Stompin at the Savoy

https://archive.org/details/CompleteRouletteRecordingsoftheMaynardFergusonOrchestra_201904

Kindle edition of Art and Laurie Pepper's bio - Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper - is on sale today at Amazon for 3 bux.

I had them in various boxes, thrown into storage in the order acquired (after I ripped them to disk). It was a jumble. I had to move so I took the opportunity to reorganize my storage and get all the sets sorted in order.

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I wonder if 'noodling' is covered in chapter 4?

Gee that's a tough order and there are folks here who could do a far better job of it. I play around with piano but am basically a guitar player. Piano is kind of unique in that the two hands can pursue independent musical thoughts. I try to simulate that by moving toward independent bass and treble voices on guitar but under the hood they are necessarily both a combination of the efforts of both hands. I like Fats Waller and wish his stuff would get a better remastering. There's a Centenary Collection (or something) volume where they did a beautiful job remastering. Count Basie as a piano player is a big favorite of mine. He tended to be a little shy as a soloist so it's hard to point to single albums. I have a nice playlist with Basie piano features like Kid from Red Bank. So many great players!

Too many and hard to decide. I like stride piano a lot, so that calls up a list by itself which I'm sure I needn't enumerate here. One album I often go back to is Dick Hyman, Music of 1937. He frequently plays the tune in several piano styles - Someday My Prince Will Come is a good example - and it's fun to speculate which segment is whose style.

Farewell, Brownie. Enjoyed your posts.

I also get listening ideas from organissimo threads. Sometimes somebody mentions a Mosaic set and I look at it and think hey that looks interesting let me check it out - and discover that I own it! Oops. I love having all this music.

My set arrived yesterday and I listened to several tracks. Interesting and good and the sound was pretty good too. I keep getting distracted by the Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly Veejay set which arrived the other day but will get back to this soon.

Church, ballpark, skating rink, etc are all large venues. Organs and organ playing in those days were designed to reach a large audience with one loud instrument. They were loaded up with overtones and throbbing vibrato to create an all-encompassing sound in places where the acoustics might not be that good and audibility trumped subtlety. I remember in skating rinks it was like a wall of continuous sound. Very little space. You could barely make out the tune (and then it would turn out to be the Hokey Pokey) but there was a beat of sorts. That style does not work all that well in a jazz setting. It has to be toned down a bit or it overwhelms everybody else playing. All those overtones are muddy! For me the organ didn't really come into its own in jazz until Jimmy Smith.

I hesitated over this set for a long time because I had a lot of it on individual releases and the set ran a bit expensive used. Recently I came across a copy for quite a reasonable price and it arrived yesterday. I did not realize that this set had so much more material than some of the original releases! Very nice sound on the Malcolm Addey mastering, too.