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paul secor

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Posts posted by paul secor

  10. The bluesiest Jazz piano player?

    in Artists

    Posted

    Jimmy Yancey -- you don't get any deeper into blues than that, and he could play them so slow that they almost ground to a halt--almost.

    Jelly Roll Morton's General recording of "Mamie's Blues" is also one of my favorite performances. Simply beautiful.

    Jimmy Yancey has been mentioned a few times, but Chris makes an excellent point. Listen to his two 1943 recordings of "How Long Blues". The man can make time seem to stop and can make the piano sound like it's crying.

    Jelly Roll's "Mamie's Blues" is a great choice too. I forgot about his General recordings when I posted, and they're too good to be overlooked.

  11. Collecting

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    If you dig music, it's the music that matters...not what pressing, not the cool graphics on a cover.  $100,000 on a turntable to play a 2,000 jackie mclean album when you can get basically the same results from a 15 dollar cd and a decent system at Best Buy.  Hey man, for that money you can HIRE Jackie McLean to come play at your house.

    That sounds a right to me. If you've got that kind of money, hire some good musicians to play at your place, invite some friends, and let the good times roll! Who cares about a damn record when you can hear the real deal and have all those memories?

  14. Earl Phillips

    in Discography

    Posted

    Thanks guys. The AMG was helpful. I even found that I have a recording of one side of his only 45 - "Oop De Oop" with some fine Jodie Williams guitar - on a VeeJay compilation CD. I'd forgotten I had it. AMG lists him as the same Earl Phillips as the drummer on the Roy Eldridge sides. However, they also list Earl Phillips as playing guitar with Benny Carter on a Classics CD - Benny Carter 1948-52 - and I don't know if he played guitar. I did a preliminary Google search (didn't have time for a thorough one) and found that Living Blues magazine published an obituary in 1991. I couldn't find the obit online in the time I had, so I'll have to search further. The obituary will probably give me the information I'm looking for.

    Thanks again.

  15. J.R. MOnterose

    in Recommendations

    Posted

    I'm pretty much with Jim on this one. I have it, have listened to it once, and it left the impression of a record that was possibly thrown together in the studio. By that, I mean that it's not really a J.R. session and it's not really a Jon Eardley session. According to the discography I have, it was a Rein de Graaff session, which makes sense, since he plays on all the cuts. Perhaps he brought J.R. and Jon Eardley into the studio to play on some of the tracks. All that said, I love J.R.'s playing and he plays some good things here, even if it's not my favorite J.R. recording. The bottom line is that I'll have to sit down at some time and give it at least a couple more listenings. And as I say, there's some good J.R. here, so whatever my opinion turns out to be, this CD is going to remain in my collection.

  17. Earl Phillips

    in Discography

    Posted

    Earl Phillips is my favorite blues drummer. This morning I was listening to some Roy Eldridge sides from the 40's, and while perusing the personnel, I found that an Earl Phillips is credited as the drummer on the 1946 "Hi Ho, Trailus Boot Whip" session. Does anyone know if this is the same Earl Phillips who recorded with Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, and other blues artists?

  18. Cannonball Adderley

    in Recommendations

    Posted

    The Mercury material!  A huge chunk of it is reissued in a two cd set called "Sophisticated Swing." 

    Not to forget - Cannonball Adderly: Quintet in Chicago. Cannon, Trane, Wynton, P.C., and Jimmy Cobb - Mile's sextet minus Miles. Great stuff!

  19. Rudy's supposed hearing loss

    in Re-issues

    Posted

    I don't have a lot of RVG remasterings, but of the ones I have, a few sound bright and others sound fine. I don't know if Mr. Van Gelder has suffered hearing loss, and it would seem that neither does anyone else here. It's all speculation. If he has, his age would seem to be a reason. Perhaps the question we should be asking is what excuse do other, younger engineers have for the poorly done recordings and remasterings that anyone with ears is familiar with?

  20. Ornette Coleman Atlantic recordings

    in Discography

    Posted

    There's nothing wrong (or depressing) about asking for advice about mastering quality - especially with the highly variable mastering jobs that we all have to contend with these days. I think that all Chuck and Rooster Ties were saying was that the Ornette box is of good quality and that the important thing is to hear the music and get to know it. Then if you feel the need, you can join the ranks of audiophiles and wanna be audiophiles (like myself) and make yourself as neurotic as you wish.

    I'll just add my opinion that I think the Ornette box sounds fine. Get it, put it on, and sit back and listen to Ornette and the guys wail.

  21. August listening

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    The Complete Blue Note Horace Parlan Sessions (Mosaic) - LPs 2&7 - Us Three & Happy Frame of Mind

    Johnny Dodds: 1926 (Classics)

    Django Reinhardt: Vol. 5 (JSP)

    The Last Giant -The John Coltrane Anthology (Rhino) - disc 1

    Sarah Vaughn: The Early Years - The Divine Sarah (Musicraft LP) - sides w. Freddie Webster

    Dizzy Reece: Asia Minor (New Jazz)

    Cecil Taylor: For Olim (Soul Note)

  23. Hey Jazz fan, are you also a Blues fan?

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted · Edited by paul secor

    This is probably pretentious and presumptuous, coming from a middle class white guy, but for me the blues are a form, a feeling, and a genre.

    The form will probably always be with us.

    The genre, to me is dying and on it's last legs. The last generation of blues musicians is passing all too soon. The younger musicians who are playing that form are playing for a white audience and, to my ears anyway, fall into a category of general popular music. Blues as I hear it, was made by black singers and musicians for a black audience. If white people came to it, they generally came to it at a later time. I realize that there may be exceptions to this, but I don't imagine that there were many white record buyers listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson and the Memphis Jug Band in the 20's, or to Leroy Carr and Blind Boy Fuller in the 30's, or to Big Maceo and Muddy Waters in the 40's, or to Elmore James and Howlin' Wolf in the 50's. White people came to these musicians and/or their recordings some years later. Black audiences had, in the meantime, moved on to other musics. Most, if not all, of the black musicians playing blues today are playing for primarily white audiences. When that last generation passes, the genre will probably exist only on records or as an imitation.

    The blues feeling will probably always be with us. Though listening to some of the younger jazz artists makes me wonder if that's so. Some of them sound as if, as Miles once said, they had to learn to play the blues.

    As far as rap goes, for me it's a form of r&b. I feel that r&b has always been popular music made by black artists for a black audience, but at the same time there has been a contempoary white audience also. And that white audience has increased as record companies have realized that there's money to be made there.

    As I say, this is just one middle aged white guy's opinion.That's all.

  24. Do narrower musical tastes equal greater passion?

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    • Most of us have favorite artists and/or genres about which we can become quite passionate. It is when that passion takes on a collector's must-have-all-of-this-or-that nature that passion is replaced by obsession. I have met collectors who probably began as genuine jazz fans but whose focus has shifted and narrowed. Some seemed more interested in obtaining a rare matrix number than in the music it identified. I guess that sort of priority shift is found among collectors in any creative arts field.

      The collector's mentality is a roadblock when it comes to appreciation , for it demands that one gather indiscriminately. Few artists have not made at least one or two eminently forgettable recordings--adding their failures to one's collection is makes little sense to me unless one has in mind using them for scholarly study or reference.

      Finally, I think the Benedetti Tapes release was the ultimate idiocy. Phil Schaap--who will let no cough or sneeze drop to the editing room floor--took collectors' mania to the max. He include eight- and ten-second snippets (Bird droppings, if you will) of no musical or historical value. Of one such snipped he wrote something like "possibly 'Lover Man'." Utterly ludicrous. That was an expensive box, but it need not have been if Schaap had assembled the material more prudently. Without the snippets and, as I recall, a passing train (is that where Ken Burns got the idea?), the box would have contained fewer discs, and the price would have been more reasonable. It would also have been a better release. The Benedetti box release was designed to appeal to the wrong kind of passion, IMHO.

    My 2¢ (guess I know how to stretch a penny  :g )

    Amen on the collector's mentality comments. I'm sure that there are few of us on this board (myself included) who don't fall into that category at some time and to some degree. And it's not a totally bad thing - most of us who have posted here have gathered or given information that's come from a collection.

    Personally, I want the records in my collection rather than need them. I'm 57 years old, and I'm sure that even if I have another 30 years, there are records in my collection I will never listen to again. That's a good probability, and by that standard I don't need those records. (If I knew which ones they were, I'd probably get rid of them.) As you can probably tell, the collector's side of me comes into conflict with the pure music lover side of me more often than I care to admit to myself. I can imagine that for some the two don't come into conflict, but for me they often do. This might make a good topic for a separate thread. Perhaps someone who's a better writer and more articulate than I am might want to start it.

    As for the Benedetti box, it was a marriage made in heaven - the completist compiler met the completist record company.

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