Phil Meloy

Thanks Gary - so it appears none of the 1965 "Live in Paris" and only "Mr P.C." from the "Paris Concert" material is included.

Scott - I don't think the live "A Love Supreme" suite is included.

Damn - Newport '63 seems to be OOP also. At least I've got the 17'27" version of "My Favorite Things" from Newport '63 on that Rare compilation I mentioned. I guess that will have to do for the time being. oops - sorry - false alarm - Newport '63 is available from amazon.com if not from amazon.co.uk

Damn - Newport '63 seems to be OOP also. At least I've got the 17'27" version of "My Favorite Things" from Newport '63 on that Rare compilation I mentioned. I guess that will have to do for the time being.

I suspect some of the material you mention may be on On Stage 1962 (Unknown label) with Eric Dolphy Which I listed in my initial post. Please correct me if this is not the case. This CD should be available from amazon.co.uk Also over the weekend I remembered that I have another live Coltrane compilation. I think I have the version of "Miles Mode" you mention on a compilation live CD I picked up called "John Coltrane - The Legendary Masters - Unissued or Rare - 1962-63" (Rare) however the recording date for "Miles Mode" is listed as the 9th rather than 10th February 1962. Maybe it's from a gig at Birdland the previous night? It's the only tune on the CD with Dolphy on it. The four other tunes are live recordings from Birdland (June '62) Newport ('63) and Europe ('62 & '63).

I've got that one. It's on Moon, right? Track 3, "Crreation" is one of the '65 Half Note tracks, and a Trane piece that there is currently no documented studio version of. It's alos one of the most "famous" and beloved pieces amonst hardcore Coltrane collectors. Yeah thats the one Jim. Sorry I was working from memory on Friday. The recordings are actually from '64 & '65. I've amended my original post to avoid confusion. I love that McCoy Tyner solo on "Impressions" - this is one of my favorite CDs. I was lucky enough to find it a few months ago in a second hand store. Thanks for the "Creation" info.

Sal the live at Antibes stuff is available on a deluxe Impulse 2 CD release with the studio version of "A Love Supreme" however I prefer this Castlepie release. A Love Supreme (Live) The version of "Impressions" is from another concert he did at the festival a couple of days later. The Love Supreme suite was not peformed at this second concert. I'm still hunting for "Live in Paris". I think it may be OOP. Looks like the second hand racks for this one.

Jim the only information I have at the moment on Live in Paris is the track listing. Also I think the CD may now be OOP. 1. Naima 2. Impressions 3. Blue Valse 4. Afro Blue 5. Impressions [2nd Version] Not much time to post now guys but thanks for the tips so far. Will be back at the computer in a day or two.

I'm thinking about getting some more live Coltrane recordings. I've already got the Love Supreme suite at Juan-les-Pins, Live at Birdland, Live at the Village Vanguard and a CD called Coast to Coast which is a compilation of what are probably bootleg live recordings of quartet concerts in New York in April '65 and San Francisco in February '64. (it has an absolutely supurb McCoy Tyner solo on it but unfortunately on one track it seems as if they actually ran out of tape towards the end of one tune) Does anyone have any information, general comments or recommendations on any of the following live CDs (well I think they are all live recordings?) which are all currently available from Amazon. Thanks in advance and by all means suggest any others that I may not have listed. Live in Stockholm 1960 Complete (Dragon) Live in Sweden (Newsound) 1961 Live in Stockholm (Le Jazz) 1961 Scandanavian Visit 1962 (Unknown label) Stockholm 62 Vols. 1 & 2 (Unknown label) - is this a different recording from the above? Live in Stockholm (Le Jazz) 1963 Paris Concert (Original Jazz Classics) Live in Paris (Le Jazz) Live at the Half Note (Le Jazz) At the Five Spot (EMI France) with Thelonious Monk New Thing at Newport (GRP) with Archie Shepp Live in Seattle (GRP) Quintet in Chicago (Polydor) with Cannonball Adderley On Stage 1962 (Unknown label) with Eric Dolphy Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (Impulse) Newport '63 (GRP) Afro Blue Impressions (Pablo)

this is really crazy. I think these are two guys who are based somewhere in Norfolk in England. They go around with a bag full of props such as wigs, false facial hair, fake novelty teeth, spectacles, various items of clothing and headwear, walking sticks, smoking pipes, etc. and seach for a suitable subject to "blend" with - usually a fairly odd looking individual. Once a suitable subject has been identified - normally a completely innocent unsuspecting member of the general public - one of them tries to disguise himself to appear as much as possible like the selected subject. He then moves in as close as he can to the still unsuspecting subject in order to create a "blend" while the other one moves in to take a picture of the "blend". They used to publish their best "blends" each year as an annual calendar but unfortunately it appears that their shop is currently closed.

The Blenders

Here is a brilliant game called Racing Frogs. You get to look after and train your very own frog and it will race every day . You can train it in the gym, choose its food, buy it stuff at a shop and loads of other stuff. Frogs win gold and medals and you can watch the frogs race in the VIP Zone. Racing Frogs

In Australia Rice Krispies are called Rice Bubbles. Snap, Crackle & Pop are still called Snap, Crackle & Pop.

About 26 miles south of Jogakarta there is a beautiful black sand beach on the Indian Ocean called Parangtritis. I was last there about 20 years ago when it was completely undeveloped but I don't think it's changed too much. Apparently now there's just a few hotels and guest houses in the village where you can stay. You can get there by bus from Jogakarta.

I wish someone would reissue Mexican Green on CD.

Possibly this is not too useful for musicians using this site as I guess the majority of you are in the USA but for any UK based musicians out there looking for function work (corporate functions, private parties, weddings, etc.) for their bands you could check out LiveMusicSearch.co.uk The concept is simple. This is a musician led organisation. It costs £15 to list your band on the site (£10 if you're an MU member). You put you're details and photograph on the site, indicate what style(s) of music you play, what type of functions you're prepared to do and how far you will travel to work and hopefully people will book you through the site. They take no agent's percentage at all - only the inital yearly registration fee. You deal with the client directly through the site and decide how much you charge. Even if you only get one gig a year it's worth it. The registration fee covers the maintenance and advertising of the site.

That's interesting Harold. I'm sure you're right about there being better quality one's available but I don't mind the sound quality on this compilation. In any case it's another I came across in the second-hand rack at a good price and it is this CD that got me into listening to Charlie Parker. I would recommend it as a good entry level purchase for someone wishing to check out Parker for the first time but maybe you could suggest something else.

This sounds like a pretty good course of action ubu. The only Parker I've got so far is the 2 CD "Yardbird Suite" compilation (apart from some early stuff with the Jay McShann Orchestra which I don't really listen to due to the quality of the sound recording). I'll grab the Savoy studio stuff while it's in the second-hand rack at a reasonable price and progress from there. As for live recordings I've already ordered the Quintet at Massey Hall and "Now's the Time" which someone else recommended. I take it that the 1947 concert at Carnegie Hall with Dizzy Gillespie is included on the 4 CD Savoy live set you mentioned. Thanks everyone for your advice. It's been a big help in sorting out just exactly what is out there.

Thanks guys for all the good advice. The Savoy recordings have turned up in the racks of my local second-hand CD store so I think I'll grab them while the opportunity is there. Also what specific live recordings would you suggest? My expectations for sound quality on recordings from the 1940's are not unreasonable but the sound quality on a few Parker things I've listened to in the past has put me off to some extent in investigating further. Some guidance in this area would be greatly appreciated. Both the Washington Concerts and the quintet at Massey Hall have already been recommended to me.

I'm thinking about getting the 4 CD set "The Complete Savoy Sessions". Any comments?

Here's another article that has appeared on CD Baby.... Baby, you're the best! By Derrick Bang/Enterprise entertainment editor It seems appropriate that a new business model emerging during the infancy of the recorded music revolution would call itself CD Baby. But this company ain't no babe in the woods; CD Baby is the future of the music business. I first encountered the still largely unknown outfit last autumn, while researching titles for my annual survey of new holiday jazz releases. A diligent Internet session produced a few musicians whose albums were available from an online business whose name - CD Baby - initially sounded like a joke. I quickly learned otherwise. After finding CD Baby's Web site, I was staggered by the sheer volume of titles available in its massive catalogue. Holiday jazz is, as you might expect, a pretty specialized niche category, and yet CD Baby kept me busy for weeks, while I sifted through hundreds of albums. The mechanics of a visit to CD Baby will be familiar to those with experience at Amazon.com, although with a few key distinctions. Whereas Amazon.com gives 30- or 60-second examples of a few tracks from most albums, you can play several entire songs from each album at CD Baby ... which gives a far better indication of whether you'll truly enjoy it. The prices also tend to be better at CD Baby, where the average album costs between $10 and $12. CD Baby specializes in independent, micro-label and amateur releases: all the music largely overlooked these days by the dinosaur-like major labels, and certainly ignored when it comes to radio airplay. Frustrated music fans who've grown tired of hearing the same 40 songs from the same 10 albums, on every station on the FM and AM dial, will delight in CD Baby's astonishing wealth of variety and quality. Note that last word: quality. One must not equate "independent" with "junk." Just as many of today's most intriguing and provocative movies come from independent and foreign filmmakers, plenty of great musicians - and their music - are just waiting to be discovered by fans ill-served by major labels too concerned with finding the next Eminem or Norah Jones. Half a dozen of the Christmas jazz albums purchased from CD Baby immediately shot to the top of my list of favorites. They're professional albums made by talented musicians and production personnel, and I'd match them - any day, any time - against what I found at Tower Records and Borders last November and December. Perhaps the only giveaway, when comparing the average indie release with something on (say) the Sony label, is that the former's CD booklet layout and art might look less polished. But that obviously doesn't affect the music, and merely reinforces the adage that one must not judge an album by its cover. Granted, CD Baby's catalogue contains its share of trash and puerile junk by wannabe pretenders lacking the slightest ounce of talent ... but so does any conventional retail outlet. The difference is that CD Baby puts the decision fully in our hands, giving us the ability to hear enough samples to make a valid judgment, without the distraction of a bothersome - and, let's face it, largely irrelevant - mass-market advertising campaign. CD Baby president and founder Derek Sivers, a musician to the core, identifies himself as a "hyperactive non-conformist minimalist optimist ... learning addict, social introvert, anti-social extrovert, marketing whiz, storyteller, design fanatic ... and owner of the world's longest attention span." Sivers has been a full-time musician since 1992, and he started CD Baby (you'll love this) in 1997 to sell his own album, and those of a few friends. Sivers intended this upstart business endeavor to be a hobby; for the first year, he'd put the day's orders in his backpack and ride his bicycle down to the Post Office. But the "hobby" quickly took over his life. As CD Baby grew, and because he couldn't afford to hire a programmer, Sivers learned PHP, MySQL, Apache and OpenBSD himself, and now the technical/programming/design side of things is his favorite part. John Steup, CD Baby's vice president and "manager of all things," identifies himself as a writer, poet, musician, carpenter, blacksmith, geo major, proud husband and dad. He loves "bad jokes and tribal beats," was raised on "classical, jazz, showtunes and The Beatles," quickly embraced "everything from Robert Johnson to the Sex Pistols to Bauhaus and beyond," and "played in crunchy heavy bands throughout the '80s." Steup started working for Sivers part-time when CD baby had 200 artists, and now he runs the place. CD Baby as we know it today set up shop in March 1998, and currently is located in a pair of 5,000-foot warehouses in Portland, Ore. Still a baby by most definitions, the company is the largest seller of independent CDs on the Web. The business has doubled in size every year, and the busy gremlins in the CD Baby warehouses currently receive and process 100 new discs per day. The company employed seven people in 2000, fields a staff of 45 today, and expects to hire another 10-15 by next year ... not to mention expanding into a nearby 18,000-foot warehouse that Sivers and Steup have their eyes on. The numbers are staggering. CD Baby handled 180 orders a month in late 1998, a number that jumped to 25,000 per month as of December 2003. More than 65,000 artists sell their albums at CD Baby, which maintains a rigorous practice of paying royalties to these clients every single week. (Put that in your corporate pipe and smoke it!) When last I looked, the company had sold 1,027,079 CDs and paid $8.2 million to its client artists. Steup recalled a phone call he received from one astonished singer/songwriter - as it eventually transpired, one of CD Baby's better sellers - after she received her first weekly royalty check. "She told me it was the first time she'd ever been sent a royalty check," Steup said, "from any label." If this truly represents the way that corporate Music America behaves - not to mention (sadly), many of the mid-sized labels - then, clearly, they all deserve to go the way of the dinosaurs they've become, gasping for air as the tar closes over their greedy heads. Industry behemoths continue to charge $18.99 and up for an item that costs less than a buck to produce, they stiff and otherwise litigate even their highest-profile artists, and hire seven-figure attorneys to combat online music piracy ... all while CD Baby grows, thrives and threatens to bury them in the very Internet environment that Hollywood regards with such horror. Which brings me to another example of Sivers and Steup's marketing savvy: CD Baby digitizes every new album that comes through the door. At the moment, all this music is stored in four to six 200-gig drives in each of 40 computer towers tucked into a back corner of one warehouse. The reason is obvious: Sivers & Co. know full well that we're only a few years away from a complete overhaul of the way popular music reaches us ... and the new delivery systems will be digital. The evidence surrounds us already: Apple has married its incredibly popular iPods with iTunes, becoming the first successful endeavor to beat music downloaders at their own game. (Ancient rules of warfare: Embrace the enemy, and you own him forever.) Satellite radio is blossoming exponentially as these words are typed, with Sirius and XM bringing commercial-free music to cars and homes across the entire country. Music distributors able to supply digital product to such operations will have a major advantage over those who cannot ... and the former's artists are fully aware of the implications: a much wider audience for their music. Finding CD Baby isn't easy; the twin warehouses are in an unassuming industrial neighborhood in northeast Portland, practically off the map. The buildings have no prominent signs; the only clue that you've found the right place is a largish version of the company logo, propped against one front window. The employees are dressed casually, and many seem to be eating ... constantly. Indeed, the working environment resembles an extended pot-luck party, with everybody bringing various food items - running the gamut from healthy to un - to share with the group. The atmosphere - cheerful, lively and extremely friendly - feels very much like the largest and best independent music or book stores I've visited, such as Amoeba Records, in Berkeley; or Powell's Books, also in Portland. And small wonder: Like Sivers and Steup, most of these people are musicians themselves. They live and breathe music, and the various warehouse departments reverberate with an ever-changing mix of tracks from the very CDs they sell. In other words, everybody at CD Baby knows the product, so if you cite half a dozen favorite albums or artists, they'll suggest half a dozen more for you to try. The one down side is that CD Baby is strictly an Internet endeavor; the company has no store front, and publishes no catalogue. One must visit and conduct business on the Web. Steup admitted that they'd flirted with a partial catalogue for distribution at trade shows, but the concept wasn't practical; the contents were outdated before the ink was dry. If you don't like what you get, CD Baby will issue a full refund if the disc is returned within 14 days ... no questions asked. Steup regards himself as a problem solver, and takes particular delight in defusing the most hostile customers (not that CD Baby gets many). He'll do anything - refund postage, send a few freebies by way of consolation - to transform an irate caller to a new best friend. Given how hard it is to find a live human being at most companies these days, and the indifference one encounters upon reaching one, I can well imagine that Steup's behavior induces stunned (but pleased) silence. And yes, Steup and his staff have encountered occasional customers who, ah, take undo advantage of the return policy. Clearly they're copying and then returning the CDs, but such behavior is blindingly obvious. "When we spot one," Steup said, "We tell 'em, 'We know what you're doing ... cut it out.' "They always stop." CD Baby's warehouse walls are painted in bright solid colors: yellows, reds, purples, greens. Steup's small office has room for little more than a desk and computer, on which he eagerly shares his company's impressive sales figures and growth charts. This is one of the few businesses I've ever seen that actually understands how to properly exploit the tremendous power of computers, in terms of tracking sales operations; with a few keystrokes, Steup highlights a just-going-out-the-door sale, and shows how it impacts totals for that day, month and 2004 as a whole. Steup makes a lively tour guide, pausing when necessary to answer questions from staffers who don't hesitate to interrupt; this is not a guy who hides behind (or abuses) his title. He reveals and explains every facet of the operation, although it's not really that complicated: CDs arrive, get catalogued and digitized, and are stored on the massive shelves that take up the bulk of the warehouse space. Orders are filled as rapidly as they arrive, the requested CDs are located easily (thanks to alphabetical/numerical coding and filing), stuffed into mailers or boxes, and collected by U.S. Postage trucks that arrive daily. Unlike distributor operations that act as middlemen and often won't obtain product until an order is placed for it - thus lengthening the customer's wait - CD Baby has all its stock at all times, and can fill an order within hours. And does. Artists looking to market their music couldn't be in better hands. The CD Baby "starter kit" costs a paltry one-time free of $35. The artist fills out a submission form, describing how the album should be marketed, and sends five copies of the disc. CD Baby then creates a Web page dedicated to showcasing and selling this CD. The site will include sound clips, links back to the artist or group's own Web site, reviews and all the desired text and descriptions. This new Web site is placed into galleries and search engines at cdbaby.com, which gets more than 150,000 hits per day. CD Baby takes all credit card orders for the CD, online or through the toll-free phone number (1-800-BUY-MY-CD, for orders only), and sends an e-mail notification every time the disc is sold, to tell the artist/group who bought it. (Customers can request to remain anonymous, if desired.) That $35 set-up fee lasts forever. CD Baby won't ever tell a band that its disc isn't selling enough. Even if the album moves at the rate of one disc per decade, CD Baby will warehouse and fill orders against the original five copies. More happily, if those five copies blast out quickly, the artist will be asked to refill the shelf (perhaps more than five at a time, depending on interest). CD Baby takes $4 per disc sold. The artists set their own retail price. The arrangement is nonexclusive, with no contracts to sign. CD Baby is not a record label, just a record store. The CDs need not be shrink-wrapped, and CD Baby will even accept and market a home-made CD-R, "as long as it looks good." Fill out the form, pay $35 and send five CDs ... and Steup and his merry minions will do the rest. Frankly, I didn't want to leave. Although he clearly would have chatted for hours, Steup had plenty on his plate; I didn't want to abuse his hospitality. More to the point, I knew that if he released me in the stacks - as I secretly hoped might occur - weeks would pass before I emerged again. Not wise. So I contented myself with a CD Baby T-shirt, and the certain knowledge that, when family obligations bring me back to Portland, I'll find that Sivers' "little hobby" has grown and grown and grown again, on the mother's milk of marketing genius, shrewd business acumen and the best customer interaction one could imagine. Heck, I'd place a new order just to get another of their droll e-mail confirmations.

Thanks John - these are two that I was actually considering - I've now ordered them. As far as solo work I've heard that a recent concert at the Lincoln Center was recorded and is due for release. Does anyone have any info on this?

Can anyone suggest any Chucho Valdes/Irakere CDs? The only recording I have is a set of two CDs recorded live at Ronnie Scott's, "Double Event - The Legendary/Felicidad". I would be interested in solo, Irakere or quartet recordings - particularly good live recordings which are available. Thanks.

This little fella's looking mighty proud of himself.....

Pity it wasn't a pelican - they have massive appetites.