TeledyN

A mainstay of the 1950s, these books gave you a full arrangement for three horns and rhythm on one page, and about fifteen tunes in each book. You don't see products like this anymore, but I'm trying to get a complete collection of the Robbins Combo Ork books. I've got most of them, but I'm missing an Eb book for No. 1-4; Bb and Eb for the Waltz Favorites, Mamboettes and the Gem book. I'm also discovering multitudes of other publishers, but I'm trying to stick with what I know

Click that book cover and you'll enter David's flickr set of 32 combo ork covers spanning genres from Dixieland to Mambo, Bluegrass and Old-Tyme Country, Swing and yes, even some classical (the Lewis Book has a very nice Blue Danube but it seems no one can find the C-instrument book!) For those of us who dig this sort of thing, this is precisely the sort of thing we dig.

Naturally I have written to David in hopes of doing some trades, I'm hoping to find the 'Matt Matlak' posting in his comments too (once you get past the spammers) as he's also, like us, collecting the scans. I'm hoping there are more out there too because these books are a great way to bring the boys into jazz, not the pre-fab scripted jazz that fills so many of the books in print or the fixed way-out changes like the Aebersold heads, but the real thing, they way it was played, here's your road-map lads, let's fill in the spacetime, stretch out the fabric and make it sing! That's the real deal, really. And we had a great time doing it.

I know there are other collections around, I hear legends of them. A local legend tells of how several local territory bands, those who stuck with it into the modern age, chipped in together and purchased a CD containing what sounds very much like it was these sort of combo-ork charts; they're said to have paid a considerable sum for the disk, but that it was a massive collection -- the story as it came to me sadly ends when the last known Keeper of the Disk passed away, and when asked by his former bandmates, his widow had no knowledge of any CD of treasures. 'Tis the stuff of Adventure ...

And yes, I have tried Google, and Bing, and Clusty and Fileshare searchings on Rapidshare, 4shared and all the rest ... what you'll find there is what we have now as I expect many of the early-adopting fileshare-savvy bands people out there did exactly as I did; it is a general Law of Filesharing that any localized collection bifurcates through the network until eventually everyone has everything reachable. So if there are any more of these out there in PDF or TIFF or any other scanned format, they are very likely either in the dark-web of password-gated collections like myanonamous.net (where you'll find my collection) or they are written out to a CD and sitting silently on some shelf somewhere.

Which is a shame because this is good stuff, the sort that fills the air with joy and so my quest continues to fill out our band book as best we can with more. Any and all leads are most welcome.

Recorded Oct. 21, 2008 at the newly re-furbished Palais Royale Ballroom in Toronto. See the Sun Ra Archive for the personel and Live Music Report Review; alas my own review appears to have slipped through the timestream and just as sadly the CBC has removed all trace of the concert from their sounds archive (the audio was broadcast Jan 11 and Feb 24, 2009 on The Signal; I'm sure there are bittorrents around). There is also a thoughtful review in the Montreal Gazette to relate the presentation to Hymn OF the Universe by the visionary archaeologist and darwinian jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin.