David Ayers

Much of it is on youtube, if all you want to do is hear it. I'm very sure it's legal to do that, and that all rights holders are fully compensated, but just in case it isn't I won't post a link...

Hold the front page!

Never made it to even one night of this: Evan Parker festival review in FT I'm always missing out...

Jazzwise, music foolish?

I don't know what is more boring - jazz, or ... know what, I can't be bothered...

Just an aside on that point. Many have found Shostakovich more comfortable than Boulez - but only when supplied with a fictitious narrative rehabilitating this core Soviet composer as a dissident. And yes I always ask the experts on this and they always confirm he was no dissident. So there's a Soviet composer people love - him and Prokofiev. Interesting we got on to this terrain.

That Trotsky text is findable at marxists.org. Worth checking the chapters I mention. And Bev, I thought you were all for the common man and against bourgeois art! and now you're turning on Uncle Joe! That's the dialectic of enlightenment for you.

I am a Marxist...the word has a very specific meaning for me and that is why I used it. From a sociological perspective, the music on ECM tends towards bourgeois affectations. Of course, the vast majority of jazz listeners are in the upper/middle classes (and that's one of the biggest problems with the music today), but with ECM you see a refinement of product specifically aiming to appeal to middle brow tastes. In the case of the other labels I mentioned, that is much less the case, unless you think, in the case of Leo, for instance, that there's a large middle class market out there anxious to devour Soviet experimental jazz. Now, a lot of you might find this kind of shorthand sociological analysis pretentious, but I don't really care. It's a more interesting topic of discussion for me than the vapid threads on product accumulation that take up most of the bandwidth on this site. By coincidence I've just been dealing with Literature and Revolution. Of course the avant-gardes - notably Futurism and Proletkult, and in a different way and famously Formalism - presented the Bolsheviks with an interesting array of theoretical questions. On these kind of lines, I mean.

Well, I wish we could discuss particular records without discussing the label. These are pretty grand releases and can't be judged by a fairly flat date from 1979 which was never on CD and has been allowed to drift to the margin of music history.

I'm not hostile and I can see where you are coming from. I am trying to look inside this label a bit more and I am reminding myself (1) how many good and interesting recordings there are even if I do not especially like either the music or the engineering (2) how many good records they did and do which I do actually like - I mean when you study the list there are a lot, actually (3) I am also thinking how much they contributed to engineering of jazz or jazz-derived records back in the day when mixing standards often came from jazz rock and were garish and also when most vinyl (especially US vinyl) was pretty poor (4) I am taking stock too of how much variety they generated and how many new aesthetics they have promoted (5) and how they presented many artists I do really like to a large public under a commercially secure umbrella. Middle of the road? But less so than almost any of the hard bop LPs and labels we love here. Much less so, really: Evan Parker's performance at the Huddersfield festival (an avant-garde hardcore gathering) on Moment's Energy would never have made it to any jazz label, major or minor. What hasn't ECM done - yes, their Coltrane was Jarrett, so not quite there on that front, and some big names are absent - Brotzmann entirely, I think, same for Cecil Taylor, Braxton never under his own name, and very few of the FMP set. Etc.

I don't know how much this will apply to the two records in question, but on the most recent Motian album (which I liked a lot) there was a highly unrepresentative selection of performances, tilted toward (surprise surprise) ballad tempos. So the ECM aesthetic, whatever you feel about it, can sneak into live recordings too. That was NOT the ECM aesthetic. That was the Motian aesthetic. And I never thought that criticism of the Motian album was very accurate. Yeah, most of the pieces start at a slow tempo (or slow free non-tempo), but many of them go somewhere else entirely. Try playing drop-the-needle in the middle of one of those "ballads" and see what it sounds like. Yes a great record and full of musical life. I think it is true in that case that Motian decided the compositions he wanted to feature, but it also can be acknowledged that editing choices can in principle affect the aesthetic of even a live record. The Evan Parker CD I mentioned is presented whole, and the Roscoe material is edited down (there was too much I suppose, or not all good enough) and presented out of sequence (to make more musical sense of what was left, I suppose). I don't get the impression that Eicher was there chanting 'It must schving!' or equivalent. Where would we be without German record producers - and their engineers, photographers and cover designers creating a memorable product identity?

I guess if these sets sell well - as it seems they do - they'll just press on through the catalogue.

If I shade it over 40 I consider it a good day. And that's uhhh not on the level...

The two records I was talking about, FWIW, were live recordings taken from a specially comissioned festival. So it is hard to argue that the music itself is geared to become an ECM commodity (in any case no-one slamming ECM seems to have heard these records). So only the engineering could be objected to, and I'd say that it is still possible to listen through the engineering to the music, if you don't like the engineering, and we are all accustomed to doing that, sometimes with recordings of very inferior quality.

Tomorrow is the start of the Jonathan Harvey Total Immersion weekend at the Barbican. The Madonna of Winter and Spring is an old friend of mine so I am hoping to get along to see that done. I thought it started tonight with a concert by the Arditti's but it seems I was mistaken, so at least I am not missing that. Sunday's Wagner Dream might be a bridge too far but never say never.

That's not on youtube. I don't even know the date. I suppose BB was alive when he made it so it is maybe not uh candid...?

I thought this was going to be a thread about how quickly the new Tim Berne album was delivered to your house!

Aristocratic, I know, but I have hired Maxwell's Demon to manually sort out the 1s from the 0s. Old-fashioned, I suppose, but it works for me.

It seems that most Bill Barron never made it to CD, at least in the West. As a leader, there are Hot Line (with Booker Ervin), Motivation, Variations in Blue, West Side Story Bossa Nova, the Brasileros Bossa Nova. Even Modern Windows was only released on CD in highly abridged form (The Modern Windows Suite). I have never heard Snake Johnson with Curson, and don't recall that one being on CD either Thanks John. West Side Story *is* on CD and still in print. As you say, there is only 1.5 Savoys on Western CD though three came out from Japan (nice!). I suppose the problem is that this missing stuff cuts across so many labels, and some of the Savoy and Muse is still in print. By the way, why is this thread in New Releases?????

Crispell very often talks about her changed style in interviews - http://experimentalfictionpoetry.blogspot.com/2009/01/marilyn-crispell-jazz-pianist.html and http://www.jazzweekly.com/interviews/mcrispell.htm

I see also upcoming a Masabumi Kikuchi trio title, Sunrise, with Thomas Morgan and Paul Motian.

OK so not 'waited' but...

Check out Water Records here here.

How much Barron never made it to CD? Or Curson for that matter? What needs doing? I know some of it was maybe only around in Japanese issues...

Another for this record.