New Hank Mobley Blue Note Set

[Clunky]

I’ve preordered because 

i want to support Mosaic

i don’t have Thinking of Home and the unreleased tracks 

 

[mikeweil]

12 hours ago, Ed Swinnich said:

Quite frankly I'd love for this to be the precursor to releases of Morgan, Hancock, Gordon, Silver.  Maybe that will provide a financial opportunity to do more  sets of more obscure or modern artists.  Who knows?

There has been a 1950's Morgan set on Mosaic - a 1960's studio set would be comparable to the 1960's Mobley set. Hancock and Gordon have been covered in complete long box sets on Blue Note. Silver was covered only in a career survey - a complete set would be huge and would have to be divided in three or four parts. 

Frankly, I am surprised by that Mobley set, although I see Cuscuna's point and know he's a big Mobley fan. The Blue Note catalogue has been milked to the last drops, eh?

[mjzee]

I am curious about, and am looking forward to, the touted improved sound quality of the new Mobley box.

[Dan Gould]

13 hours ago, Ed Swinnich said:

. Quite frankly I'd love for this to be the precursor to releases of Morgan, Hancock, Gordon, Silver.  Maybe that will provide a financial opportunity to do more  sets of more obscure or modern artists.  Who knows?

 

Unfortunately I think Mosaic needs guaranteed profits on every set to keep the lights burning so we may see the former but I don't think the latter is too likely, unless a pre-order request gets the requisite response.

[mjzee]

43 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

Unfortunately I think Mosaic needs guaranteed profits on every set to keep the lights burning so we may see the former but I don't think the latter is too likely, unless a pre-order request gets the requisite response.

I'm not seeing the two as being mutually exclusive.  Sonny Clark, Herbie Nichols and Grant Green were relatively obscure; their Mosaic boxes made them less so.  But I don't think any of us are looking for Mosaic to intentionally lose money.

At the Mosaic open house, I told Cuscuna and Scott about the Grateful Dead's current release model: when they prepare a box set for release, they solicit pre-orders and require payment upon order, so they have the money all up front.  They basically pay all costs for producing the box set out of the pre-order money, requiring no out-of-pocket spending.  It's brilliant, as long as your audience is willing to co-operate.

Mosaic hasn't gone that far; they're only asking for pre-orders (without pre-payment) as a gauge for whether the proposed box will sell.  But let's face it: if the Woody Herman, say, couldn't get 750 pre-orders, then they'd be foolish to take a chance on it.

[Dan Gould]

59 minutes ago, mjzee said:

I'm not seeing the two as being mutually exclusive.  Sonny Clark, Herbie Nichols and Grant Green were relatively obscure; their Mosaic boxes made them less so.  But I don't think any of us are looking for Mosaic to intentionally lose money.

 

But the difference is that those sets came out in Mosaic's heyday long before the current malaise/massive change in the market.

[JSngry]

and iirc, the success of the Mosaic sets then let to the general releases a little later on.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

On 3/9/2019 at 8:13 AM, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I found it in my spam folder. Weird. I've never had their E-mails go to spam before.

i do all the time.  so much so i seriously thought the mosaicrecords name was hacked.  That being said if you can get me invited to the mastering session I will sit very quietly on the couch and won't touch ANYTHING

[medjuck]

6 hours ago, mjzee said:

 

At the Mosaic open house, I told Cuscuna and Scott about the Grateful Dead's current release model: when they prepare a box set for release, they solicit pre-orders and require payment upon order, so they have the money all up front.  They basically pay all costs for producing the box set out of the pre-order money, requiring no out-of-pocket spending.  It's brilliant, as long as your audience is willing to co-operate.

 

That's sort of the Tesla model.  (Though they only ask for a deposit.) 

[gmonahan]

18 hours ago, chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez said:

i do all the time.  so much so i seriously thought the mosaicrecords name was hacked.  That being said if you can get me invited to the mastering session I will sit very quietly on the couch and won't touch ANYTHING

I'll sit with you and we can police each other!

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

[ghost of miles]

Update on the Mobley and Herman sets that I'm sure some other posters received as well:

We have completed the transfer and mastering stage of this 8-CD set. Rudy Van Gelder’s original tapes are uniformly superb and Malcolm Addey has done an exquisite mastering job. Hank and company never sounded better. Lee Morgan, who’s on six of the sessions, is at the top of his game throughout. Billy Higgins drives 9 of the 13 sessions with incessant swing.

Bob Blumenthal is almost done with his typically insightful and informative liner notes. I’ve amassed a large amount of excellent Francis Wolff photographs from the actual sessions and am in the painful process of choosing want to include and what to drop because of space.

The design of the set should be complete by early June and we hope to have finished sets by the end of July.

 

More Info & To Preorder:
The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70

Upcoming Release: July 2019
 

The Woody Herman Decca, Mars and MGM Sessions (1943-54) is in full swing and we hope to have it shipped sometime in late June or July. It took us longer to gather all the original source material and spend the time to guarantee perfect transfers and restoration which is currently underway. We think you’ll enjoy the freshness of the music obtained by a great majority of the original lacquer discs and many tape sources in fabulous sound. These sources, from the Universal vaults, have yielded some previously unissued alternate takes as well as undocumented titles. 
 

For those who love the Herman First Herd it is a welcome opportunity to hear this band in its formative stages and then in full blossom at the legendary 1946 Carnegie Hall Concert. It is unlikely that a better source exists of this concert but at least we have the CD release from Verve (produced by the great Ben Young) which had used a cleaner sounding source of discs from Woody’s grandson. Our restoration engineer, Andreas Meyer, is making sure that this concert sounds even better with the technology he currently has at his disposal.

The Third Herd is well represented in the MGM and Mars offerings and hearing them for the first time, all in one set, I think will give us a better appreciation of this period of Herman’s Herds.
 

Jeff Sultanof has sent in his detailed notes and we have a number of rare photos to share with you as well. Add to this the most up to date, corrected discography and you have another Mosaic set that is essential.
 

More Info & To Preorder:
The Woody Herman Decca, Mars and MGM Sessions (1943-54)

Currently on Backorder

Ship Early June 2019
 

For Loren Schoenberg of the Jazz Museum of Harlem, it's the discovery that capped nearly forty years of searching. For us at Mosaic, it's the "find" that has us re-examining an era we thought we knew inside out. 

And now, for listeners, it's an historic and fleeting opportunity to own a treasure trove of previously unknown music. 

Mosaic Records presents "The Savory Collection" - six CDs with 108 tracks locked away for more than 70 years and finally available on CD for the very first time anywhere. The recordings are from the personal collection of Bill Savory, a quirky and secretive studio engineer in New York whose day job in the late 1930s and early 1940s was transcribing radio broadcasts for foreign distribution, and whose nighttime passion was turning on the disc recorders to pull in and preserve what was happening in the clubs of New York City and other cities. 

Savory had always been cagey and unresponsive when asked about his collection. There were rumors it contained jewels. We're here to report - it does: 

" Thirteen tracks from the original, under-rated John Kirby sextet featuring some of the finest soloists of the day: Buster Bailey, Charlie Shavers, Russell Procope, Billy Kyle and O'Neill Spencer. 
-Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald and Roy Eldridge as guest stars on the CBS radio hit of the day "The Saturday Night Swing Club". 
-Broadcasts from the legendary Café Society, Famous Door, Panther Room, Onyx Club and regularly scheduled radio programs with a cream of jazz stars. 
-Joe Sullivan improvising at the piano - solo -- during a private party. A chance for him to loosen up, stretch out, and experiment. 
-And an unknown version of "Body and Soul" by Coleman Hawkins, recorded live just seven months after his earth-shattering recording in 1939 that most listeners believe laid down an entirely new point of view about jazz soloing. As important as that original recording was, this newly-found version might be EVEN BETTER. 
-A wealth of classic Count Basie live when Lester Young, Herschel Evans and were with that classic, trendsetting orchestra making jazz and big band history. 

 

[JSngry]

I'm actually a bit excited about the Mobesaic, I have so much of it on LP, and that's how I'll hear it probably forever, but I checked out the Japanese reissue of Third Season, the one with the bonus cut, and DAMN did that sound good. To have all of this material - which at this point is kinda deep-wired into my basic way of thinking about everything, not just music -  in that quality of sound (or better?), yeah, that's a good thing, I'll pay money for that!

[Rooster_Ties]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

...I checked out the Japanese reissue of Third Season, the one with the bonus cut, and DAMN did that sound good.

Third Season is probably my numero uno favorite Mobley leader-date, with Slice of the Top a close second.

I love Third Season so much that I did actually buy that Japanese reissue on CD (the one with the LT cover), just for that bonus track.

Fantastic playing, but the arranging especially, is just divine!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

15 hours ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Third Season is probably my numero uno favorite Mobley leader-date, with Slice of the Top a close second.

I love Third Season so much that I did actually buy that Japanese reissue on CD (the one with the LT cover), just for that bonus track.

Fantastic playing, but the arranging especially, is just divine!

I wonder if Mosaic knows about that bonus track? Maybe someone should remind them. It would suck if they forgot.

[jazzbo]

18 minutes ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I wonder if Mosaic knows about that bonus track? Maybe someone should remind them. It would suck if they forgot.

They list it on the set's discography, even showing the Japanese cd release.

[king ubu]

So that's a bonus track that was not on the Conn CD?

[JSngry]

Yeah, an alternate of "Don't Cry, Just Sigh" made it out on a Japanese reissue of the LT release.

[Dan Gould]

Regarding sound this is a brand new mastering, not the SHM process that most people find so pleasing.  I am guessing people with good to really good set ups will hear whatever difference there is (why hello there Lon!   ) but I am not expecting the Third Season tracks to sound like the SHM which I also obtained for that extra track.

[jazzbo]

Well mastering makes the biggest difference in Redbook cd playback. And I really like Addey's work, so I am expecting a nice improvement on all these sessions. Not all of these appeared on SHM-CD this decade. The Japanese "Third Season" for example is not an SHM-CD. By the way, SHM-CD is not really a "process" so much as its the use of a different material for the disc itself that the information is "pressed" onto. I think the material MAY make a difference but what many may be preferring in the Japanese releases' "sound" is the mastering. 

Edited May 9, 2019 by jazzbo

[Kevin Bresnahan]

A lot of the older Japanese Blue Note CDs did have a sound signature. Michael Cuscuna used to joke that they had a special "hiss generator" that they used to soften the sound of their CDs. I don't know what it was, but I have always loved the sound of those old TOCJ CDs. Others have disagreed with me there and that's fine. I have the version of "Third Season' with the bonus track and I think it sounds pretty good.

Malcolm Addey has done some great mastering work in the past, so I am not worried about the sound of this new Mobley box.

3 hours ago, jazzbo said:

They list it on the set's discography, even showing the Japanese cd release.

Excellent!

Edited May 9, 2019 by Kevin Bresnahan

[Kevin Bresnahan]

It's too bad that no one ever figured out if the titles for several of the tunes on "No Room For Squares"/"Straight No Filter" were mixed up when they were filed at the Library of Congress. I found this thread where we talked about it.

[Shrdlu]

The titles on the "Straight No Filter" 3-track session are definitely wrong. We will probably never know what is what. One incorrectly labeled track is obviously "Soft Impressions": the other two: who knows.

I do not accept that the sound will be better in the new set. That is just advertising copy. Not that there is anything wrong with Malcolm Addey.

It is not true that all the tapes are in pristine condition. There is an audible fault on one of the tracks on "Dippin' " on a later CD which is not present on the "Blue Note Works" version, which was taken from an LP master. The tape had aged in the interval between the two CDs.

[king ubu]

5 hours ago, JSngry said:

Yeah, an alternate of "Don't Cry, Just Sigh" made it out on a Japanese reissue of the LT release.

Thanks, that had escaped me! Got some of those expanded SHM reissues, but none by Mobley.

[JSngry]

I only got the ones with reported extra tracks.