Stompin at the Savoy

Henderson died about a year later. Hutcherson lasted quite a while after that but was already having health problems then and was using oxygen when I saw him and got badly out of breath while playing. Nevertheless both played well.

Yeah, I went through a Benny Carter thing a while back and I remember wishing there was a Mosaic of the early stuff. I have some euro-compilations of Benny Carter albums, one with eight and one with 4 albums. Also some Chronologicals for the early period. There is also a 1946 Benny Carter Quintet recording on disc 9 of the Keynote Collection. It's hard to find a bad album. Carter is really a man of many parts, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger too. I'm fond of the Basie album, The Legend - From the Pen of Benny Carter.

I happened to catch Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson together at an engagement at Jazz Alley in Seattle around 2000 or just before. Both men were looking quite frail but they played great.

Maybe partly because my eyesight is not great but I have never understood the appeal of accessing the internet on a smartphone. I have an iphone and love it because it's a phone, an alarm clock/stop-watch, a decent camera, a compass, navigation system for car, an ok music player in a pinch with headphones, etc. But I don't generally look at things like photos or even mail on the phone. If I take photos I look at them on a pc. Email - pc. Social media - pc. You-tube and spotify - pc. Newspapers - pc. Those phone screens are too small, the speaker sound is horrible, and it's hard to maintain good posture while using them. If I'm gonna squint I'll squint at something bigger like a biggish monitor. Leaving the device aside, I agree with you about all the distraction of phone/social media etc life. These last few years I have spent so much time doom-scrolling. Recently I got very fed up with being over-stimulated and frustrated and have begun to go back to my old, pre-internet habits of reading books all the time. Stories are good entertainment and they provide a comforting way for us to see a bigger picture from a lofty vantage point where the beginning, middle and end are available to us, unlike our moment to moment experience which is just now and where the endings of things are unknown.

Another suggestion for you: The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson. A very fun romp!

Just finished it. Very enjoyable. Thoreau once said "in wildness is the preservation of the world" or something like that. With Sun Ra: in weirdness is the preservation of the cosmos. In a world that is pressing for sameness and homogeneity, this strangeness is salvation.

I have all my cds ripped (and backed up) and have photos of all the booklets so I never have problems finding and listening to something. About 20 years ago (when I spent a couple weeks ripping every cd I had) I alphabetized my single cd collection and put it into two or three plastic boxes per letter of the alphabet and kept it all in storage. I then let things go for decades and just accumulated cds in random order in boxes which I would throw into storage. I'm in my mid seventies and signs of aging and mortality keep turning up so I've begun to think about disposing of all the hard copies by giving some away and selling some. But in order to do that I needed to get them back into good order so I can find things. A landlord decided to take back the place I was living in a few months back (harrumph!) so part of my prep for moving included getting all my single cds back into alphabetical order by artist and mosaic sets by set number, which turned out to be a pretty big job. Once I got everything together I took photographs of each plastic box of single cd's (spines facing up) and each cardboard box of box sets - I highly recommend doing that, even pics of your shelves. You can do some types of search right from your desktop and in many cases the serial numbers are visible on the spine so you can confirm which edition you have.

I don't really see that much difference in quality between the small group and big band v-disc sets. I remember noticing there was at least one session that was actually split between the two sets. And there are a few vocals on the big band set that are pretty dated, too. This material has been available and much or most of it could be found on the internet prior to the Mosaics but I do think the sound quality on these two sets is great and sets a standard for any future release of V-discs. Very worthy sets!

Rex Stout works a bit like P. G. Wodehouse: very useful to have around to self-prescribe as a palliative for the blues. A roommate of a girlfriend I had in grad school recommended Rex Stout and I immediately picked up a used copy of Some Buried Caesar at a used book shop. Over the years I acquired many more volumes and read some from the library. Decades ago I came across an ebay listing for all of the Nero Wolfe series in various paperbacks at a surprisingly low price and bought it. Since then I have re-read the series (plus his other series and one offs) in sequence a few times. As my vision deteriorated I acquired the Wolfe series again on kindle. I recommend Rex Stout! There was quite a good video dramatization with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin but nothing beats the books.

Also interesting to find Dizzy Gillespie arranging Claire's performance of Who Started Love. This Boyd Raeburn group is good stuff!

Rogue Male (1939) by Geoffrey Household. Len Deighton and Eric Ambler if you haven't read them. If you like the occasional mystery with classy, brassy, humorous protagonist try Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert (1950). You might also enjoy John D. MacDonald. He has the Travis McGee series and a lot of good non-series stuff.

Resonance's facebook page has this: So at least there will be a cd version which presumably won't break the bank.

When this thread came up I checked the four volumes and the subsequent volume of essays on Amazon. I read the sample material of the new essay volume and picked up the Kindle edition of Vol 1 of the session volumes. I must say that though Listening to Prestige is a dandy title, he probably should have called the book of more general essays by a different name. Anyway I have picked at that first session volume a bit, by no means as extensively as Steve. Notwithstanding the defects pointed out by Steve, which I suppose stem from compiling a blog, which are by nature a sloppier and less rigorous enterprise than a book, I found the 1st volume interesting and worth the five bucks or so it cost on Kindle. I'm not sure about investing $60 on the four paperbacks. I'm going to keep referring to vol 1 as I listen to Prestige recordings it covers and possibly pick up other volumes later. As regards the latest book of essays - Chronicles - I read the introduction and first chapter in the sample provided on Amazon. Those were pretty worthwhile and I'll probably get the book.

I had the same thought when I listened to disk 1.