I'm in New Orleans this weekend at the Annual National Cardigan Welsh Corgi Board Meeting. No, I don't show dogs but my wife does and she's on the board so like a good hubby I tagged along.
Charles Lloyd pointed me towards the Chico Hamilton album A Different Journey (Reprise RS R9-6078) on which he plays, is musical director and wrote all of the tunes. I'd never heard of it or even seen it, so I went on DISCOGS and found a copy.
Imagine a hard bop jam session featuring three tenor sax greats: Johnny Griffin, Hank Mobley and John Coltrane. Add Lee Morgan on trumpet and propel them with the rhythm section of Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bas and Art Blakey on drums.
Euphoria Jazz is a division of Bob Irwin's Sundazed. Sundazed licensed this and other Dawn Records jazz titles from Shout Factory, itself a division of Retropolis LCC. Shout Factory is a recent entity created by Richard Foos, an original founder of Rhino (along with Harold Bronson).
Surely you've picked up a just cleaned record and need to put it down somewhere other than in the original jacket, or you've mistakenly pulled one to play while the one you've just finished playing still sits on the turntable or you've made some other brain-addled move that leaves one record in your hand with no place to put it. Well here's the TRANSIT PLATTER, the "why didn't I think of it" solution from the "stable geniuses" at stable 33.33.
Vinyl simply wasn't a major event at this show, though it was there. When I noticed the Pure Music Group was demoing the TechDAS Air Force One turntable with the Thales Simplicity II tonearm I figured the room might have some other interesting analog gear.
Like the $29,000 Boulder 2008 phono preamplifier, the new Whest PhonoStage.20 with its MsU.20 power supply costs as much as a car. Fortunately for you, that car happens to be my first new Saab, which cost exactly $2737 back in 1972. The solid-state Whest costs $2595, so it's a few hundred dollars cheaper. But at only a tenth the cost, it comes closer to the Boulder 2008's performance than it has any right to. That it's good enough to be mentioned in the same paragraph should tell you something about how good I think it is. Nor did it come to me hyped by the manufacturer—it took me by surprise from the minute I first heard it. I began my listening right away, before reading anything about the circuit design.
21st Century Procol Harum neglect is one of our time's most serious musical scandals if you axe me. That it took until now to get a high quality reissue of this most excellent album, while other less stellar records are one their 3rd or 4th reissue is a leading indicator of the neglect and lack of appreciation for this super group.
After the messy "supergroup" hype surrounding Blind Faith—more a one-off money maker than a group formed to last—Eric Clapton decided to downplay his fame and so was born in 1970 Derek and the Dominoes and the Layla... double LP that initially flopped. Many people today forget that, but flop it did. It didn't help that it was a costly double LP by an "unknown" group.