[Dixielandjazz] Don Lambert

[John Farrell]

Arn,

Although a great admirer of his piano playing I am no authority on the life
and work of Don Lambert, the little I know about him comes from liner notes,
books and word of mouth.

So far as I am aware the sides issued by Bluebird are Lambert's only studio
recordings therefore I presume that the material on the IAJRC and Pumpkin
LPs must have come from privately recorded tapes.

The four 1941 Lambert tracks on the French RCA Harlem Stride Pianists double
LP set came from the Bluebird session. In the liner notes (written by Johnny
Simmen) is the following comment :

"Don's death (in 1962) was to coincide with the publication of the fine LP
he recorded for Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh."

Maybe our resident expert Bill Haesler can enlighten us about this LP. I
thought that I had all the available commercial releases but do not have
this one, Rust does not mention it (hardly surprising as Rust restricted
himself to jazz records made between 1897 and 1942). Indeed I have never
seen a copy - did it appear on the market in a different guise perhaps?

I am not acquainted with Harvey Ballance nor do I know any details of what
is on the Lambert tapes he has. However I am fortunate enough to own two CDs
which he made, as I said in my previous posting although the audio quality
of the original recordings is abysmal the music is astonishing. As for Mike
Lipskin, although we correspond very infrequently he has told me nothing
about the Lambert tapes in his possession - all I know about them is that
Mike plans to transfer the contents to CD which he will release in due
course.

John Farrell
http://homepages.tesco.net/~stridepiano/midifiles.htm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arnold Day" <arnieday at optonline.net>
To: "DJML" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 12:53 AM
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Don Lambert


> John,
>
> Were the three LPs (Meet The Lamb/Classics In Stride/Harlem Stride
Classics)
> produced from the private tapes you are referring to? The liner notes on
> Meet The Lamb, (which IS from the Wallace Tavern recordings) refer to
> "clean, studio-like tapes of over 200 Lambert Solos." Are these the ones
now
> "owned" by Harvey Ballance and Mike Lipskin?
>
> Incidentally, since this subject came up, I have been transferring my
'Meet
> The Lamb' LP to my computer for eventual burning to a CD.
> A very interesting discovery is that a lot of the distortion on several of
> the tracks is in only one of the stereo channels only (presumably due to a
> bad mic or recording head.) In these cases, simply deleting the bad
channel
> and replacing it with a copy of the audio in the good channel gives an
> excellent mono recording. The IAJRC LP (my copy at least) also had a lot
of
> pressing and equalisation defects which are very easy to correct. It's
> amazing what one can do with a modern computer and some pretty low-cost
> software that someone like the late John R.T.Davis would have given his
> right arm to have available to him. This subject (audio restoration) is
> probably  not of much interest to most DJML members. Therefore, anyone
> wanting to discuss it further and /or to receive some of the results of my
> efforts on the 'Meet The Lamb' tracks is  more than welcome to contact me
> off-list. Note:  A 3-minute MP3 160Kbs file is about 4MB in size!
> Arn