Tag Archives: albums

Top 10 Albums Of 2011

There are a LOT of sites that are posting top 10 albums of the year. I thought I’d post my favorites. In no particular order. There were a lot I left out….:-(

Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band – That’s How We Roll iTunes,amazon. Duh….obviously.

Christian McBride Big Band – The Good Feeling iTunes,amazon. Love that there are more Big Bands starting up and sounding amazing other than the already amazing Gordon Goodwin Big Phat Band.

Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook iTunes,amazon. Latin jazz music is awesome, and Miguel is the master of it. Great album.

John Escreet – The Age We Live In iTunes,Amazon Great album with Dave Binney.

Captain Black Big Band – Captain Black Big Band iTunes Another Big Band? Yep.

Tony Bennett – The Best Of The Improv Recordings iTunes,Amazon Haven’t really been a fan of Tony’s. I generally thought his singing was too commercial, to….scripted? Not these recordings. More like Sinatra….which is good.

Omer Avital Quintet – Live at Smalls iTunes,Amazon Great, tight group.

Scott Hamilton & Dusko Goykovich – Tight But Loose iTunes,Amazon I never tire of listening to Scott Hamilton. He is in the top of my favorite tenor players.

Richard Cheese – Live At The Royal Wedding iTunes,Amazon Need a Weird Al jazz person? Except not PC? Then Richard Cheese is your man.

Ken Peplowski – In Search of… iTunes,Amazon Clarinet and saxophone played awesome? Yup. Peplowski is great.

So You Wanna Record A Big Band…..

So, I’ve been working on this CD for a big band I play in. I have no idea how much it cost to get the person to record it, multitrack, and a couple of sessions. I’m thinking at least $6,000….if not more. So, say you have ProTools (or something similar) that can handle 30 tracks of audio. How much would it cost to get the equipment to do it yourself…..let’s figure it out……
Continue reading So You Wanna Record A Big Band…..

50 Tons Of Records Donated

CNN has an interesting article:
“The more than 200,000 records represented the entire inventory of “Records Revisited,” a landmark Manhattan store owned by Morton Savada, who died in February of lung cancer at age 85.

The collection, valued at $1 million, weighs 50 tons and represents more than a half-century of American music history.”

Wonder what gems one would find in there. Albums that aren’t produced anymore. That is one of the great things about going to an old used record store, finding that album that was only done on LP…….

Find Out What People Are Listening To

This site, powered by Gracenotes (the company that provides lookups for CDs via computers), shows a map and a list of what people are listening to. Though, you have to take it with a grain of salt. It is a stats map of CDs people put into programs such as iTunes, and then iTunes looks up the CD on the internet and provides track names. Doesn’t track anything else. I didn’t see any Jazz artists on there at all………