Stompin at the Savoy

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.

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.

I like that Berliner Jazztage record too and often play it. Hello to the Wind!

There is a relationship between heart rate and blood pressure. When cannabis lowers blood pressure - which it does - the heart speeds up. If you use it a lot the effect - lower pressure and faster pulse - diminishes.

The problem is organs are capable of putting out a lot of harmonic overtone series. So it can sound busy in the way a 12 string sounds busier than a 6 string guitar - twice as many notes. Depending on the organ settings one key depressed can cause several notes to come out. For some this doesn't matter but for me it sounds terrible. Overkill, confused and busy. And of course if you ever spent any time at a roller skating rink, and I did, the associations make this sort of organ setting sound really tacky. The organ on the 45 sessions is not as bad as some from the period, IMO.

I have absolutely no quarrel with that. Weed is not for everybody. On the other hand I have an 85 year old friend who has truly terrible arthritis. All over the place. Scary looking. Doctors asked him how he manages with this and he used to tell them he smokes weed every day. Keep doing it, they told him. Recently he had shingles and gout. The poor fellow is a mess and can't use cannabis as much but he told me how much he liked some blue dream I gave him.