A Christmas Yuleblog

Merry Christmas! We've had quite a year here - digitizing all of our Christmas music, a radio show , and remastering yuleblog samplers past.  But I can't complain.   Taking the nine months to get every album and MP3 onto my hard drive (and an external hard drive for backup) was the best decision I may have made in my Christmas life.  To have every song at my fingertips saves me time and led to discoveries of songs I never knew I had.  I thought that what the CD was supposed to do but that only shows you how far in the past I was living. The radio show was very satisfying.  The folks at the radio station were very supportive and thrilled with the end results.  Will it happen again next year?  I'm hopeful but only time will tell.  Lots of things are in store at the station...  Okay... enough about you Capt...  where's the samplers? During a break in digitizing in June, I went back and remastered the Yuleblog ...

The jazz and musical world lost a great friend two days ago when Dr. Billy Taylor died at the age of 89 in Manhattan. Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina and had his first piano lesson at the age of seven. His family later moved to Washington D.C. and attended Virginia State College for Negroes (now known as Virginia State University) where he studied music. After graduation in 1946, Billy moved to New York City at a time when jazz and bebop was about to explode onto the music scene. Within two days of his arrival, he began working with noted jazz musician Ben Webster and later became the house pianist at the famous Birdland Jazz Club. He formed his own jazz combo in 1951, toured all across the United States, and even put his music degree to good use; lecturing at schools on jazz, writing extensive articles for DownBeat magazine, and even had a long tenure of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Taylor's diverse resume deepened with stints on tel...

Merry Christmas! Usually at this downloading season, I would be posting new Christmas albums that I would have rummaged for at thrift stores, haggled for at record shows, and sniped at the last minute on eBay. Several things prevented me in doing that this year - I could bore you with the details but I'll refrain. I did want to continue the tradition that I started five Christmases ago - the annual Yuleblog Sampler. Normally, this would have been posted on Christmas Day - my present to you. But I decided to move the release date up by 10 days since I don't have anything else to post this season. I'm excited about this release for two reasons: 1.) Many of the 45s and 78s I found for the sampler were nowhere to be found in my 22,000+ Christmas song library. 2.) These singles were the first vinyl transferred on my new Stanton T.92 USB turntable and captured to digital on my new Dell PC. None of the vinyl I've transferred before has sounded better than...