And for a complete change of pace....Some Jazz

I really love 20's and 30's Jazz along with the other fucking millions of things that float my personal sonic boat. I like sounds and different things for different times of day/year/states of mind/etc...

Thesaurus of Classic Jazz (1959)

So there's this 4 lp set of recordings from NYC done between 1926 & 1928 featuring a whole host of folks who have been more or less forgotten and left by the wayside. The most famous of which are perhaps the Dorsey Brothers who went onto some renown later on with their big bands and discovered a singer named Frank Sinatra. But for the most part Jazz recording in New York seemed to be based around different combos of the same 15 or so main guys. The Discogs listing gives the player breakdown track by track for anybody who's actually interested.

For my money the player that appears most frequently here and who gets just about zero credit for his contribution to the history of early Jazz is Miff Mole. He played on shit tons of dates and pretty much invented jazz trombone and was a fucking killer player, but time hasn't been kind to his legacy.

But for most people these days, this kind of stuff is really specialized listening. Few people have much interest in 90 year old recordings of music that was almost already old fashioned before the decade that spawned was over. But it's still some killer shit. 

These recordings were done live. There were no overdubs. Not nets. You had three minutes to get your glory onto the wax and you'd better be ready the first time. This was what you'd hear when you went out to a club and what you'd dance and drink to in whatever dingy speakeasy you managed to find your way into for a some hootch during Prohibition. This is the real deal red hot jazz.

Another reason that I wanted to post this is that the transfers here are actually really pretty fucking good. The recordings sound better than you'd expect. Sure they've filtered a bunch of high end noise off and added a shit ton of reverb to help fill things out, but they did manage to make the music sound much more present than a lot of other versions of these recordings I've heard. Maybe it's that in 1959 when they made their transfers the source material was only 20 or so years old. I don't know. I'm pleased with it.

I also don't expect that this will be a popular post amongst the folks who frequent this little corner of the internet, but I'm posting it mostly for myself.  You can choose or not choose to see what all the hubbub is about.