Down Beat Record Reviews

[colllin]

Hi. I have bought a few vintage Down Beat magazines and I really enjoy reading the vintage reviews. Are there ways to view reviews compiled into convenient sources? If so, any suggestions for acquiring them? Thanks, Colin

[Fer Urbina]

For a while (c. 1956-1961, as far as I can remember) Down Beat published yearly books with all the previous year's reviews. Paperback, although I know there's at least one hardback (1961?).

Don't know when they stopped doing that. To get them, I'd try eBay or other used books outlets.

And yes, very interesting reading.

F

Edited June 8, 2011 by Fer Urbina

[Chuck Nessa]

Down Beat published record review annuals from 1956-63. I have a set - the first 3 are softcover and the rest are hardbacks.

[Big Beat Steve]

For a while the softcovers and hardcovers coexisted. I have the first four as softcovers and the fifth one as a hardcover. Fine works! Unfortunately rare and fairly pricey on eb.. and elsewhere.

Wish they had started doing that series a bit earlier ...

Just so you know what to look for, Colin:

Edited June 8, 2011 by Big Beat Steve

[readyrudy30315]

What are Down Beats soft covers going for on e-bay and elshwere thes days.I have a few I might let go !

[Enterprise Server]

Hi. I have bought a few vintage Down Beat magazines and I really enjoy reading the vintage reviews. Are there ways to view reviews compiled into convenient sources? If so, any suggestions for acquiring them? Thanks, Colin

Funny you should ask that. I was just looking at some vintage Down Beats I have from the middle 1960's. I suggest you look on line for different magazine sellers. I bought mine from Gary Alderman about twenty years ago. I'm sure he has more to sell. Check it out for yourself.....

gary alderman jazz

[Hot Ptah]

I wish that Down Beat would put out one of those Cover to Cover CD sets, with all of the content from all of the issues in digital form, like the ones for The New Yorker and Rolling Stone magazines. Then I could get rid of the 35 years of old issues I have in my basement.

Jazz Times, the same thing.

[Leeway]

There was a time when a Downbeat review meant something; that was a long time ago. I do enjoy the old issues.

The current generation of jazz mags are so corrupted with PR flackery and timid musical tastes that, aft many years, I finally dropped my subscriptions in frustration. Jazz Times was/is simply dreadful. I don't miss either magazine at all. And there is less to take to the recycle bin

[jazzcorner]

On 8.6.2011 at 5:26 PM, Big Beat Steve said:

For a while the softcovers and hardcovers coexisted. I have the first four as softcovers and the fifth one as a hardcover. Fine works! Unfortunately rare and fairly pricey on eb.. and elsewhere.

 Missing Volume VII

Here is the rest

Edited March 5, 2020 by jazzcorner

[gvopedz]

Hard to forget the rating that a Down Beat (15 June 1967) review gave to Coltrane’s Kulu Se Mama.  The review began with “Rating: see below” and ended with “Rating: None. All.”

[Gheorghe]

Once I heard that Arnold Jay Smith did one or two interviews with Mingus quite towards the end of Mingus´ live. I would have liked to read them or to know what they talked About. 

[Big Beat Steve]

Here's how you can keep busy for a worthy cause on long fall and winter evenings ...

I regularly pull out my 1956 to 1960 Down Beat Jazz Record Review yearbooks for reference. As hinted at long ago in this thread, I’ve long regretted that these Record Reviews did not start before 1956. I’ve owned originals of 20 out of the 26 issues of the 1955 Down Beats for close to 25 years and have often felt it would be nice to have the record reviews as a yearbook too – for more convenient reference. But the missing 6 issues remained elusive in an affordable way.
But when word got around about the Down Beat files downloadable from the Worldradiohistory website I was able to add the missing issues (and reviews) as PDFs (alas in less than perfect quality).
So this got me to thinking last fall: “How about making my own '55 yearbook?”

So one chilly evening I set to work … It all took much, much longer than anticipated, though.

In a first step, screenshots of the review pages from the PDF files were saved as JPG files and retouched and reformatted to obtain passably decent printouts. It looks like the PDF files on the Worldradiohistory site are no 1^st generation scans but older microfiche copies converted to PDF files later on. So their quality and legibility are OK but a distinct notch below those of the photocopied originals.
Photocopying the review pages from my original mags came next, resizing them to get nearly identically sized texts from both the screenshots and the originals for the columns in the book.
And then there was the cut-and-paste job that almost took ages (though I’ve done such jobs before to make up personal magazines and brochures) - with sorting each and every single review of the entire year in A to Z order and arranging them all so that a decent layout was obtained for each page.
(I had thought about trying to do it digitally throughout but found this would not have saved much time compared to the cut-and-paste phase of the paper copies and would have presented other layouting problems.)
Finally, the cut-and-pasted “master copy” was copied on my photocopier to produce the actual book pages – a time consuming job again: In order to obtain the best possible reproduction quality of the screenshot printouts throughout, the copier settings had to be different for the pages that included only clippings from the photocopied originals and for those pages with (lower-res) printouts from the PDF files.
But it did work out OK, I think … It was worth the effort, and the finalized 180-page paperback (including 8 pages of reissue reviews too) looks nice.

 

And who knows ... now that the “master copy” is here I might even do 1 or 2 more copies for fellow collectors in the area …

So what about the cover used for the book ?? Well, actually a 1955 Record Reviews annual seems to have been in the planning at Down Beat but never saw the light of day. The “Music ‘56” yearbook (the very first Down Beat yearbook) has an ad for such a book (at a projected price of 50c!) announced to be available from January 1956 and showing an “actual size” pic of the cover. So obvisouyl this cover just has to figure on my paperback.
Checking the regular 1956 Down Beat from January onwards, no trace of that “Special” was found anywhere, and even the ads and coupons for the “Music ‘56” annual did not appear until somewhat later in 1956. So as the “Volume II” and “Volume III” indications on the covers of the 1957 and 1958 issues of the Record Reviews (that followed the 1956 issue as Vol. I) confirm, this must have been a stillborn project. Until now … 😉

BTW, one welcome side effect of all those hours spent on piecing this paperback together was that you inevitably glance through the reviews you paste together. So this was the perfect opportunity to give records a spin that were reviewed there and that you had not listend to in too long a time ... Time well spent too  😉

[HutchFan]

15 minutes ago, Big Beat Steve said:

So this got me to thinking last fall: “How about making my own '55 yearbook?”

That's amazing, BBS!  Nice project! 

 

[Dan Gould]

It's very impressive  - I would never have the dedication to undertake such a thing. Bravo!

[JSngry]