Here's another book that has been sitting on my shelf for years, waiting for its moment to arise. 224 pages long, so probably just a little more than a week's worth of commitment at my current 20 pages per day rate, and then I guess I'm finished with my Jazz unit... though the more I think about it, the more I would like to read a little more into it. I'd especially like to read more about Lee Morgan, whose music I've been listening to with avidity, but even though there are a couple of books out there, none of them are available at the public library, and even though both are available for purchase at various places, none of the copies are in what I would consider to be my price range (less than $15). So this is probably it for Jazz, at least for now.
Note: The Notes on pages 206 to 217 sometimes include additional material (instead of just citations), so you might want to flip to the back to check them out every little once in awhile. There's no indication in the text of the book that there even ARE notes...a practice which always annoys me. I am much happier with books that use footnotes so that I can take them in in order and in bite-sized bits. Just in case you are of like mind, I'm putting this information, which I didn't discover until about 100 pages in, up top. No, no, thank YOU.
Day 1 (Jazz Day 37/ DDRD 1,615) April 3, 2022
Well, technically this would be Day 2, because last night I picked the book up, intending to just read the cover copy, and ended up reading through page 23. But I don't feel like complicating things again, so here it is.
As I was reading I started thinking, "You know, in this age of Super Deluxe Re-Issues, surely someone has released a boxed set version of this album." And...
Found a couple of different versions on Amazon, but buyer comments indicated that the sound was terrible and that the product was most likely a counterfeit. And very pricey, too. Found another version which was a Japanese release...which one review said wouldn't play at all, yet sold for $180. And found yet another version on Merchbar, whatever that is, for $110, which included
| 7. | "Freddie Freeloader" (studio sequence 1) | 0:53 |
|---|---|---|
| 8. | "Freddie Freeloader" (false start) | 1:27 |
| 9. | "Freddie Freeloader" (studio sequence 2) | 1:30 |
| 10. | "So What" (studio sequence 1) | 1:55 |
| 11. | "So What" (studio sequence 2) | 0:13 |
| 12. | "Blue in Green" (studio sequence) | 1:58 |
| 13. | "Flamenco Sketches" (studio sequence 1) | 0:45 |
| 14. | "Flamenco Sketches" (studio sequence 2) | 1:12 |
| 15. | "All Blues" (studio sequence) |
--plus a bonus cd which includes the only other five studio tracks recorded by the Kind of Blue Sextet--
1. "On Green Dolphin Street" Bronislaw Kaper, Ned Washington 9:502. "Fran-Dance" Miles Davis 5:49
3. "Stella by Starlight" Victor Young, Ned Washington 4:46
4. "Love for Sale" Cole Porter 11:49
5. "Fran-Dance" (alternate take) 5:53
And what can I say? I still have the album and the t-shirt, but the wife is long gone. (So stick to your guns, boys!)
Yep. Not only all of the outtakes, but the other (recorded earlier with he same group) songs as well. The only thing missing was the documentary stuff, which I didn't really care about anyway. So I'll be sliding these discs into the player later on today.
Day 2 (Jazz Day 38 / DDRD 1,616) April 4, 2022
Read to page 81.
On deciding whether to join up with Miles or Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderly said, "I figured I could learn more [playing with Miles] than with Dizzy. Not that Dizzy isn't a good teacher, but he played more commercially than Miles."
Which surprised me on a couple of counts. (1) Miles had expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that he couldn't play like Dizzy and (2) Miles was much more commercially successful than Dizzy. Maybe even (3) after reading To Be or Not to...Bop I didn't see Dizzy as aiming at commercial success in his music. In fact, I thought he was the guy who was pushing the boundaries in creating BeBop, and that commercial success eluded him for much of his early career. Hmpf.
Also, I remembered the other story I wanted to recount from the other day. It was a comment by Sid Caesar about how in BeBop the band had a fifth member who played radar...and whose job it was to insure that the band never got to close to the melody. I thought that was pretty funny.
You know, I'd kind of like to read a biography of John Coltrane. And maybe Bill Evans, too. The LFPL has several Coltrane possibilities, but no Bill Evans. Hmmm.
P.S. Oops, read some more...to page 103.
Day 3 (Jazz Day 39 / DDRD 1,617) April 5, 2022
Read to page 132. Forgot to mention that one of the most interesting things from yesterday's reading was a picture showing what the musicians were paid for the first session of Kind of Blue. Adderly, Coltrane, Kelly, and Evans were paid $64.67 apiece and Chambers and Cobb were paid $66.67--because Cartage was included for them. That first session, which lasted six hours (broken up into two sets) yielded three of the albums five songs--"So What," "Freddie Freeloader," and "Blue in Green." The second session, which lasted no more than 2 1/2 hours, accounted for the other two songs--"All Blues" and "Flamenco Sketches." Hard to believe that the best selling jazz album of all time was recorded in no more than 8 1/2 hours, over the course of two days, and yielded only one complete outtake...and that all of the songs on the album were the first full takes of those songs. Columbia got a lot of bang for their buck on this one, for sure.
Also interesting is the story that during the first session, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, there had been a problem with a motor on the master machine which caused the tape to record at a slower speed, and that all pressings of the album until 1992 (and the album was released in 1959) were not "right." I don't know what "a quarter-tone difference" means, other than that the sound was off a little bit, but that's what Kahn says was the result vis-a-vis Mile's trumpet...and presumably the other instruments as well. That's kind of a gigantic fuck up for such a famous and big selling album, ennit?
Yesterday I discovered that the Notes on pages 206 to 217 sometimes include additional material (instead of just citations), so I've gone back to read them. There's no indication in the text of the book that there even ARE notes...a practice which always annoys me. I am much happier with books that use footnotes so that I can take them in in order and in bite-sized bits. Just in case you are of like mind, I'm now going to transfer this information to the top of this post.
P.S. I started in on the Notes again, and ran across this:
What's that saying about a Bad Penny? Mmm-hmm. Anyway, I flipped to page 155 to see what there was to see, and saw this:
Which I thought was kind of funny, as I didn't think Hodeir rated the title of "historian." (And Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, at least implicitly.)
Then I flipped back and finished the Notes, then started reading the other stuff...bibliographies and stuff...and lo and behold:
Day 4 (Jazz Day 40 / DDRD 1,618) April 6, 2022
Read to page 178, but I'm just taking a little break now, and will mos def be finishing the last 22 pages of this book in a few.
Picked up
from the library this morning, and yes, I am going to start reading it tomorrow.
I also put Kind of Blue in the cd player this morning (the My Ex-Wife Mocked Me For Buying This edition) and gave it a good listen. The original album was pretty fantastic...especially "So What," which just settles into my brain and stays there. It even managed to drive "Air Raid," the opening track from Grachan Moncur III's Evolution out, and that's been taken up space for quite some time now, pretty much non-stop. The rest of the album was quite pleasing, but none of the other songs hit me as forcefully as "So What."
I also enjoyed the outtakes stuff, especially since I had just finished reading about each piece.
Speaking of reading...another thing which I found extremely interesting was that on the first pressing of Kind of Blue, there were a couple of mistakes on the cover copy. First off, the names of the two songs on the second side of the album where mis-identified, so "Flamenco Sketches" is listed first and "All Blues" is listed second, even though the songs are actually in the opposite order. Also, Cannonball Adderley is misidentified as Adderly. According to Eric Nisenson, about 50,000 copies went out with those errors, thus creating a collector's item. I checked to see what I could see re: this and found prices ranging from $171 for a really beat-to-shit looking copy to $2,000 for a copy which was still sealed. There were also some red herrings in there, so it's obvious that if you really want to get a first pressing of this album, you need to know what to look for. And what to listen for, too, I suppose, since all of these early pressing would also be at the wrong speed for the songs on the first side of the album.
Okay. Read to dive back in and finish off those last 22 pages.
And...yep. According to Kahn, Kind of Blue had sold over 5 million copies at the time of this book's writing. And in those last pages it hit me: this book was published in 2000. 22 years ago. So there's that.
Well...the Eric Nisenson book was published in 2000, too, so maybe it won't take me any further than Kahn did, but I'm still not ready to let go of Kind of Blue, so I'm glad to be starting on it tomorrow.
Heh. That is unless I take a little peek at it tonight.
DDR Day 1 to 1,000: 13,449 pages read
(1) Leviathan 63 days, 729 pages
(2) Stalingrad 27 days, 982 pages
(3) Life and Fate 26 days, 880 pages
(4) The Second World War 34 + 32 + 40 + 43 + 31 + 32 days = 212 days, 4,379 pages
(5) Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming 10 days, 572 pages
(6) The Great Bridge 25 days, 636 pages
(8) Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 23 days, 523 pages
(9) Jerusalem 61 days, 1,266 pages
(10) Voice of the Fire 9 days, 320 pages
(11) The Fountainhead 15 days, 720 pages
(12) The Pacific Trilogy: Pacific Crucible 23 days, 640 pages
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