Back to facing the music

 I'm still working on the listening guides in Jazz Styles, a book that (except for the listening guides) I just finished reading recently. I've also added a bunch of interesting chunks of musical history to my collection, that I thought I would brag, er, write about.

I like the early pictures of Duke, because he doesn't show all the weariness of 50 years in the music business that his later pictures do. Just a happy, confident musician.

The top of that heap is the 3 CD set of Early Ellington: The Original Decca Recordings. This is an increasingly rare set that could be had on Amazon and E-bay forever, but almost always at ridiculous prices. So, when I happened to be surfing around and found one for less than $20, I was all over it. I really consider it a cornerstone of my collection, even though I've only had it for a few days. Of course, Mrs. S put it on for me the other night as our dinner background music, and she quickly thanked me when I walked right over to the iPad and put something else on. "I thought you wanted to listen to it," she said. I told her simply, that's music to study while listening to it, not to eat dinner. She said, "Well, thank God." Which is not to say there's anything wrong with the music, just, it's old, and it really takes a lot of focus and energy for a person living in the 21st century to listen to.

A subdued and simple piece of cover art, oddly compelling, that requires a second look, and then a third, just like Haig's music. 

Next is Al Haig's Will-O-The-Wisp, a collection of four ten-inch LP's from the '50's. This can actually be played during dinner to no great detriment, but it too is music I bought to study. I didn't know it, but Al Haig really is the grandfather of post-bop piano (Bud Powell fans: please give me a break on that one), and because of his work with the bop masters, he really laid the groundwork for a lot of the great pianists that were to come, like McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Ramsey Lewis, Ahmad Jamal and others. I find Haig's simple statements quite attractive because they are approachable to untalented players of little skill, like myself, making a decent sound not only attainable, but manageable.

How do you take a tax-deductible trip to France: Record your latest CD while you're there!

Then, speaking of Ahmad Jamal and getting some music we could listen to, we picked up the latest by "armadillo", as he's known in our house. ("Ahmad Jamal" in spoken Japanese sounds remarkably like "armadillo".) As I've indicated in my side bar: "It’s scary to think that Ahmad Jamal has been playing jazz piano for something like 20 years longer than I’ve even been alive. Maybe that’s why he sounds as good as he does. His original compositions also have a way of sneaking into your head for long periods of time, which means the best solution is to just put him on the iPad and leave him on." His music is just a joy.

Ah, it feels good to write about music again. I must do more of this in the very near future.

Core Collection – A Picture

When I first became interested in jazz, I picked up the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings and decided that acquiring the entire core collection – 187 (in that edition, the eighth) “must have” historic jazz recordings – would be the best way to learn about jazz. So I went through the book and made a spreadsheet and then set about finding all the recordings. Some of my efforts over the years have already been documented in this blog. In March of this year, I was able to track down and purchase three very hard to find, pretty expensive CD’s and announced to Mrs. S that I had completed my collection. The next step was to photograph it.

Several times, I stutter-started the project (much like my piano restoration effort), usually giving up due to lack of space, lack of time, or general resistance to the huge effort it would take to lay out that many CD’s so that they would be more or less visible in one photograph. But after the tornadoes rolled through Alabama last April, I’ve sort of been on a mission of getting rid of “stuff”. “Stuff” is nice, don’t get me wrong, but if a tornado blows it all away, you won’t have any “stuff” and you won’t have much of a way of getting it back. So, I thought it prudent to lighten my load. And now that I’m much more mature and knowledgeable about jazz music and my likes and dislikes, I decided that I should sell off the CD’s that I’m never going to listen to. Before that, however, I needed to make a concerted effort to take a picture of the collection as evidence that, at one point in my life, I did in fact have possession of the entire core collection, all at one time. Here’s what it looks like in chronological order:

Me and the core collection: CD's are in chronological order

This was actually the second layout I did, and it’s good that I did, because the first layout was missing three CD’s. This was due to working from a bad list and oversight on my part, but the chronological list was complete and accurate. So, with the initial layout and this one, I was invested for about two hours of my time. Even though I was sweating bullets for all the bending and moving around without stepping on CDs, Mrs. S still talked me into rearranging them once more, to get the original shot that I set out to take: an alphabetical shot with me in the middle of them. So, here’s what it looks like in alphabetical order in five blocks of 36 CD’s, with some sets pulled out so as to not block the view.

Me and the core collection: Alphabetical order

Let me put that picture in perspective now: three years of collecting, three hours of arranging, one photo. This is, I believe, also the first time all the CD’s of the core collection have been photographed together. That is “photographed together” and not “PhotoShopped together”.

Although I am tempted to keep this collection together, simply because of the achievement, but also because I might fancy updating it with the selections from Penguin’s current edition, I believe I have proved all I could hope to prove by assembling this collection, once, and so now, for many of the reasons I mentioned above, I’m comfortable just liquidating this and getting rid of what I don’t want to listen to and trading them for some that maybe I do.

If you fancy you want to have your own core collection, you need to go to amazon.com and ebay right now and buy up the CD’s I’m selling there. Some of them are really hard to find.

Advanced Jazz CD Collecting: A Quick “How To”

The basis for my jazz music collection has always been the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide’s “Core Collection”. Remember that I started out in jazz without owning a single jazz album, except for three culled from a Wall Street Journal article about “must have” jazz recordings and some average stuff borrowed and burned from the library (I don’t do that anymore, so don’t call the FBI.) . So using the core collection of the Penguin Guide eighth edition, I began buying jazz CD’s.

As is to be expected with a list like the core collection, probably more than half the CD’s are common, relatively inexpensive, and easily found on amazon or ebay. But as you pick what I call the low hanging fruit, you are left with high hanging fruit that gets increasingly harder to find and more and more expensive. Some of the recordings are downright rare, and as I’ve written before, some can’t be had for love or money. They just aren’t out there. Be that as it may, I am dangerously close to completing the core collection with only one or two substitutes, but no integral gaps from the 188 selections.

Notice there that I say “selections” because some are multi-disc sets and some recordings are now available either as parts of boxed sets or other compilations. That complicates matters. So here’s the “how to” for completing the core collection:

1)  Get the easy ones first. Lots of artists can be had for just a couple of bucks: Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc. Most every selection on amazon will have a “People who bought this also bought…” underneath with a bunch more of the selections you will need to complete the collection. Pick up what you need.
2)  Buy used. Used CD’s are almost always half the price of new, or less. There are some CD’s I literally picked up for the cost of shipping. 
 3)  Keep track of what you have and what you don’t. You will quickly form a mental database that will help guide your search and will alert you when you come across something rare or hard to find.
4)  If you see one of the rare ones, buy it. You have to convince yourself that money is not an issue here, because there are some that I have seen and failed to purchase because I thought it too expensive, and then I never saw the thing again. It’s frustrating. More frustrating than breaking the budget.
5)   Search ebay and amazon everyday. The foreign amazon sites are also worthwhile. I found some on amazon Japan that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Use the wishlist (amazon) and watchlist (ebay) to keep your eye on prices and availability.
6)  Spend the time and money.
7)  Listen and enjoy your collection. You deserve it.

Depending on the availability of one or two CD’s and whether I opt to substitute or not, I should finish my core collection by the end of March. I plan to take a picture of me sitting in the middle of all those CD’s. It’s going to be exciting.

Still scared – still not back in the water

It’s a good thing I have my piano off in the seldom visited corner of the house. You know: out of sight, out of mind. Attentive (and even not so) readers will have noticed that I have not worked on my piano of late. I purchased everything I think I need to fix it and get it operational, but I have not jumped back in the pool since right around the holidays. The reason is simple: I’m scared. I’m deathly afraid that I will find the piano to be beyond repair, at which point, I will have to face that fact that I am hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars SOL. I know avoidance is not the best policy, but for now, it’s the policy I’ve chosen. Two weekends ago, I promised Mrs. S I would work on the thing this past weekend, but this past weekend, the temperatures hit darn close to 70 degrees, so I worked outside trimming all our crepe myrtles and all of Mrs. S roses instead, needing two and a half hours on Saturday and one and a half hours on Sunday to do it. So, here’s hoping it is cold and miserable next weekend to put me in the mood to work on the piano once again. Maybe I can at least finish it before I’ve owned the thing one year (Memorial Day-ish).

I’ve been occupying my other free time with practicing my melodic minor scales, searching high and low for a good trumpet, searching preliminarily for a violin, and seeking out and buying the last few CD’s I need to complete the entire 188 disc “core collection”. So let me write about those things instead.

For buying the trumpet, I enlisted the help of a classmate at school, and I did a ton of reading online. Since the trumpet will basically be just a decoration in our music room, the number one priority was to buy something that looked nice, but it also had to be playable, since I intend to mess around with it some. (That rules out “brand new student trumpets”, especially anything made in China.) Having only played the trumpet all of one summer when I was ten or eleven, I had to study some to not get too badly burned in the market. But since I wasn’t completely without experience. I was up to speed pretty quickly. Anyway, if you go to ebay and search trumpets, you will find about 135 pages with 50 items to a page, or roughly 7000 trumpets, mouthpieces, stands, pipes, valves, care kits, etc. It is no small task weeding out the wheat from the chaff. And after letting a really nice, rare trumpet slip away last week, I paid close attention this weekend and picked up a 1941 vintage Conn trumpet for right at $350. It is two-toned, engraved, and very classic looking. I’m excited to see it in person. Here’s a picture from the auction:

The 1941 Conn "New York" Trumpet

So after that, Mrs. S said, see if you can spend the same energy and effort to find a violin. Well, if you go to ebay and search violins, (wait for it) you will find about 885 pages with 50 items, or roughly 45,000 violins or violin items. Of those, roughly  44,273 of them are made in China. (Mrs. S said, “No ‘Made in China’, no matter how good it looks or how cheap it is.”) Despite the long odds, I still found a couple of nice ones, but the closest we could come to buying one, was finishing second in a reserve auction that the first place bidder did not win because not even he bid enough. Unlike the trumpet, it is unlikely that Mrs. S or I will play the violin, other than taking a few token strokes over it with the bow, so we’re primarily looking for something that looks nice and which we will be able to resell for what we pay for it. That means we’re going to have to spend a couple hundred on it, too.  And, we have to keep looking and wading through the plethora of Du-shi and Xiang Ho and Ming Mang Mong instruments.

Who knew having a music room to display an antique piano in could be so difficult and expensive?

I’ll write about the CD collection in a separate entry.

Something else that is nearing completion

At the end of last year, I tallied up the number of CD’s I have from the Penguin Core Collection (Eighth edition) and found I had reached about 75% completion of the 188 or so CD’s. And as I have said in the past, all or nearly all of the ones that I have are “low hanging fruit”: easily purchased from amazon or ebay for a few, or sometimes maybe twenty, dollars. Now, I’ve got around 40 to go to complete the collection, and I’ve begun pushing it. In fact, I was lucky to find some of the missing ones for as low as $5 here and there, usually on ebay. Some of the others are semi-low hanging fruit, in that they require some surfing around and they are often expensive (more than $20, sometimes $50 and up), but at least they are out there and available. That can’t be said for all of the remainder. Some are as rare as a unicorn and cannot be had for love, money, or anything else.

A good example of the latter is the Art Ensemble of Chicago 1967-68 CD. I’ve only ever seen two. The first was on ebay for “$125 or best offer”. I offered $77 but it ended up selling for $100. The other was listed for $200 and it sold in a day. I haven’t seen one since. Another one I’ve never seen is Humphrey Lyttelton’s Parlophones, volumes 1-4. I’ve only ever seen volume 1, and they were asking $100. That would push the price of the set up to $400, (if you could find the other three in the first place). That’s just not worth it. I suppose if I get all the others and  it comes down to it, I might spend that much to complete the collection. (After all, if they are selling for that much, they can probably be resold for that much, or possibly even more, at some point in the future.) Personally, I just want to see the collection laid out on the floor to see what it looks like. I think it will make an awesome picture. (I plan to sit down in the middle of it.

I briefly toyed with the idea of downloading MP3 for some of the ones missing from my collection. I nixed that idea because usually, the recordings are esoteric enough that the MP3 isn’t available either, but I also felt that downloading MP3’s constituted a bit of cheating or forgery. Having collected stamps for forty years now, I would never stoop to making a color copy of a stamp just to fill a space in my album. That just doesn’t make sense. I considered an MP3 file that same thing: it’s a color copy of an original, and just not the same.

Although I have nothing against Martin Luther King Day, with so many CD’s in transit, I’m aggravated that there won’t be any mail delivery today. I’m itching to size up my current purchasing activities, narrow down my focus, and do what has to be done to complete the collection. Not getting mail or package deliveries slows down my efforts. I did, however, get my oversized tuning pins and shims on Saturday, so I have plenty of other things I could be doing, if I felt up to it. I’m saving that for Saturday though. Honestly, it just feels good to write about something other than my goofed up piano.

Days 73 and 74 – Friday and Saturday, December 30 and 31 – A Smattering Modicum of Advancement

Goals: Finish the metal wire “stringing”; order parts to move on to the final stages.

Music: Paul Bley’s “Time Will Tell”; Charles Gayle’s “Touchin’ on Trane”; Dave Douglas’s “Convergence”; Michel Petrucciani’s “Solo Live”.

The hardest thing I have had to deal with in this late stage of the piano restoration is figuring out how to make the wires the correct length so that they wrap neatly around the tuning pins and yet still hold the wire at or near the correct tension. I suppose one is supposed to not cut the wire, but rather, string it on one pin, pull it down to the holding pin, pull it back to the second pin, then cut the correct length at that point. Unfortunately, on a square grand, several of the wires have to pass under a frame brace or a damper arm support, and several more have the back pin under the actual frame of the piano. Needless to say, it is not possible to pass a coil of wire through these narrow spaces. That leaves only the option of cutting the wire to length. This is tricky, due to the bends the wire has to take around the pin blocks and due to the unsure wrapping requirement, which depends so much on the pin tension, which depends so much on the condition of your 130-year old piece of pine wood pin block. It’s a process and a guessing game and a lottery, all rolled into one. I finally figured out that I could just measure the longest string for the given wire gauge, then shorten it once I had it partially strung. If that string seemed too short before I’d got to the end of that gauge wire, I could make the next one a few inches longer, and that would limit the amount of wasted wire that ended up being too short to reach the tuning pins.

(Too late, this led to another realization: I could have done short and long wires of different gauges at different stages of the restringing to hold the felt pieces in the correct positions, instead of adjusting the felt as I went. Although I did not end up with an especially unattractive felt pad, its hole alignment also is not perfect. Again, hindsight is 20-20, and I make this note here not only to admit my inexperience, but also to hopefully help someone else avoid this problem. Note also: I’m not sure how much harder – or easier – the actual stringing would have gone with this strategy, as the stringing was hard enough without having to do it in between two sets of strings. Maybe I’ll try it in a limited context on my next piano refurbishing project.)

When all was said and done, after a two day push, the second day of which really was a push until late into the evening (even after an early start), all the double-strung wire strings (52 of them) are complete. To celebrate, I drank some Cajun-spiced rum that we bought in New Orleans, and I ordered a set of larger pins and a socket adapter for touching up the wire strings and finishing the 33 wound strings. (I’m expecting many more of the holes in the lower end to be unable to hold tune with the narrow pins, due to the fact that I reamed those first and did a much more thorough job than on the higher register ones, and the increased tension of the larger strings.

Anyway, here’s a shot of the stringing so far, pre-pin adjustment/re-installation/rough tuning. 

Core collection update

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have been actively pursuing jazz music for just about three years now, using the eighth edition of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings’ core collection as my guide for purchasing music. There are 187 recordings listed in the core collection, and I recently acquired my 110th. Since for the purposes of the core collection, I don’t really try to discern beforehand if the recording is something that I’m going to like, I’ve ended up with a lot of recordings that, after I listen to once, I can almost never bring myself to listen to again. The most recent of these is Peter Brotzman’s Machine Gun. Christ on crutches, what a bunch of crap. I will contend to my dying day, that if you listen to a “song” and you can’t hum it afterward, it cannot even be considered music. This heretical opinion has gotten me into a lot of trouble with various jazz enthusiasts whose tastes run to the esoteric and avant-garde. I’m not going to belabor the argument here. Let me just say, I picked up Bix and Tram and Maxine Sullivan and Dick Hyman as well, and as dated as they sound, and as poor the recording technology and what have you, those are, to me, far more valuable and meaningful pieces of jazz than any well-regarded somebody blowing pointlessly into an instrument of any type, meant for blowing or not. Cast me out of the jazz world if you must, but you might want to at least listen to some of these recordings and see if you don’t agree with me.

Or, just read about them on my blog. Lots of reviews will be forthcoming as I get farther and farther into my recent purchases.

Yoity Tot Big Band CDs

So, as I said some time ago, I thought that in order to get more CD’s on the Yoity Tot list, but to be fair to all, (that is, never have to relegate any CD from the list because I come across something I like better) I thought it expedient to break the list into two. One is for “regular” jazz CD’s, the other for big band CD’s. (I could go even farther in expanding genres, and I might someday as the list expands.) My big band CD collection is not that big (oops) yet, so the list is basically everything I own that is big band. The regular list is my top 25 as I see them today.

I still have some CD’s I haven’t even listened to yet, leftover from my crazy buying spree a month or so back. I’m having fun and enjoying them, going through them slowly, finding gems, learning things, just loving jazz.

Anyway, check out the lists over on the right.

Zero to sixty in about eleven months

As attentive (and not-so) readers of this blog well know, since discovering jazz some two years ago, I have primarily relied on the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide as my key reference to help me select jazz recordings to buy. I have used that book's Core Collection of 185 recordings as the list of what I should buy, basically using it as a checklist and picking up recordings by artists that catch my attention and have a selection (or two, or more) in the core collection. This has been helpful in selecting both dreams (like Helen Merrill with Clifford Brown and Portrait of Sheila by Sheila Jordan) and duds (such as The Magic City by Sun Ra and Sound by Roscoe Mitchell) to add to my collection - of course not knowing they are dreams or duds until after I get them - recordings that I never would have otherwise have thought or known to buy. Well, two days ago, I received After Midnight by Nat "King" Cole and yesterday, "At the Golden Circle" by Ornette Coleman, giving me a total of 60 recordings from the core collection list. (I have many more jazz CD's than that, however.) Pretty soon, I'll be adding a couple more, but the majority of my recent purchases are other things I have wanted that do not appear on the list. Anyway, I always wanted to mark the 60-point in my acquisitions, since it is almost one-third of the list and is quite a milestone in and of itself. I'll have to get on the Macintosh and check our iTunes and music database software to get a count of my entire collection for my next entry.

Nat Cole, by the way, kicks ass. It will definitely end up on the Yoity Tot list before long.

A site I wish I'd found earlier

I say I wish I'd found it earlier, but it's likely that had I done so, I wouldn't have known what to do with it. Anyway...

Here's a link to a site that for the most part does nothing but rank jazz albums.

http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/jazz100/

They do it by genre, all time, decade, new, classic, etc., so it is a very useful set of listings. Conspicuous in her absence is Helen Merrill, who didn't even make the top 200. That can only be considered an oversight of some kind. It's funny to me how the top 10, top 25, and to some extent, the top 100, are (relatively speaking) easy to agree on. There is a lot of uniformity with this list, the Penguin jazz recordings guide core collection and crown collection, typical lists of jazz standards, and so on. And I'd have to say that compared to the Penguin core collection, this list is much closer to how I would probably rank many of these recordings (at least, as far as the ones I've heard goes).

I find these types of lists quite helpful, because the depth of jazz recordings continues to overwhelm me. It's been about a month since I've added any significant amount of recordings to my collection, (though there was the Art Tatum and Charlie Parker stuff I picked up cheap) and even though I've plenty of titles I want to add, I've been more reluctant than usual, simply because I don't feel like spending money in this economy and because I could probably afford to spend more time with the recordings I do have. I think whatever happens, I'll try to hold off until I take my annual trip to Las Vegas (October 19-23), then plan on picking up a pile of stuff before the Christmas holidays, giving me something to focus on over the long vacation. Jazz ensemble class will be wrapped up by the end of November or so, giving me some more time to focus on listening as opposed to playing. (Sometimes it's hard to strike a balance between those two - sounds like material for a future entry to me.)

Sticking with the plan

It's been quiet on the "learn jazz music" front. I've been practicing pretty often and usually for at least an hour, and often a lot more. A Child is Born is sounding pretty good. I still can't play Maiden Voyage worth a damn, but I can play the parts separately, so I just need to work on the rhythm a little more and then put everything together. I've also been going hard at the drills and I'm optimistic I'll be able to make my way through at least one drill book completely by the end of July.

This week, I'm taking two days off work, which will give me a five day weekend to work with. No piano lesson this week, since we did an hour last week, so those five days of practice should get me up to speed for next Wednesday's lesson.

Having exhausted all possiblities with Helen Merrill and Gordon Beck's No Tears...No Goodbyes, which is just not all that good, I'm currently listening to Larry Young's Unity. I forgot how good it is. I'm focusing on it because it probably needs to be added to the Yoity Tot CD list. We'll see how I feel in a day or two. When I posted four more reviews on amazon.com over the weekend, I noticed I hadn't done one for Unity yet, so I'm fixing to rectify that situation. There are more than 120 reviews in my profile now, probably about 80 of them being jazz CD's. Here's hoping all readers have a look (here's a link) and click on a few "yes" votes for my reviews being helpful. I'm looking to move up the reviewer rankings.

Progress on Maiden Voyage: A Report

Had another hour-long piano lesson last night. With only one week of practice between two, one-hour lessons, it was rough going, but still quite productive. We spent most of the time on A Child is Born, not only because I can actually play it, but because its intricacies are more varied and subtle. After all, it is a relatively simple ballad with several multi-bar phrases that repeat over and over, so it is challenging for the pianist to come up with something sonically interesting every time a similar bar comes along. We listened to the original and analyzed, played it through, listened, played again, so that almost half the lesson was on that song. Then we moved to MV.

Thankfully, my instructor knows my limits, so I was relieved when he realized I probably wasn't going to be able to play it then and there after just one week, calling it, "Oh yeah, our project." If I get lucky, I can play the intro in correct rhythm, but with my instructor behind me tapping to try and help me, I don't get lucky. I get confused. And of course, with that tricky rhythm, I can't possibly make the melody go, so, while pieces and bits are more or less tangible and useful, it only vaguely resembles the song that Herbie Hancock wrote. The good news, is that I did gain some insight and should be able to spend the next two weeks, which includes (for me) a five-day weekend, practicing enough to actually put everything together. We shall see in our next report.

The rest of the lesson consisted of a quick run-through of Falling in Love With Love, which I play Helen Merrill-ish, which is to say, schmaltzy and in the wrong time signature. (It's a 3/4 that I play in a quick 4/4 or slow 2/4, depending on if you're an optimist or pessimist). And, we did a quick blow-through of Ornithology, which has got to be the trickiest song I've attempted so far, but which, once I can play it, will be one of the gems of my repertoire, I'm sure.

One upshot: All that work on ACIB has made me leave Thad Jones in the CD player all week, further justifying its move into the number one position on the Yoity Tot list.

What I'm listening to lately and some thoughts on the (possibly perceived as neglected) Yoity Tot CD list

Readers may well be forgiven for thinking that I have let the Yoity Tot CD list go to the dogs. Attentive readers will note the addition of Thad Jones' Consummation last weekend was the only addition since the launch of the list back in May, and that there've been no other changes or alterations to the list. "Eric's stopped listening to jazz and the list, once targeted to have 25 titles plus some past title-holder slots is stuck at 15 or 16 now and for ever. Lazy ***!" The fact of the matter is, I've been adding to my jazz music collection like crazy, so much so that Mrs. S sometimes doesn't even find time to upload everything to our iTunes library, or, with so many CD's coming in on a regular basis, isn't sure which ones have been uploaded and which ones haven't. What's more, I've been adding almost exclusively classic jazz recordings recommended as part of the core collection of the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide, so there haven't been too many duds and slouchers creeping into my listening regimen.

This has created some problems.

First of all, listening time. Right now, I probably own ten CD's that I haven't even listened to yet. The reason is because, after I listen to something once, even if it is a casual listen while cooking and eating dinner or driving to work, before I listen to it a second time, I like to read the original liner notes, compare the musicians playing on it to other recordings, and maybe read up on it in the Penguin. So naturally, this process takes some time. I must admit also that this process sometimes get jumbled up and I forget what I have listened to so far, or I put in Dexter Gordon but think I'm listening to Wayne Shorter, or something like that. This makes for interesting listening and interesting results in formulating my opinion, which is what I'm trying to achieve anyway. But again, this takes time. Secondly, I have to say, despite the overload of what are considered jazz classics, honestly, I haven't found any that are worthy of the Yoity Tot list. One thing I am not interested in is recreating someone else's list. This is my list, so I'm careful about how I listen to and think about a CD and what qualifies if for Yoity Tot. And just to show that I have been doing what I say I am doing, here's a list of what I'm listening to lately and why they haven't made the list:

-Sarah Vaughn with Clifford Brown - Excellent. Really great stuff. But for my money, nowhere near as good as Helen Merrill with CB. Can't put them both on the list. Sorry.
-Love Supreme by John Coltrane - Legendary recording. Legendary work. Unmatched. Historic. But I bought the deluxe edition and the live version from France on disc two is nothing special and overall, I'm not moved by the pieces, original or bootleg. Somebody cries for John Coltrane when they hear this music, but sometimes, I just wish the noise would stop. McCoy Tyner almost saves it, but no, this is not Yoity Tot material.
-Destiny's Dance by Chico Freeman - Probably, this will make the list if nothing else comes along to impress me more. I listened to it once and thought it was crap. Listened to it a second time and "got it", listened to it a third time and was enraptured. The tracks that Wynton Marsalis plays on are especially dynamic. It's not great but it's as deep as the ocean, and that might be enough.
-Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock - Another legendary, historic, epic recording. But it only has five songs on it and only two of them are any good and none of them are that entertaining that repeated listenings don't become a bit boring. (I may be biased here.)
-Speak No Evil by Wayne Shorter - A list candidate. Still thinking about it.
-Our Man in Paris by Dexter Gordon - Another viable candidate. But, like John Coltrane, in places, I just wish it would stop.
-Blue Serge by Serge Chaloff - Probably this will go on the list, even if it will eventually be surpassed and have to be removed. This CD is very interesting and baritone sax is an instrument with a sound completely unto itself. A unique recording.
-The Amazing Bud Powell Volumes 1 and 2 - Great music, crappy recordings. I want them to be better, and that means, they're not good enough.
-The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson Volumes 1 and 2 - Great music, great bands, Clifford Brown, sharp recordings, these have a lot going for them. If Jay Jay doesn't make the list through Clifford (Volume 1 is on the Complete CB on Pacific set that I have, which I'm thinking about putting on the list), I may have to throw this one on there. It's probably good enough to be on the list.
-In My Time by Marian McPartland - Decent. Some interesting moments and a high level of skill, but, it doesn't stand out to me.
-Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery - Borderline. This recording really has its moments and despite my admitted bias against jazz guitar, this is very close to edging its way into the list.
-King Oliver's Complete Creole Jazz Band - Good God! I don't care how historic or trendsetting or timeless or anything the music is. If it was recorded on a street corner by a monkey turning a spindle on a prototype Edison recorder, it's crap.
-Complete Atomic Count Basie - Yeah. That's better. Good enough for the Yoity Tot list? Maybe. Just maybe.

I could go on. Suffice to say, I listen to jazz everyday for at least an hour, not counting my own playing time. When I find a recording that you it to yourself to own, it will get listed.

Meandering musings on things jazz

I had an occasion to listen to some live jazz music this weekend, but for various reasons, I was not able to take advantage of the opportunity. Instead, I was mostly stuck at home, and it provided me an opportunity to delve into a few of the new CD's I purchased for my rapidly growing collection. One that I listened to the most is one of the most classic of jazz classics: A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. I hardly know what to make of it. It went by so fast the first time, I felt sure it wasn't the 28 (?) minutes it said it was, so I listened to it again, back to back. Again, it seemed to me that the first track (listed at 7+ minutes) wasn't more than two minutes long. So, either the CD is altering the space time continuum, the liner notes are wrong, or it's just so good, you can't feel the time go by. It was weird, actually. I swear I thought maybe I passed out or somehow skipped one or two of the tracks or something. I guess ultimately, forgetting about time is what jazz (and all music, really) is all about. That, and waking up in the morning, going, (in a really really deep voice) "A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme..."

After Coltrane, I put on Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. The title track is really the only song on there that I like, but I'm going to write about that recording some other time.

Then this morning I was listening to volume two of Jay Jay Johnson, and that freaked me out for a simpler, less supernatural reason. I've been listening to a lot of trumpet music lately, and I was struck by how smooth Johnson is on the trombone that it sounded, in its phrasing, more like a trumpet than a trombone. Of course, he's not doing anything crisp and jumpy like Clifford Brown or Fats Navarro would, but on Old Devil Moon, I found his phrasing to be remarkably lively and similar to Mel Torme's, enough so that I wonder if Mel might not have been listening to Johnson before he stepped into the studio to make his Swings Shubert Alley recording.

And, over the weekend, I read about Louis Armstrong's recording of West End Blues, which will be 80 years old this Friday. I'll write about that later this week, I suppose.

I stopped practicing half-diminished chords because that wasn't going all that well. Instead, I decided just to do diminished sevenths with the bass note as the lowest note around the circle of fifths. Even that was not easy. I have a lot of basic things I need to work on, and with an hour long lesson coming up this week, I'm going to get my instructor to give me some ideas of what to work on - specifically. I thought there would be some kind of diminished chord exercises in one of my jazz chord workbooks, and I was surprised to find there was not. Now I'm thinking that such a thing might exist and I need to find it for my own benefit. Then I remembered, that's what my instructor is for. Teamwork.

Interconnectivity

I suppose what has had me going all this time is the obvious and extensive interconnectedness of the jazz world. While I don't consider it particularly unusual that record companies would release the exact same recording under two (or more) different names, I am aggravated by how hard it is to find out that information. Yes, one could, I suppose, go through the playlist of every CD one is considering purchasing to see if it matches the playlist of a CD one already owns. That would be a start. And while I can't really imagine a scenario where two CD's would have a playlist of, say, five songs exactly the same name but different versions, I have seen CD's that have different playlists (slightly) but which are, in fact, the same recording. Confusing.

I think that is what makes the jazz world so unique. I mean, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna and Hall and Oates might team up to make a recording of a song or two, wherever and whenever there' s a dollar to be had or a benefit to attach one's image to, but you'll never hear Madonna sing on a Bruce Springsteem album and you'll never hear Eric Clapton playing guitar for Green Day, or something like that. But you will hear Clifford Brown playing for Helen Merrill. And Sarah Vaughn. And Art Blakey. And Jay Jay Johnson. And, and, and... Certain guys were everywhere. One could be forgiven for thinking that in the golden heyday of jazz, say the 1950's and 1960's, there were only about 150 people playing jazz music. I mean, seriously. This is probably why I missed the jazz boat. "Do you like Miles Davis, man?" "No, I don't dig that stuff, man." Well, guess what? Miles Davis made, like, a thousand albums a month back then, so if you throw him out of consideration, you've just thrown out a major portion of the music being made at that time. That, at least partially, is what happened to me, I guess. Anyway.

Since I've purchased 16 CD's in just the past three weeks (it will be a while before I get any more now, unless a big discount on something in my wishlist shows up on Amazon.com or e-bay), I've got them all piled in one place where I've been reading about them in my recordings guide, reading through the liner notes, and of course, listening to them. And it was last night as a bunch of Blue Note recordings came together that I noticed they had a lot of the same artists' names on them. Watch me as I go full circle here:

-McCoy Tyner plays piano on John Coltrane's Love Supreme along with Elvin Jones
-Elvin Jones plays drums on Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil with Herbie Hancock on piano
-On Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Ron Carter plays bass
-Ron Carter also plays bass on Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet
-Freddie Hubbard also plays trumpet on Herbie's Maiden Voyage (ooh, that's one circle right there)

... and okay, I made my point. But I could go on and on if I wanted to do some research. (And some day I will.)

Again, I'm not saying any of this is bad or good or whatever. And now that I understand it and have had an opportunity to explore it somewhat, I think the chances of my continuing to duplicate CD purchases is pretty slim, unless I do so intentionally to get a different, or better, version of something I know I like. (Helen Merrill comes to mind.) Someday, when I have the time and the technology, I'm going to construct a massive timeline or "connectivity map" that conveniently illustrates all this interconnectedness, making it easier for the jazz fan to understand who goes where and what are the likely locations for having overlap in a CD collection, due to all these musicians playing and singing on each other's recordings. Today, I merely note it for convenience and future subject matter consideration (and reader comments?).

It happened again

It happened again.

I was listening to Volume One of The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson on the drive in to work this morning. I put it into the player last night on the way home from the local poker game (where I won exactly half a hand in two hours of poker), and because I live close to where the game is held, I only listened to one song last night, but I thought, that sounds familiar. But then I thought, hmmm, must be another version of a song I've heard before. I didn't think anything more of it, as I pulled into the garage and turned it off for the night.

So this morning, as I'm driving, I'm listening closely again and noticing that the trumpet player accompanying (trombonist) J.J. Johnson is really kicking it, so much so, I'm thinking, is that Miles Davis? Doc Severinson? Herb Alpert maybe even? I challenge myself to figure it out, and I listen carefully to that song and the next. I conclude that it must be Clifford Brown on trumpet and I decide to make that my "final answer" and I look at the CD cover.

Correct! I've won $32,000 and the chance to continue. It is Clifford Brown. Uh-oh. Clifford Brown. No wonder I thought I'd heard it before. Don't tell me. This CD is a duplicate of one in the complete Clifford Brown Blue Note recordings that I already own. Isn't it? ISN'T IT?!?! I glance at the CD cover again. Sure enough: Blue Note.

Son of a --!

I'm starting to get pissed off about this, I think. But as I'm listening, I'm thinking: you know, this sounds like I've heard it before, but not quite. Not really. Maybe it's not exactly the same as the Clifford Brown pressing. Then I think, maybe I just want to think that because I'm getting upset about having all these duplicate recordings. First thing when I get to work, before the drudge begins, I jump to amazon.com, open two or three windows and pull up J. J. Johnson Volume 1 and Clifford Brown Complete. I'm relieved to see that, while all of volume one does appear on the Clifford Brown set, none of volume two does. So, my ideas about having to finally bite the bullet and resell some CD's because my collection went from two duplicates to four were unfounded, although it did go to three, but I will, for now, be content to hold onto all of the CD's I have, for the collection's sake.

Just the same, I'm again starting to get upset about letting the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide be my guide in purchasing jazz recordings because, let's face it, as a "guide", it sucks. As a "list", it is essentially one of a kind and indispensible, but it doesn't "guide" you anywhere except into a black hole of debt and duplication. I promise you, there is nothing in the entries about J. J. Johnson that says, "this is also available on the Clifford Brown Complete set", or "parts of this also appear on...". Plus don't forget, two of the four CD's in the Clifford Brown set also happen to be Volumes 1 and 2 of Art Blakey at Birdland, so IF in fact, both J.J. Johnson works were duplicated on the Clifford set, it would have been possible to buy that and dispense with buying both Art and J.J. So instead of buying eight CD's, you could buy four and have exactly the same "amount" of music. Now, if you pay $20 for a "guide", don't you think it should tell you that? At a minimum? I guess it's time to start a "duplicate CD's list". Maybe people will come to me for the information, instead of Penguin.

Look for that list, coming soon.

My latest, arguably greatest discovery: Helen Merrill

The road to jazz knowledge continues to be frought with difficulty.

After eating too much curry at a curry cook-off at lunch yesterday (eight different kinds of curry, including coffee, dumpling, kimchee, spinach, strawberry, and three others), it is no wonder my stomach woke me at 2:45 this morning. Sleep was not an option. I've been listening to Helen Merrill with Clifford Brown the last two days, and I listened to it again to lull me to sleep last night. In the darkness before the dawn, I've spent the last half hour or so perusing my Jazz Recordings Guide and the Internet for Helen Merrill CD's. Lord, I'm in love with Helen Merrill. People who are familiar with her work will know what I'm talking about. I'm at a loss to explain her singing and song-stering, all I can say is, I really love to listen to her sing. The voice: so pure. The timing: unhurried but right on. The phrasing: impeccable and un-imitatable. What's that, two words invented already because I can't describe her and her singing?

Of course, the version of the CD I bought has only seven tracks and is a frighteningly short thirty two and a half minutes. That's why it is easy to imagine my consternation at finding a "complete" with Clifford Brown CD that has 19 songs. Son of a --! I have to say, this is where the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide really fails me. It just doesn't tell you what's what, as I've pointed out before. Would it have been too much to ask for one line saying: "Helen's really good, so if you think you might like her, look for the "complete" recordings"? It would have saved me 11 bucks anyway, because, I have to have everything Helen Merrill.

I'm in love.

Oh, and yes, you better believe she's going on the Yoity Tot CD list. Right at the top.

Mel Torme Joins the List

Some things you may or may not have known about Mel Torme:
-He co-wrote the words and music to The Christmas Song (made famous by Nat "King" Cole). He claims he and his partner finished the song in about 40 minutes.
-In addition to writing over 250 songs, he also wrote a biography of Buddy Rich, a novel, and three autobiographical works.
-His nickname (which he didn't like very much) was "The Velvet Fog".

So, if I needed any justification for putting him on the Yoity Tot CD list, there it is. Simple fact of the matter is, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley is a really fun, highly exuberant piece of music entertainment and true to its name, every tune swings. I really only bought it because it wasn't that expensive and I never expected Mel to become a pseudo-hero of mine, but he did, and he did it in short order. This CD is hard to put on the shelf. It helps that I'm working on one or two of the songs that are on the CD, too. You know, you can listen to Sinatra anytime, but the same goes for Torme. Like I said in my amazon.com review, growing up, his was one of those names that you heard all the time, but you could only really associate it with "older people's music" and when you got older, you just never expended the effort to find out what he was all about. I bought the Shubert Alley CD on a whim, and it was after that I began to learn more about him. Like so many things in being late to jazz, at least I'm able to get on the boat the second time it pulls into the harbor. My entire life would be different if I'd figured out about jazz and people like Torme back in, say, 1972 instead of 2007.

More Yoity Tot CD's

Today, I’m up for some additions to the Yoity Tot CD list. To wit:

Night Train by Oscar Peterson. I could easily have put this in the first bunch of CD’s that I posted and I couldn’t tell you why I forgot about it, because by far, this is one of my top five most often played CD’s. I like it because it is up tempo, it has a great variety of songs, and Oscar’s performances are always so reliable and true. Mrs. S loves Hymn to Freedom, but I’m partial to the jazzy little rendition of Volare, which is not covered nearly enough in the jazz pantheon, I reckon.

Time for Tyner by McCoy Tyner. After my experiment, this dropped right into my playing rotation, and I’m pretty sure it went something like five or six days in a row in my car, which would be something like five or six complete play-throughs, before I decided to listen to something else, and only then because I started working on Surrey with the Fringe on Top and I wanted something other than McCoy’s perspective. (Wynton Kelly and Billy Taylor’s versions are just too high to aspire to, for not, so I’m now listening to Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley’s version, which gives me the words, which helps with my phrasing.) Anyway, McCoy is a solid standby in our dinnertime music rotation, and like Oscar, a favorite of Mrs. S and I both.

I changed my mind

Here we are, two weeks later, and I still haven’t sorted the yourmusic.com situation. They assure me they are working on it, but in the meantime, the credit card I had on record with them expired, and I missed yet another selection of mine, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, one I was really looking forward to getting. Right after that, I got a rather rude, automatically (I think) sent e-mail that simply announced, “Dear ERIC, We have cancelled your subscription because of multiple unsucessful [sic] attempts to process your Music Queue shipment using your default credit card.” I rejoined by clicking on the link they sent, but I regret having done that. I should have left well enough alone. My plan now is to just buy the CD’s I want, when I want them, probably using PayPal to make the payment, and screw everything else having to do with yourmusic.com. I’ll still introduce you to them to get a free CD, if you are a glutton for punishment like I am, but I hereby officially withdraw my recommendation of their service.