the 1950s stuff usually dig the rest of the ride, too? Am I going to be spending alot of money in the future?

A 3-albums-on-2-CDs Conn of Wayne Shorter's 1970 Blue Notes: Moto Grosso Feio, Odyssey of Iska, and the unreleased session w/ Tyner. Pleeeease.

I, too, think the K-2's are more of a sonic upgrade, in general, than RVGs. The only K-2 that I didn't think sounded great was The Sound of Sonny, but I understand that the OJC sounded even worse. Of course, some RVGs are huge upgrades, too, like The Birth of the Cool.

I meant to add that the sound of the VICJ is still less than perfect. There remains a bit of a flanging or distortion in the high-hat during the first part of "Tasty Pudding". Still, all told, the sound is greatly improved relative to the OJC.

nmorin — Please let us know what this one's like! (I was just about to make the same order myself.) I've always liked this session, but it never seems to get any lip service among Miles fans. (The track "Tasty Pudding" is tasty indeed.) I believe the VICJ flips the playing order in contrast to the OJC. Is this correct? The ...And Horns VICJ sounds much, much better than the OJC--I am very happy to have gotten it. There's very little (no?) noise reduction on the VICJ, and the sound is much fuller--one can hear the individual instruments much more clearly in the ensembles. Miles' tone sounds more Milesian. The VICJ places first the "Morpheus" session from 1951 with Rollins, and the 1953 "Tasty Pudding" session with Sims and Cohn is second--the opposite of the OJC. Like I said before, the original OJC CDs of Miles' Prestige sessions sound just fine to me (though, that didn't stop me from getting the K2s), but the two sessions on ...And Horns, the Dig session, and the session with Bird and Sonny on Collectors Items were glaring exceptions. With Dig coming out in April as a K2 and Collectors Items coming out as a K2 a few months back, I am quite pleased. [edited for grammatical error]

Good Christ, that fire must rank as one the most enormous jazz tragedies that didn't involve someone dying.

I was reading the liner notes to Ornette's "Beauty Is a Rare Thing", and it was mentioned that as a result of a fire at an Atlantic warehouse, three times as much material was lost as was released!?!?! What else was lost in the fire? Other big-time master tapes?

Thanks much, Chuck. Hey, where's Whitehall, MI (I'm a transplanted Yooper)?

I am burning my Mulligan/Baker recordings chronologically. But I see the same recording of "Festival Minor" listed as being recorded three years apart. One date given is September 1954, the other date given is 1957--part of the reunion recording. Any idea what's the truth?

What does that mean? Are some new EU rules putting Classics and their bastard cousins out of business for post-1953 material?

I don't, but have a feeling I will some time in the not-so-distant future ... Five years ago, the RCA set left me somewhat cold. Don't know why. Now I'm gaga over it. Last night in the car (by myself, thankfully) I was calling out "Manteca!" I'm listening to the Savoy set ("Dizzy Gillespie: Odyssey 1945-1952") right this second, having recently listened to the RCA set also. Both are Keepnews productions. The sound on the Savoy is quite inconsistent, but seems to have been subject to less noise reduction than the RCA set. It's actually a great compliment to the RCA set though, filling in the mid-'40's stuff with Bird and Slim Gaillard, for example, and miscellaneous early-50's Dee Gee material (in great sound, and including early Coltrane on both Alto and Tenor in a 1951 session). One thing I really prefer in the Savoy (and other Savoy boxes I own) over the RCA box are the track listings, which include all the personnel and discographic info with the track listings in one place, so you don't have to keep flipping back and forth to correlate the discography with the track number and title. Between the Savoy and RCA boxes, I think you pretty much have Diz's studio recordings covered through the early '50's. Then again, you won't see ME posting in the Discography forum any time soon, and I stand to be easily corrected. You can see the tracks and personnel in the Savoy box here. The RCA and the Savoy CDs togther are missing a few sessions by Diz under his name from the 1940s: The session where he recorded the first version of "Salt Peanuts", plus "Good Bait", "I Can't Get Started", and "Bebop"; the session with the first version of "Groovin' High" (the same session where he recorded "Blues 'n' Boogie"--but Keepnews kept "Groovin' High" off the Savoy disc because it was "sonically inferior"; a sesson from LA where he and Bags et al did "Dynamo", "Diggin' for Diz", "Round Midnight", "When I Get to Old to Dream", and "Confirmation" (a great session, but Bags sounds like he's playing milk bottles); and a four tune session with strings. This is from memory, so I am sure I screwed something up somewhere.

if you can believe Miles, in his "Autobiogrpahy," (add salt, I know), he thought pretty highly of that "Dig" session, although it seems to get the brush-off from a lot of reviewers. I've always liked Dig it quite a bit, too. Even on my old and inadequate system, the current-vintage OJC CD sounds pretty muddy, though. Another session I quite like, but I never hear anything about, is the session that's the first half of And Horns--the four tunes with Zoot Sims and Al Cohn on tenor. The And Horn session's even muddier, so yesterday, I ordered the VIJC to see if it's much of an improvement.

I will surely pick up "Dig" -- I think the Miles stuff on Prestige generally sounds pretty darned good, with the three exceptions being "Dig", "Miles Davis and Horns", and the four tracks with Bird and Sonny on "Collectors Items".

Some how I got TWO copies of the "Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass" (Verve, 1958) for Christmas, and would be happy to part with one. I'd love to trade for CD-Rs of live mid-to-late 60s Miles shows from Europe.

According to the indispensible Jazzmatazz site the following CDs will come out as K2's in April: NEW Art Pepper - Winter Moon (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Miles Davis - Dig (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Coleman Hawkins - Soul (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW John Coltrane - Standard Coltrane (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Yusef Lateef - Eastern Sounds (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Kenny Drew - Kenny Drew Trio (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Thelonious Monk - Thelonious Alone in San Francisco (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Cannonball Adderley Sextet - In New York (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Bill Evans Trio - At Shelly's Manne-Hole (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered NEW Abbey Lincoln - Abbey Is Blue (Fantasy) Apr — 20-bit K2 remastered

I love Mingus' Pithecanthropus Erectus and Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, but the CDs I have sound really flat. I am sure I'd live if I couldn't find better versions, but are there better sounding reissues of these amazing albums?

Sounds good, but wasn't "Fun With Your New Head" by Thomas M. Disch? Indeed it is a Disch novel (who is a favorite of mine)--but "fun with my new head" is how I feel after reading nearly 30 PKD novels in a row.

Around the beginning of 2004 I began re-reading chronologically all Philip K. Dick's novels, and I am a little ways into UBIK now. I am having fun with my new head.

So, I am newish to ripping my CD collection to MP3s. What sampling rate do you guys generally use? My audio equipment is ok at best--I am nowhere near an audiophile--but I don't want my music to sound like there's a washcloth over the speakers, either. After some very quick playing around, I haven't noticed that much of an audio degradation at 128 Kbps; but in the not-too-distant future I hope to upgrade my audio equipment, so I don't want to be re-ripping everything in 2006 because the 128 Kbps sounds like crap on a good system. Any suggestions? Is 300+ Kbps the way to go? Norm

I know these sorts of questions come up all the time--my apologies. Anyhow, I am more than happy to buy the RVG or K2 if the consensus is that sonic improvement is significant (like "The Birth of the Cool" or "New Jazz Conceptions"). Is the sonic upgrade on the RVGs of Rollins' "Volume 1", "Volume 2", or "Newk's Time" substantial?

For what it's worth, one of the football commentators mentioned that White had said that the comments he made to the Wisconsin legislature (e.g., Asians turning TVs into watches) were one of his biggest regrets. I don't know if he ever repudiated his opinions on homosexuality. His prowess on the football field is unquestionable. Off the field, he struck me the way some folks' great uncles do: they would never DO anything bad to anyone, and are kind and generous in their actions, but they spout opinions that are offensive (racist, homophobic, and chauvinistic). I am never quite sure how to think of those folks.

After the version of "Stars Fell on Alabama" from the 1947 Town Hall concert, I had to pick my jaw off the floor. Both his playing and singing were simply perfect.

A few months back I got Louis Armstrong's Classics Jazz CDs for 1947 and was just FLOORED by Jack Teagarden's playing and singing. You guys said that Teagarden's performances in the Town Hall concert with the All-Stars and other appearances in Pop's CDs were not atypical. So, then: what Teagarden should a guy get? Should I just start working my way through the Classics Jazz CDs?

I agree with that totally, but from an "opportunity cost" standpoint, every second spent on Pops from the late the 1950s to the 1970s was time taken away from the evolution in jazz over that period.