Gratification System

I don’t know about you, but I’ve chosen a job for myself that has its own rewards, but usually they are far and long between and are certainly more of the ideal type. In my eyes, I earn enough to live comfortably, but any sort of luxury is hard to come by and usually demands keeping a rather strict budget, which I’m definitely not very good at. On top of that, my job – if done right – regularly provides me with insane working hours and long phases in which I’m basically busy between opening my eyes in the morning and trying to close them again at night. Every single minute inbetween, even those in which which the stomach demands some food, are taken up by work. I know that’s not a healthy way to live, but I also do thrive on it at times (yes, the definition of workaholic fits me perfectly).

Very early on then, when I was still at university, I devised a gratification system for myself to help me get through the most insane work phases. Because I also happen to be a procrastinator when I get the chance, I usually also end up with a seemingly unscalable mountain of work which then has to be completed in a substantially limited time frame. Stupid, I know, but in the past it also lead to the best results possible. One starts conditioning oneself to work that way if the results are good, only to notice once one gets older that it might not have been a good idea. Just like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my engine starts humming when the work starts piling up, not when it is in the process of slowly accumulating. It’s an automatic thing and very difficult to keep in check. Continue Reading →

Anita O’Day (1919-2006)

God, I don’t know where to start. If you drop by here regularly, you know that I always approach what I write about from a (very) personal and instinctive vantage point. It either has to be very close to my heart or I have to hate it. Both aspects bring out the most passionate responses. Often I have to root around parts in my head that I don’t always like to root around in to drag up or sometimes even unearth things that I buried a long time ago. To make a long story short, this one is going to be one of the more difficult posts to write. Try to bear with me … I’ll get to the point (relatively) soon.

When jazz greats die, there are always tons of people posting their R.I.P. lines on the various jazz forums around, writing up a few lines about how good this or that musician or singer was, what albums they loved and how important said artist was (or wasn’t). This time, when I joined the line of mourners, I tried to write something and could only post a line of sad smileys. That was it.

Why?
You need some patience for the answer. Continue Reading →

Anita O’Day (1919-2006)

I usually write endless lines of text, but today I don’t feel like it.

Anita Belle Colton O’Day, one of the greatest jazz singers of all time, died today.

She was right up there with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.

A true legend.
And still, too many people don’t even know her name.

What a sad, sad day and what a terrible loss.

I’ll need lots of time to write up how much enjoyment I got out of her music and how important she was to me when it comes to discovering jazz. I’ll try to be finished by Christmas.

May she rest in peace.

Shelly Manne & His Men at The Black Hawk

Recommending CDs is always a difficult affair. As soon as you say that some CD is desert island material for you, someone gets on your case, taking you to task for having said that, stating that the relative merit of this or that recording diminishes when taking other, more relevant recordings into consideration. On top of that, in jazz circles, one is always prone to be drawn into endless discussions with fans complaining that one is ignoring East Coast jazz when recommending a superb example of West Coast jazz, as is the case here. In the end, usually, everyone’s none the wiser.

If you read my site regularly, you know that I recommend recordings based more on a mostly emotional response. I do list some negatives here and there, but if there aren’t any, in my little world, I won’t try to come up with any. I’m also not all that objective because there are enough reviews out there that try their very best to weigh the pros and cons to give you a seemingly accurate description of a recording. That approach usually leaves me somewhat cold, although it does have its merits, because I want to read about what a recording did for someone. Is it music that resonates with a person and, most importantly, why did it have that effect?

Having said all that, the five CDs that comprise the complete reissue series of “Shelly Manne & His Men at the Black Hawk” are what I would consider to be some the best live jazz ever recorded. Whenever I’m asked why I like jazz and what jazz means to me, I put on any or all of these CDs. Considering the many thousand CDs I have, I’m often surprised that it’s really that simple. Continue Reading →

Eugen Cicero

When it comes around to music criticism, not much bothers me. One cannot argue about taste and one should try to live with critical reviews when they’re bad, just off or just badly researched. There’ll always be that one review that gets things right, negating – perhaps – those that botched things in the past.

With Eugen Cicero, things were and are different. To me he was doubtlessly a musical genius, a man with incredible technical abilities coupled with a great and definitely unique musical sensibility, brought about by a musical education that very few people had the opportunity to enjoy and yet, he was summarily trashed or politely ignored because he fused classical music with jazz at a time when it was easy to get lobbed into one basket with the Swingle Singers, Jacques Loussier and some lesser exponents of a school of jazz that has often been relegated to the living rooms of those that supposedly didn’t and don’t know squat about jazz. Continue Reading →

Boltz LP Shelf Units

Usually I can’t even blink an eye before someone takes me to task for not including this or that in one of my posts and also this time, about two seconds after I put up a post about the nifty Boltz CD racks, Steve, hailing from the US, shot an e-mail my way, complaining that I had forgotten to include the Boltz LP shelf units, his – as he put it – “one true and only love” (did I ever mention that we collectors are a weird bunch?). In a post scriptum, he added that his wife had threatened him with divorce (no surprise, mate) if he ever bought another expansion set and, he tells me, he now has to resort to having them shipped to his office. Collecting can put a real strain on your life and relationship(s), can’t it? Continue Reading →

Boltz CD Racks

One way of adding products to write about to my ever-growing list of items is to simply surf through the list of referrers (for those not in the know, those are the “footprints” on my site left by visitors and kept track of via a small excellent programme called “Mint“, courtesy of Shaun Inman) which then usually takes me to longer or shorter posts referencing my site or discussing one of my posts.

Just the other day I followed another one of those links and was reminded again that I haven’t written anything about Boltz yet. Mind you, it certainly wasn’t the first time I was sent over to their site. It has happened many times because whenever people discuss storage options at some forum or another, the Boltz CD racks invariably pop up, usually by the third post or so … at the latest.

So, let’s see what all the buzz and hype is about. Continue Reading →

Les Trésors du Jazz

OK,OK, I’ll admit it. I just dislike compilations, usually. Yes, sometimes a single artist’s best-of compilation is all you could possibly want of one single artist’s output (and even twelve to fifteen tunes are eleven too many), and yes, every once in a while a compilation of different tunes from some period in music or showcasing a style one is interested in might be a good place to start.

Usually though, I dislike them because they attempt to do my job for me. As a collector, I almost always disagree with the editorial selection and I’ve all too often discovered that many of the tunes included I already had floating around my collection. On top of that, when it comes to jazz, I’ve gotten so tired of the recent flood of remix compilations of classic tunes and the policy of some major labels that limit the output for any of their artists to a steady stream of market-”safe” reissue compilations (just try to find some decent Cal Tjader reissues from Verve and all you’ll really find are, yes, compilations) that I decided to unsubscribe from, for example, Verve’s and Blue Note’s newsletters that lately have been trying nothing more but pimp the crap out of those useless things.

Then you have those “theme” thingies, you know, “Jazz for Lovers”, “Bar Jazz”, Jazz for the Bathroom”, “Jazz Standards that Absolutely NOBODY Wants to Hear Anymore”, and whatever else those labels can come up with. Dreck. Nothing but dreck. Continue Reading →