Stompin at the Savoy

Good stuff!

I've been watching an Italian tv show (set in beautiful Genoa) on PBS Passport called Blanca. It's part of the Walter Presents group of European tv shows; each episode is two roughly 50 minute parts. This follows a standard police/detective show concept where the protagonist has a super power, like Sherlock Holmes and his power of deduction, Monk with his obsessive attention to detail, etc. Blanca, a police consultant, is blind and has super hearing power. So it's kind of a formula but the scripts, acting, cinematography are way above the usual. Attractive people and a very nice dog. Beautiful interiors and outdoor scenes. It's a great show! If you know Spanish after a while the Italian dialogue is fairly easy to follow.

I'm perfectly ok with Spotify. You have to register and establish an ID and password but it's free and there is no obligation to subscribe to anything or receive emails, etc. I never use it to scout out new things to listen to. I use it to find and listen to an album I can't find on youtube. Both of them suck because of advertisements but they are better than listening to radio for my purpose because I can choose the albums and tunes to play. For discovery of music new to me I will sometimes click on recordings that come up alongside whatever I'm playing on youtube but mostly I just read this forum. Generally I use these services to listen to an album before buying - my music budget is limited.

Thanks, was not aware of this.

I like him and enjoy the stuff with Dizzy. I used to love those tv themes like Mannix but am not sure I want to go the whole 16 disks. What are his best jazz albums? Is this euro-compilation good?

One thing that never fails to amaze me about Ellington is how different the arrangements of a tune can be at different performances. Seems like he and Strayhorn were always tinkering with arrangements and sometimes drastically revising.

Great stuff!

Well, if you made sure caps lock is off and tried your regular password on both ids you're kind of stuck. Mac has this "Start up from macOS Recovery" process you could look up. Or you can reboot and try the reset options in the login window. That's about as far as my expertise goes - there are probably some mac folks here who can help.

Try to verify that you are logging in to the correct account for the password.

Do you mean you type a password and it says wrong password or wrong password/id combination? Do you have more than one user account on the machine?

The word I heard from pretty reliable a music store friend at the time was Joe had a habit. I don't know if that's true; I saw him a few times in the nineties and he was always on time, professional and performed well. But he didn't look too well.

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.