April 11, 2007

artie shaw's Self Portrait and Kid Ory's completed Decca recordings

Posted by dogpossum on April 11, 2007 1:09 PM in the category digging and music

Ok, so we never found out what happened the other night. We suspect the cops just gave up and went home. Nice one.

I am currently the most boring person in the world. It's The Squeeze's birthday today, so I'm organising dinner for him tonight with whoever could make it at the last minute. I'm also sending him off on a CAE cooking course, probably the one with Cam from Eat It on RRR. The Squeeze loves to cook, but he's mostly a wok man and doesn't like masses of meat. So we'll just have to see how he goes.

On other fronts, something lovely came in the mail for me today:

Artie Shaw's Self Portrait. It's lovely. Its packaging is lovely - nice box with nice 'recycled' paper sleeves, book and box. Five discs of loveliness. This is a really special thing as I've been saving and saving for it and needed some good Shaw action. Plus it's interesting because Shaw selected the songs himself - in 2001. It's not all that common for big olden dayes jazz doods to select the songs for their box sets, mostly because they're dead. So this is not only a nice set of music (I'm enjoying it very much), but an interesting text. It's also all remastered and nice.

I'm also on a major Kid Ory kick atm (continuing...), and this cheapy arrived the other day. The quality is kind of mixed, which isn't all that surprising for the price, and the fact that a chunk of the music was recorded in 1922! I'm sure I'll get over the whole New Orleans revivalist thing soon - Sidney Bechet gets up my bum a bit now, and I can see Ory heading that way too. But until then...

Posted by dogpossum on April 11, 2007 1:09 PM in the category digging and music