Jazz Holiday Bonus

Al — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 22:53:16 +0000

We have our friend Japhy to thank for today’s post. My inbox contained the following note under the subject “Jazz Collector Website – Jazz Holiday Playlist.”

Hi Al,A decade or so ago I went on a mission to create the ultimate Jazz Christmas (or Holiday, if you prefer) collection. I dug deep, scoured the darkest recesses of the internet, searched every conceivable keyword on iTunes, etc., and ended up with an 8-CD collection (the days of CD burning!) that I called “Yule Be Swinging”.A few years ago I recreated the collection on Spotify (some tunes weren’t available, and some come and go) as a 10-hour, 152-song playlist. They’re all my personal selections, of course, instrumental and vocal, and I tried to stick to “classic Jazz”. There are certainly countless tunes not represented (e.g., I didn’t just dump the entire Ramsey Lewis record on there), and I tried to avoid having 10 versions of any one song, for example (“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” came close!). Point being, anyone can certainly say, “Man! How can you not have Song X on here?!” And that’s fine; this is just were I landed. That said, I’m always looking for any I missed, obscurities in particular.Anyway, I thought perhaps Jazz Collector readers might enjoy the playlist as we head into the holidays. I do not benefit from this financially in any regard whatsoever — I’m simply sharing the fruits of my labor, and it’d be nice to know that others are enjoying it. If you’d like to include the link in a post, please feel welcome to. If not, I absolutely understand.https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Fplaylist%2F7aaq0ThlcjdD79wJuLuHbL%3Fsi%3D56846bed3c6c47a0&data=05%7C01%7C%7C1a3106b666be4cb2e9b708dacbf2cda8%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C638046540948788073%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=g3t%2FqiOVFd57uCsio3G1NO04vSLtPnCRAQPkfjZk%2BRM%3D&reserved=0Have a Swinging Holiday!Japhy

I replied as follows: Hey, Japhy. Thanks for sharing. If it’s OK with you, I’ll post it on Jazz Collector, just as you sent it. Might want to add this gem, below, from an album called Christmas at the Monterey General Store, featuring me on rhythm guitar and my friend Dan Axelrod on lead. 🙂

https://jazzcollector.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/10-Winter-Wonderland.m4a

The post Jazz Holiday Bonus first appeared on jazzcollector.com.

Jazz Collector’s Greatest Hits

Al — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:21:37 +0000

I was having trouble sleeping the other night and clicked on to Jazz Collector on my iPad to look and see if there were any comments or any other activity. There wasn’t much, so I started browsing around the site. How did I browse around the site? Good question. It’s not really that well designed for browsing, is it? If I wanted to look at, say, what makes an original Blue Note and original Blue Note, I would have to do a search on “Blue Note,” which would bring up just about every post over the past eight years. At some point I will put the time in to make it more browser-friendly. In the meantime, what I did was I clicked over to the right side of the page where it lists all of the Archives, month by month, and I picked random months and just went down from the top, looking at any article that piqued my interest. It was actually quite fun – particularly looking at some of the articles that generated a lot of comments from the community. It was kind of like a Jazz Collector’s Greatest Hits, going from post to post, not necessarily focusing just on which records are selling for how much money on eBay. I would suggest you do the same thing and see (and share), which posts capture your attention. Here are some of the random posts I settled upon:

Bill Evans, 30 Years Later from September 27, 2010: This post didn’t get a lot of comments, but it had a link to this great article from The Wall Street Journal talking about the influence of Evans 30 years after his death. I remembered writing this post after listening to the Bill Evans/Cannonball Adderley record Know What I Mean on Riverside. I was thrilled that the link was still working and I could re-read the article. It’s a good one.

Mingus on Mingus (on Mingus), Nov. 10, 2011: I enjoyed re-reading this because it included an article I wrote when I was first starting out and I “interviewed” Mingus backstage at a gig in Syracuse, N.Y. It brought back some nice memories.

This Week — Live At the Monterey General Store, August 31. 2011: What I liked about this is the clip of me playing with my friend Dan. So I’m laying in bed, it’s the middle of the night, The Lovely Mrs. JC is beside me, and all of a sudden out of my iPad pops out “Donna Lee.” The Lovely Mrs. JC rolls over, says “nice” and promptly goes back to sleep. Priceless.

The post Jazz Collector’s Greatest Hits first appeared on jazzcollector.com.

Monterey General Store | jazzcollector.com

Jazz Holiday Bonus

Jazz Collector’s Greatest Hits