David Ayers

Me neither. I can only understand threads about box sets and reissues.

I'm like the landlord waiting for everybody to leave the pub.

It's dead. Isn't it time to stop flogging it?

How do you guys remember? They always do great obituaries for jazz musicians in the London newspapers - I should keep them as a record.

We must be bored if we are talking about clashes of opinion in the smooth jazz world. What does Kenny G think about all this?

Um - did this book ever appear?

You gentlemen need a streaming service! I find that I have Into the Blue (2008) Sonic Trance (2003) Dear Louis (2001 - Louis who, I wonder?), Gumbo Nouveau (1995 - like nouvelle cuisine geddit geddit) and a number of appearances. All I have to do now is listen to it... Those are all major labels recordings, btw, so someone must be listening...

"Bitches - leading me astray" Awww how sweet - he's just an old-fashioned bigot at heart.

This email seems confidential. I wonder if it belongs on a public forum?

You'd be surprised how much of this stuff turns up on Spotify. This set is already there. So I don't have to worry about buying it or uh liberating it... it's just there!

Ah OK. Thanks.

Maybe I should move to Japan. I don't know how this country can get on in the world, really, with such primitive technology. And the telecoms companies like Talk Talk truly are thieves. I rang their number to ask if they could do anything about the service. Having been through a number of menu choices I was told by an automated voice that the fault on my line was being dealt with, asked for my cell number, told I would be sent a text reporting on the status of the work. So I got an SMS apologising for the problem on the line, telling me I would be updated soon. Next morning an SMS arrived to tell me the engineers had completed their work and the problem had been resolved. But there was no problem. I had rung about the speed which is unchanged (in fact, generally worse). So the whole charade of the SMS was a bluff to get rid of customers who thought they had a problem.

I guess one thing you guys might want to recall if you are talking about singing is that modern jazz is basically derived from song. Most jazz standards are 32-bar show tunes. If you look for standards that are not originally songs the field narrows, and if you look for standards that are neither songs nor in song form, then we could have a short thread on that, maybe.

In jazz or jazz legacy musics isn't it simply the case that there is over-supply of musicians and recordings. There is interest in and audience for 'jazz', just not enough for everyone who wants to make a living from it. Jazz isn't dead, far from it, but there is more than anyone wants. As I am always saying, the ardent advocates of 'jazz' are basically musicians and record collectors - and neither is a particularly cool demographic.

It's great that the BBC records and broadcasts so many gigs like this. Catch it while you can. Yet another one to chalk up to streaming technology?

In all honestly, I think Clifford's direction is the way to go. I love the Braxton Mosaic and I love Henry Threadgill, but I think it's alright to say that these sets aren't for everyone. While the Braxton contains wonderful, accessible stuff like New York, Fall 1974, Five Pieces 1975, Montreux/Berlin Concerts and Creative Orchestra Music 1976 (which given your tastes I'm confident you'd LOVE) a full half of the set is given over to much more challenging work like For Trio, For Four Orchestras and For Two Pianos. And Threadgill's conception is very idiosyncratic too, though there's lots to enjoy and he never goes "way out" (imo). Better off tracking down some of the original LPs than drop $150 on something you might not like. The Ornette, though, is a must. I am glad you said that about those two Mosaics. I have all the LPs on both sets but never bought the CD versions. What you are polite enough to call 'challenging' on the Braxton is IMO just not that that good of its type. The stuff you list would have made a great collection and set the bar for entry much lower. I do understand why they reissued it all, so I am not criticising that, but equally I can imagine purchasers of the set who didn't know the music feeling they didn't get great value. I agree on the Threadgill too. Uneven, and only sometimes as good as it wants to be, sometimes just too dry, etc etc - not a great place to start. In a world where genuinely bad records have had multiple individual releases on CD over the years, there may be reasons it has taken this long to get this material out, and then only in premium price product. As to where to start for Jazz Nut, if boxes it must be, Ornette Atlantics and Coltrane Village Vanguard, but with the Ornette you could go for individual Atlantics, and for the Coltrane there is a Best of VV which has what really are the best tracks. Of course you will end up wanting it all in both cases...

Heh heh. They certainly should be here. We're the ideal consumers. Whatever they do we buy and demand more.

Eicher developed a wide audience - Pelliciotti and Bonandrini didn't. They also took too much of what musicians wanted to do and for that reason so very many of their releases are just not quite up to snuff and none seem that definitive. It is just objectively true that ECM has brought this music to the widest public by far, developed many artists, allowed new idioms to flourish, and offered space and exposure to some at least of the most talented vanguardists. I know you want to say that Chuck recorded the AEC first in 1967/8 and that Eicher picked them up and smoothed them out, and I'd tend to agree with John Litweiler that early Mitchell/Bowie is more surreal (ok well I said surreal, he said truer to the concept of 'sound in space') while once they added a drummer they stablised and the music became more normative, but who is to say how they arrived at that strategy (maybe they decided, not Eicher?), and certainly the numerous ECMs of AEC and of Bowie and (to this day) of Mitchell set them before a large public and did a lot of work for that music in terms of reaching a public. That you and I prefer a rougher (and more marginal, to us maybe more authentic) music to the stablised music of ECM doesn't alter the public significance of that label.

You're going to get the neighbors knocking on the door for that...

There's even a film about him now. They followed him around for five years with cameras. That's a bit much, but I guess he has to go down as one of the most significant producers of art music (if that phrase covers it) of the last thirty forty years and someone who has in a way led music production and consumption especially in terms of a modified 'jazz'. I don't know what would have been left of 'jazz' without him. Yes, all the unfinished improv business from the late 60s/70s - but apart from that?

If you made the complete list of avant-garde boxes after the death of Coltrane (so excluding a lot of favorites), starting with the Art Ensemble and including everything after that - it wouldn't amount to all that many boxes. I was wondering what we hadn't mentioned? There is the second box of Iskra 1903. Quite a few Braxtons nobody picked out. We obviously aren't mentioning any Miles (interesting he sort of doesn't count as an avant-gardist). There's two types of box set. The historical compilation a la Mosaic. Then just the compendious collection, whether new or archival. Most of the sets we mention post-Coltrane are themselves recording projects - not at all the same thing as a compilation. Though I don't mind Old Dogs and I guess would enjoy the duo with Morris if I heard it, I somehwat doubt that Braxton model of just go in a studio, record one hour chunks, issue on CD. I don't mind the decadence of the compendious recording though, in a way. If one model is to tape ten concerts then select for single LP/CD issue, then indeed that is one way to document activity and the quality is obviously higher (you picked the best). But equally to tape and issue ten sets is also fun and for the listener you get more variety than listening ten times to the same set. How many such sets are classics though, rather then impressive acquisitions, I don't really know, and mega-sets by definition have many fewer listeners and are surely, with exceptions, mainly aimed at a selective audience. By contrast the CT FMP is a key document which sadly for me I have only ever heard in single disk selection. Oh and you'd also have to have a proper think about the term avant-garde which in my book excludes the likes of Tolliver and Hill.

Well, so many musicians have said this in some form and reflected it in their practice. I think that the model of jazz as a genre is extremely flawed. I'll write this all up in due time. I guess if you don't like it from Payton you don't like it from Miles or Braxton, and I guess you are resistant to Paul Whiteman (um, like swing if you have to ask...), Benny Goodman and Duke, in terms of massive generic migration according to one model or another. Let alone Delius and Debussy. But oddly, I actually think jazz does surprisingly well. Not all the record collecting which is less than nothing and barely a blip in terms of any history of music, but in terms of continued opportunities to play and even record (though I think we know recording is much less important than it was in the 30s). As with classical music, every time I go to something it is more-or-less sold out. For a minority sport it doesn't do too badly.

So how far do you suffer from this in your country. Most areas of UK have no genuine broadband (i.e. via cable). Instead we are sold a 'broad band' which relies on a technology of slightly accelerating downloads (but not uploads) down an exisiting copper phone connection. The advertised speeds are 'up to 8 Mbps' (wow) but for most people it is really about 3 Mbps and for me (my supplier is Talk Talk) most times I am getting a little over 1 Mbps. Government allows this specious advertising of 'broad band' which is not true broad band, and 'up to x Mbps' with no guarantee and often quite simply no prospect that the advertised rate will be met (in my own case, which is common outside major cities, I can never go over about 3.4 Mbps just as a limitation of the physical system - and uploads can never go over 0.6 Mbps). Little more than organised crime. But maybe too some government embarassment that British technology and infrastructure is so inadequate. When he first came to power Tony Blair made a 'white heat of technology' type speech (modelled on a Labour predecessor) that announced how an 'information super-highway' would be laid to the door of every home in the UK. He came and went, but 15 years on for most in the UK no sign of the super-highway, just lies and extortion from the broadband companies.

No. They aren't. We're too boring.