Kevin Bresnahan

Church organ and roller rink organ are two very different breeds. Church organ makes me think slow, somber held notes. Roller rink organ is not slow or somber and lightly held notes. But that's just me. Catholic churches were dark & somber in general, so it makes sense that I'd think that about the organ playing. Best church organ song ever:

That's funny - that's exactly how I described it. Michael Cuscuna was not amused when I used it when talking with him about it.

This is a comp of Cecil Payne 's "Performing Charlie Parker Music" & "The Connection", both on the Charlie Parker Music label. I have a CD of "Performing Charlie Parker Music" but not this version of "The Connection". Weirdly, this version of "The Connection" has nothing to do with the other two versions by Freddie Redd. Are they supposed to be related at all?

I tried contacting them last year about this but they never responded. Their loss. I love Christmas Jazz. I typically buy one or two titles each year. They are making it hard to do now. Kinda fucked up.

I was never able to buy this Christmas album. I see that Amazon is still selling the 6 separate tracks for $1.39 each. Do they think this is the best way to sell this music? Is it working?

Maybe - but I only get one shot at this thing called life and if I'm wrong, I could end up dead sooner rather than later. Since I already have heart issues, I am just a bit more concerned with a study showing even a slight increased risk of heart attack from THC use. I've already dodged cancer once. Maybe I can dodge this heart thing too.

You might also be unaware of the Mobile Fidelity fiasco. They have been producing hundreds of titles advertised as "straight from the analog masters", while doing the exact same "unprocessed and untweaked" transfers of the analog masters at 24/192 PCM or high sampled DSD and still calling them fully analog LPs (the old AAA). They were not. The uproar over this move continues today. There was a class action lawsuit over it, resulting in Music Direct (MoFi's parent company) settling for something like $10 Million in credits to buyers. There are a lot of unhappy buyers. Personally, I think most of the people who are really upset are just pissed because this showed that "the emperor has no clothes" when it comes to analog vs. digital. There were quite a lot of "analog can't be beat" reviewers that looked really bad when the LPs they were holding up as the best-sounding versions of certain recordings were actually processed in the digital domain. They then looked stupid when they changed their reviews to say that they thought they sounded bad because they were digitally mastered. I have zero respect for anyone who pulled this. I don't think this A/D conversion is a bad thing myself, as I am very aware of digital audio's ability to replicate the full audio spectrum, particularly when done at 24/192 (PCM) or even better when done using high sample rate DSD. It's a whole lot of noise over nothing.

From the samples out there, it sounds pretty good to me. BTW - another reason to maybe go for the CD version - Side A has almost 29 minutes of music on it. This means that it had to be cut with some bass reduction to allow the cutter to tighten up the grooves to fit them onto the side.

If someone is looking for a real medical study showing an actual link between THC and health risks, this one should do the trick: Cannabis Users Face Substantially Higher Risk of Heart Attack It certainly got me to re-think the use of THC gummies to help me sleep. I have several friends who swear by 5 mg gummies before bed but given this new study, it's not worth it for me.

I don't know what you're missing. He also said: They were transferred by me, personally, at The Mastering Lab at 24/192, and those files remained UNPROCESSED and untweaked throughout the digital steps for LP production. Maybe you're unaware that 24/192 is a digital term? Even if you are, he clarified that when he talked about "digital steps" & then bluntly stated, "What you hear on the LP is those flat 24/192 files". He digitized the analog tapes to 24 bit/192 kHz digital, period. 24/192 is digital - it's not analog. Given this info, I don't see why anyone would buy the LP. Although at my age, I do appreciate the large LP artwork.

If you look into this Free Press article. they cite a study that has little backing for their conclusions. Their article is based on an internet-only study with no clinical follow-up: https://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(25)00018-6/abstract Basically, they had an online survey where they asked a bunch of people who claim to smoke a lot of marijuana if they get sick and based on their answers, made a conclusion that marijuana smoking is the only reason for their problems. A study like this could be done for almost any medical condition.

This is odd... when someone on the Hoffman forums asked the LP mastering engineer, Matt Lutthans, whether this was digital or analog, instead of, "We mastered this from a 24/192 digital master" we got this word salad: Here's the deal. There's digital, and then there's digital. Cutting an album from a commercial CD, or from some sort of (often poorly) pre-mastered, processed digital file....that's one thing, and it's generally subpar; nearly always quite bad. Fine. We know about those. This is not one of those. In this particular case, the performances were recorded on an Ampex 600, if I recall correctly, and yes, the recordings are mono. A set of tapes has been in Jim Wilke's collection for all these decades, and those two reels were physically shipped to me for mastering. (Blue Note now owns and archives these original tape reels.) As the production team and I started going through the contents of the tapes, we discovered a problem: One song was absent from the tapes I received, but a flat, existing, archival digital transfer existed for that track, and it sounded fine, so we included it -- and the album is better for it. For the tracks that were on the analog reels: They were transferred by me, personally, at The Mastering Lab at 24/192, and those files remained UNPROCESSED and untweaked throughout the digital steps for LP production. (The digital work on those tracks consisted of flat editing for increased continuity/flow ONLY.) What you hear on the LP is those flat 24/192 files, edited slightly, no compression/limiting, "no nothing," run through the tube-based analog TML console for live-during-cutting EQ, then into the all-tube cutting system. (The track that came from an existing digital transfer required a little bit of in-the-box EQ to get its tonality to match with the newly-made transfers of the other tracks, but it was minimal, and final "artistic decision" EQ was still done on the TML analog console for that track, as with the others.) I used to really respect Matt's work but this explanation from him on this has really messed that up. "There's digital and then there's digital"?? No Matt, this is digital. Which is not a bad thing in my book, but it's still a thing. Is Blue Note trying to replicate the Mobile Fidelity fiasco? If it's a digital master, just fess up.

Not when my daughters went in the late 00's. Only grants & loans. Scholarships might be a big private school thing, like Harvard, but they have endowments galore so they can probably do that.

I don't understand your question. In private schools like these, everyone pays the same tuition. Not everyone pays room & board - if the college even allows off campus housing. State schools usually offer discounted tuition for state residents. The only reduction in tuition at a private school is through grants. Grants were getting harder to get about 15 years ago when my youngest started college. Her school of choice offered her $0.00 in grant money. It would have cost her (and me) about $45K/year, so she didn't go there. This year, that school's estimated costs are over $68K. I imagine grants are even harder to get today. Loans should never be considered any sort of discount. Loans are just delayed payments with interest, so really just delayed payment with a huge adder. I bet if someone re-did this chart with the typical loans associated with it, the top number would be something like $160K/year.

I saw Rush several times when they were Rush. This band, less Peart, is not really Rush, as Eric Lifeson said when Peart died. Even if I wanted to see them, the ticket prices are insane.