Stompin at the Savoy

Craft Records put out a remastered lp of this a few weeks ago. Today I noticed that presto now has the craft remaster as a cd quality download for $12.50. Went for it!

Apparently the Christmas Jazz Jam was a free event held on the Millenium Stage. So there was no revenue lost.

This is a somewhat elusive album in Joe Newman's catalog. Very tasty small group swing. It was originally issued on Jazztone as New Sounds in Swing. Also released as Byer's Guide by the Billy Byers Sextet. There was a Fresh Sounds CD of this, somewhat pricey and hard to find now. For now I'm listening to a cheap download from Apple Music.

The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries - free if you have Amazon Prime. This is a fun dramatization of Ngaio Marsh's detective novels. The setting has been moved from the 20's to the 40's but the overall look is slightly retro and the costumes, houses, interiors, villages, automobiles etc are beautifully authentic looking. Each program is movie length.

I have all the albums on Muse and 32Jazz cds but am still kicking myself for not buying the Mosaic. Hard to find and expensive now.

Don't you wish they had gotten some people who really know the music to give short talks about the various developments in jazz. And not Wynton Marsalis, who is knowledgeable and a good player but should be taken in micro-doses. Without getting too technical they could have gotten somebody like Dick Hyman to play the same thing as swing, vs bebop for example and show the characteristics and some of the nitty gritty of it. Instead we got non-musicians, enthusiastic but vague, going on about how great various players were. We have a notion they are great; tell us why.

One of the things Burns does is ask all interviewees certain leading questions and get them to answer in much the same way. This becomes the thread of his story and each of the interviews sort of confirms this thread. Never mind that it's shallow and maybe even wrong. In the jazz series he never really discusses what's different about this music, what's going on with each development, what's good about it, etc. It's all just glossy panning of old photos and shallow generalizations... and praise, lots of praise! Endless clips of various talking heads enthusing about some musician without any real attempt to explain why.

Just read this old thread after it came up. I agree wholeheartedly with Christiern - Burns is a big fraud. I've often wondered at the way people gush over his stuff, which is mostly panning still photos and repetitious music. Slick tv with very poor interviews and scripts. I watched some or most of the jazz series and found it frustrating because there was talking over the music and they never played a tune complete, not to mention the dumb narrative he carves out of the interviews.

I got the kindle edition of vol 1 of Listening to Prestige. It's interesting. Merry Christmas!

Heat is definitely bad for cds. Depending on the climate, the car can really be a bad place for cds. A few years back I left a Dell computer keyboard sitting on the seat in a car in San Jose, CA and the thing melted! It was all distorted. Global warming has made California's interior valleys really hot sometimes in the summer.

Interiors of cars can experience heat extremes which sort of increase entropy with regard to plastic objects.

Oh sorry I guess I gave the wrong impression. He was not intentionally breaking stuff. Kids just naturally have a way of finding out the weak points of stuff. I was pretty similar as a boy. Luckily I was in my forties when I had him 30 years ago and was mellow and forgiving when he broke stuff. Shit happens!

CDs are pretty robust, generally, but they have some vulnerabilities. There is a directory area at the beginning of the data which if compromised with quite a small nick generally spells the end. It's pretty easy to mess up a cd by putting scratches and holes through the label side and screwing up the reflective layer. Steve has documented nasty issues with glue-on labels, above. When he was small my kid was pretty good at finding the weak spots in things. He showed me that it is easy to completely wreck a cd by not putting it far enough onto the spindle and then shoving the cd tray into a pc. Another time he pulled a cd up off the spindle of a laptop when the cd tray/drawer was not all the way out - bent it seriously. If I remember right it didn't snap but was totally unusable. As to vinyl - I grew up with it and I admit it used to sound amazing through the tube push-pull mono amp my dad assembled and the big tuned speaker enclosure he built. I particularly remember loving Jimmy Smith's The Cat on that rig. But I also remember the heartbreak of skips and scratches...

That last picture is a good example. The picture is there, but degraded. The picture doesn't cut off half way. There are bits of missing data spotted throughout. Q.E.D.

I'm afraid you are incorrect about this, Kevin. If you do a google image search on the phrase "distortions caused by corrupted photo files" you will see it is so.

Yes. Static, muting, skips and seize up/crashes. He may have perceived static as loss of sound stage. There is no accounting for how degraded signal is perceived - it's subjective. But the point is a significant amount of dirt does affect playback and sound quality. This was the way several disks from Wes Montgomery Riverside box - which I got at an amazing low price - looked. That's not a couple missing bits.

A good sized cloudy area on the surface of a cd is not a couple of misread bits.

I'm sorry but I disagree. I've had noticeable static, muting, skips etc from dirt which were fixed by cleaning.

If the file of a picture of the statue of L is corrupted, you don't get the Eiffel Tower but you do get a different version of the statue picture. If enough is corrupted you will see degradation of the image. Same is true of audio files. Yeah, it might be the same tune but if there is enough corruption, there will be static and signal degradation. Still more corruption and it becomes unplayable and the playback seizes up. You are thinking it will take jillions of corruptions to affect the sound so it won't really be affected. The problem is some drops of soda allowed to dry on a cd will affect jillions of spots!

There are a couple of problems with this. Unless a file is a random access file organization, typically it is a sequential access organization. That means the file is read sequentially. This includes .doc files. Buffering is simply a way to read and hold some rows of the file (almost never all at once) in computer memory rather than go back to the disk for each line of data. Buffering is something the operating system does transparently - you basically don't need to consider that as different from sequential read. It's just a more sophisticated form of sequential read which is actually used in virtually all sequential reads. Buffering also takes place on reads from a cd. It has to in order to prevent variations in device/system read speed from affecting playback. If some data bits are blocked by dirt on the disk, the byte those bits are part of becomes corrupted and possibly unreadable. In some cases error correction can use checksum numbers - the sum total of the value of all the bytes for some 'block' or unit of the data - to figure out the corrupted bytes. Often if there is enough missing the operating system cannot come up with a unique correction. Mike Weil is correct in saying that if you can clean off some dirt and make missing bytes resolvable, the resulting output is different.

Ugh!

Listen here while hunting: https://archive.org/details/CompleteRouletteRecordingsoftheMaynardFergusonOrchestra_201904

Those are going to be pretty tough to work with. I suppose the best you can do is try to rip the disk as soon as you get it and keep backups in case of sticker failure...

Well, washing is not indicated if you have something with a glued on sticker - it will come off and screw up the reflective layer. Most cds and dvds you get are not like that. Washing is ok for most cds if they don't play, IMO.

Table of Contents for the new book Preamble. How This Book Came About Introduction. Bob Weinstock and Prestige 1. Postwar Independent Jazz Record Labels 2. Weinstock's Beginnings. New Jazz 3. Early Artists on New Jazz 4. The Birth of the Prestige Label 5. The First Jazz on LP 6. Wardell Gray, James Moody and King Pleasure 7. Miles Davis 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Enter Rudy Van Gelder and Recording More Monk 10. The Modern Jazz Quartet 11. Cover Art, and a Dual Role for Esmond Edwards 12. Sonny Rollins 13. Miles Davis Back and Ready to Work. the Contractual Marathon 14. Changing Times and Technologies at Prestige 15. Other '50s-era Prestige Recording Artists 16. Miles's Sidemen and John Coltrane 17. Mose Allison and Yusef Lateef 18. A New Era. Soul Jazz 19. Prestige's Satellite Labels 20. Soul Jazz Organists 21. Moving On. Free Jazz and Eric Dolphy 22. Dolphy's Peers at Prestige 23. Booker Ervin 24. Stars of the Early '60s 25. Final Days Epilogue Acknowledgments Works Cited Index