There are still way too many jazz albums among the missing. During the digital revolution that started in the late 1980s, not every album made the jump to CD, download or streaming services. Some simply went out of print on vinyl and never were reissued. They either fell through the cracks or they were ignored when labels changed hands. In other cases, they were dismissed as inconsequential and not worth the cost or effort to reissue. They're just out there in the universe, floating around like space debris.
If you still love one or more of these lost vinyl albums, chances are still pine for them today, hoping for an eventual reunion in digital form. That's because as CDs became popular, you probably gave away your LPs or put them in storage. Now those albums are tough to reach or too much of a pain to bother. I know the feeling.
Back when I first started listening to jazz in 1968, I was a big Sonny Stitt fan and was intrigued by his What's New!!! (1966) album on Roulette. The copy I came by was a bit scratchy, but fortunately the label re-issued the album in 1976 as Stardust. The album featured Stitt playing the varitone, a quirky device that hooked up to a saxophone (or trumpet) and gave the instrument an electric sound. In the pre-fusion era, horns were desperately trying to keep pace with the electric guitar, bass and keyboards.
At any rate, What's New!!! was one of those LPs that went into boxes that are now someplace in my building's storage cage. Heirs will eventually find those boxes and be overjoyed, since I don't have the time to deal with them. Stardust has been impossible to find digitally. I even tried to find a rip online without any luck. In fact, I think I'm the sole person who knows or cares about it. And so I became resigned to never hearing it again, wistfully thinking about the music that once was.
Then recently, a reader mentioned in an email that he had a few of Sonny Stitt's varitone albums that I may be missing, include Stardust. (I first posted about my Stitt varitone fetish here back in 2011.) The reader offered to ask a mutual friend to make a digital burn of the analog albums. I was in heaven.
Mind you, Stardust isn't the best Stitt album ever recorded, not even close. But it was still seared into my memory as an LP I enjoyed very much. Long story short, the missing Stitt varitone albums arrived a couple of weeks ago on burned CDs, complete with generous printouts of the covers. Among them was Stardust. Reunited after all these years! Pure joy!
Here's the album's collective personnel, since it was recorded over a couple of days in July '66: Joe Wilder and Eddie Preston (tp); J.J. Johnson (tb); Sonny Stitt (el-as,el-ts); Illinois Jacquet (ts,el-ts); George Berg (bar); Billy Taylor (p) / Ellis Larkins (p); Wild Bill Davis (org) / Ernie Hayes (org); Mike Mainieri (vib); Les Spann (g); Jan Arnet (b) / George Duvivier (b) and Walter Perkins (d).
To celebrate, here are three tracks from Stitt's Stardust (a.k.a. What's New!!!):
Here's Stardust...
Here's Jumpin' With Symphony Sid...
And here's What's New...
A special thanks to John Herr and Joe Lang.
