Stompin at the Savoy

I'm looking forward to this release. Yes it's probably all available in various public domain and commercial releases but a lot of that is pretty chaotic and I despair of obtaining all the discographical details on some of those things. Mosaic does a good job of finding the best sources, cleaning up the sound and organizing the discography in a consistent manner.

An older friend of mine has a collection of LPs and a pretty decent turntable, amp and speakers. He was interested in playing some cds he had been given so I found a Sony DVD player which also plays cds and got it for him. The player cost $33 in 2021 and now goes for $44. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007F9XHBI . It's not a top quality device but it worked pretty well; this indicates that the cost of entry for working with cds is pretty low. Most PCs will play CDs no problem...

I also burned disks of downloads at first, thinking of them as the long term backup for the files I was playing. But as my collection of ripped and downloaded files grew I moved toward a fully digital way of thinking and began backing up all my music to portable hard drives and lately multiple copies at more than one location of 1 TB micro sd cards. One advantage of this arrangement is I can instantly dial up any record I own on multiple devices and also instantly bring up photos of the album covers and booklets. This is particularly helpful in my case because visual disabilities make it near impossible for me to read most cd covers and booklets but I can read the photos when I blow them up on a good sized monitor.

Originally I didn't like downloads much and was particularly puzzled by the habit younger people have of downloading single songs. Having grown up on 78s, 45s, and albums the single download seemed like a step backward. Not to mention the loss of album front and back cover. I was also turned off after a while by mp3s. It's probably all in my head but I fancy I can tell the difference between cd quality (and better) and mp3s. But then a number of things changed my mind about downloads. First of all, I have a lot of cds and box sets and I'm having trouble storing it all. I live in a tiny cabin at the moment. They end up residing in a storage unit and I play the files ripped from them. Another thing that happened is the advent of widely available cd qual or better downloads and the simultaneous proliferation of music database sites such as Discogs, MusicBrainz, AllMusic, Internet Archive, etc. The discography and often photos of album covers is now available electronically and for free for most releases. So I was already listening to lossless files I ripped from my cds and keeping photos of their covers and booklets. It occurred to me that commercially available cd quality (and above) downloads combined with digital photos of the covers and booklets available online were exactly the same formats I was using at home! Why not just buy the cheaper downloads and quit storing hard copies in a storage unit?

Qobuz is running a nice sale on HighNote label. This includes quite a few Woody Shaw releases. CD quality downloads of Woody Shaw Live Vol. 1 - 4 are dirt cheap, $2.95 or $3.70, as are the two volumes of The Tour: $4.44 each.

And even if you do get dementia, it'll swing.

Show biz churns up a lot of strange stuff!

I will watch it soon!

Right, you didn't enter 'pop'. Someone else did, or somehow defaulted to pop, and their application (iTunes, etc) sent it to the Gracenote Database, which is where your application pulled it from. The database appears to retain alternate sets of metadata and sometimes you are asked by your application to choose which one fits your cd.

I think much or all of the metadata ends up in the Gracenote database (and probably others) based on whoever first popped the cd into some application and updated the database. For example sometimes when I have gotten a very recent Mosaic set, the metadata was not set up in applications like iTunes and I had to enter it myself.

Note to self: next time I buy a laptop make sure it uses a USB C charger!

Hipnosis was released on the Grachan Moncur Mosaic Select.

I've had that box for decades but didn't listen to it much except for the album with Woody Shaw. Hmnnn... Time to give it a spin again.

Well, you can listen to it here (or download m4a files which in this case are mp3 level of detail, not as good as cd): https://archive.org/details/ArgoEmarcyandVerveSmallGroupBuddyRichSessions. I had a sort of strange impression of Buddy Rich from my youth in the 50s and especially the 60s. You would see him now and then on TV doing some humongous, over the top, over long drum solo and looking like death warmed over. So I wasn't too attracted. But the Mosaic set turns out great, lots of fine players and good stuff. He really was a top drummer. Booklet: https://musicbrainz.org/release/595f02e2-355b-48d7-a8a7-f9ffefa8cb03/cover-art

That's a pretty good price for that set. People have been asking absurd prices for it for years. Like $999. $100 per disk? I don't think so. There don't seem to be many for sale. I have some files I found so I've heard it but have been looking around for a reasonably priced copy for years. My concept of a 'good price' for a Mosaic is somewhere close to the original price, which was maybe $15/disk years back and is now more like $18. And the market is such that I have often snagged used sets for something in that neighborhood or less. Recently I got the Buddy Rich set for $35 including shipping! That one's got to be a record low price for me. A 'reasonable price' for me on a set that is rarer or generally fetches higher prices would be about $20-$22 per disk. Some stay stubbornly high, like the Ferguson. I don't think I have ever seen one as low as the price you got.

The book was updated in 1994 and I remember Laurie Pepper being interviewed on NPR about it, possibly by Terry Gross. It sounded interesting but somehow I never got the book till now.

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.

👍

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.