Stompin at the Savoy

Anker Soundcore brand makes some inexpensive blue tooth products (made in China) which have pretty good sound quality and offer noise canceling. I like the full over ear headsets they make, for example Q35. They have earbuds which probably have similar electronics. With blue tooth you get marvelous freedom of movement but the signal occasionally cuts out when you turn your head just the right way or get into a corner of the house where reception is poor. The dropouts are pretty rare and I just accept that. Another approach I sometimes use with iPhone is a small adapter which plugs into the the phone power port and has a mini-plug socket on the other end. Then I plug in wired Sony Studio Monitors or other phones, such as lightweight Koss SportaPros. To me Koss SportaPros sound better than most earbuds and are less wearying on the ear, physically. Sony Studio Monitors etc sound better but they are bulky.

Yup.

This seems like a really interesting release. I'm up for it!

Bill Evans could not make a bad record. A couple of decades ago I reached a saturation point and decided to stop buying Bill Evans records. I still enjoy his music and welcome reissues of classic Evans like this but feel no need to upgrade.

This is just my opinion - some dude on the internet - but I think this would be better if the bass had more of an acoustic feel. It sounds like a pickup to me (what do I know?). I feel that a big acoustic bass has a lot of tonal character if well miked. But this bass sustains a lot and has a sort of fundamental tone, it's hard to hear the woody goodness of the instrument. To me it seems overwhelming and boomy. The horn is playing something that could be intimate but the bass is playing to an auditorium.

It's a very fine set. I love it. I think I paid more for mine.

https://i.postimg.cc/xcYz7S0B/IMG-0461.jpg

Arg! Grum.

I received the set today but haven't had time to read book or listen. Will report back later.

Droste effect.

If you rip all your albums to a hard drive (and have a fairly extensive collection) it's a snap to do this with any reasonably good music player application, such as itunes. I often check out all the versions I have of a song. Not all album metadata contains all the participants but it often does, so I can often search and find sideman appearances too. The difficulty for most with a large collection is if you haven't been ripping everything to hard drive all along, it could take a long time and a lot of labor to rip them all now! Many years back I wrote to allmusic asking them to expose an interface which would allow you create queries connected by 'and' and 'or' to allow search for two musicians on the same album, etc. They never replied and the site has gone downhill so badly I no longer use it.

Presto has this as a download (44.1 kHz, 16 bit, FLAC/ALAC/WAV - cd quality), for a few weeks the price will be $14.25. Thinking of picking it up.

I haven't really used AI besides Google search ai summaries, ai summaries of comments on articles in newspapers etc. Those are often useful if not exactly brilliant. As a whole I find AI to be in its infancy and interesting if not quite ready for prime time. Unfortunately the way AI is being developed now it is a huge electricity hog which has already made electric power more expensive and promises to continue to do so. There are a lot of ecological and safety problems around this technology which are not being addressed.

https://www.prestomusic.com/jazz/promotions/blue-note-downloads/browse I took advantage of it to get Duke Pearson - The Right Touch. Some of the Capitol Vault Series (mosaic and mosaic select as downloads) are also included in the price drop. Might pick up a few selects I don't have. Some of these are a pretty good deal, for example if you don't have the Elvin Jones Mosaic (which is dynamite) you can get a legit copy for $25. Here are the Capitol Vault series: https://www.prestomusic.com/jazz/search?search_query=capitol vaults

Freddie Green very up front and audible on this album. This is becoming a fave. It's like the archetypal small group swing date.

Your attitude has hardened. You view the errors as signs of irremediable character traits in the producer and have written him off. I agree with you that there have been some significant issues. Zev is not a good writer and has, in my view, kind of bad taste. He is attracted to glitzy, glossy sort of stuff. All that means is he should delegate and let others design the covers, booklets and advertising and write the copy while he handles the bigger picture with more care. Those are my constructive suggestions but the truth is I don't care much about Zev - I care about the music and focus on the product coming out of my speakers: is there benefit to music lovers such as myself in these releases?

"All the bullshit" I assume means self promotion. He's in a business where promotion is part of the game. His advertising doesn't really harm the product and basically I don't care about it. Presumably by "blatant, oblivious fuckups" you are referring to the fact that he didn't notice the presence of a player on one disk and he endangered another release by shooting his mouth off. These are sins I find forgivable and I am willing to give Zev the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because I have made mistakes of a similar sort in other circs. I have some releases he produced that were good quality and reasonable price. All My Yesterdays by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis comes to mind. Excellent release, IMO. He could use some constructive criticism on the overdone packaging and liner notes which are long but don't really illuminate...

Well, he produces reissues and recent 'discoveries' so I am willing to cut him quite a bit of slack. Yes he does toot his own horn too much and yes I hate the idea of expensive, luxury vinyl in limited editions that I will never buy. That said I assume he is doing this as a career, has to make money at it somehow, and pricey vinyl is a thing right now, incomprehensible as it may seem to me...

I have some of the Muse albums on previously issued cds and would be interested in purchasing several more but not on pricey, deluxe lp editions. Good quality downloads (cd or better) would work fine for me too.

I received a tracking number! It often takes several days to my little corner of Oregon. On top of that today I received a very nice copy of the Buddy De Franco/Sonny Clark quartet and quintet set, for which I have searched many's the long year, and the price was shockingly low - counting for 30 years of inflation, probably less than the original price. I tried for a while to get all the original albums but some were pretty difficult to find on cd.

I had to think about this one for a while too but I finally pre-ordered it. Wasn't sure if I would want to listen to it. The curious thing is that I was actually a big Pharoah Sanders fan in the early seventies. My interests lately have been delving back into swing, big band and older stuff.

Rhoads is more like the electric guitar virtuosity I used to admire listening to the radio in the 80's. Yes it's licks and tricks but it's damn fooking impressive nonetheless.

So, are you impressed by this? He says it's a "jazzy solo" but it's a memorized passage and you can go to a guitar store and hear people playing as well or better every day. Okay this is probably not leading to edification so I will shut up.