David Ayers

I see 'Snakeoil' is the name of his new band: http://www.theshedd.org/divP/series.aspx?event=2082

Berne baby Berne. Saw it on amazon.co.uk - can't give link I'm on phone.

As Tim Berne was mentioned I note that he has another album on ECM due soon - no personnel mentioned, so might it be solo? And with no relevance whatever, I also notice that Rainer Bruninghaus Freigeweht has popped back into CD existence - one of the more notable outings for double-reed instruments of recent decades?

Both labels come under the CAM Jazz banner now. Details of what's available can be found here: CAM Jazz Ahhh... for some reason I was on camoriginalsoundtracks.com which is the same but doesn't display anything...

I was wondering if there would be a Hemphill or WSQ box from BS/SN so I went over to their website but it is not functional - not down, just seemingly abandoned.

They heard that people were downloading music illegally then listening to it on portable devices without a care in the world. It had to be stopped. The 'replacement' is a tiny pewter bust of the late Steve Jobs. No bigger than your thumb. Makes a fantastic gift!

Maybe they will. Interesting.

The vinyl is very findable - I guess you want it on CD...

Like a smother party. Who else needs doing in?

Is that a kind of punishment for recalcitrant box sets? Is it a bit like being sent to Coventry? Is the presence of Hawk likely to foment discontent across the border? Will the authorities even let him leave? Can they clip his wings? Does some warped version of chaos theory predict that the flight of the Hawk will precipitate the long-awaited Canadian Spring? Noooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paul Motian converted me to jazz, so I am very sorry to see he has passed.

They had a dead parrot.

They suggested that I just sit in the corner and hum quietly to myself - forever...

So I go to the hifi store to buy speaker cable. The guy points to an empty rack and starts to tell me the prices. I stop him and ask if he actually has any cable to sell me. He says no, the guys have taken it all out on an installation job. Every roll of every kind of cable they had. I actually need it immediately for an installation of my own (remodeling, finite window of opportunity). So nobody who wanted cable, nobody who went instore to buy a whole system for example, could get cable that day. Maybe that works for them, as a business model. Who knows?

But I wonder if different things can start to happen around reissuing. I find the model of Destination Out quite interesting - reissues, some rare and never on CD, in FLAC and other formats. No need to buy an expensive box set, just one title at a time as and when you feel like it. But in some ways the issues are the same for that business model as they are for the hard copy model - won't people simply just steal it, that is, 'share' it? Destination Out has 32 FMP titles up and more to come. That's a lot. It hasn't been around long, I'll be interested to see how it goes. I say get over there and support it. I should have mentioned that you can stream whole albums on the site, so buying the d/l is most definitely optional. They believe in their product!

I read it - and I'm disagreeing! That's why I said the question is, what's missing? EMI and Fantasy reissued loads of stuff from defunct labels they had bought up over the years. My point was that many labels from the 70s and 80s still exist and have continued to make stuff available, so that the there may be less sense of the 'reissue program' but when you analyse what's absent it doesn't seem that there are big gaps. Contrast Blue Note and ECM. There were maybe 500 ECM LPs released in the 70s and 80s. The great majority were reissued on CD by ECM and of these the majority have been more-or-less continuously available. So we don't think of that as a reissue program. In contrast the 500 or so Blue Note LPs issued from 1955-the very early 1970s have had only periodic reissue, usually part of special and limited programs, and while I think that about 80% of BNs and 80% of 70s/80s ECMS have been available as CD (some ECMs from later 80s would have been LP/CD in any case) I'd be surprised if ECM didn't pip it, and while I haven't counted I'd be amazed if there are not many more ECMs of that period in print (if the idea of 'in print' counts any more) than there are BNs currently in shops.

I don't need a mic on every cymbal and the corresponding artful stereo spread of the drumkit - it's garbage and nothing to do with the feel and function of drumming.

Kind of what I was saying, n'est-ce pas? According to Kevin, Miles found the same problems with the music that I was talking about.

Oddly we switched to the topic of restoration. I think there are quite a few dimensions to this. I noticed the other day how listening through the problems of a recording (a cassette of a concert taken from FM radio) involved me quite as much as a a clear CD recording of the same thing - because I was interested, and also because the romance of music is about distance ("gentlemen, give me an impression of the notes"). A lot of listening is about listening through the recording not listening to it. And since listening is substantially about memory the role of the listener's mind is much more important than the 'ears' which hi-fi buffs always talk about. I don't much like CD, really find little to enjoy in digital transfers of magnetic tape, dislike a lot of modern recording methods as applied to jazz, but mostly find myself able to listen through that, although since music is frequently shaped to fit recording technology and formats music and recording are not so easily dissociable. So with 'modern' recordings I often feel I am accessing the music through the recording and in spite of it. Like Hans I dislike a lot of the glare which has become fashionable, though again it is about mind and I find at low volumes things like RVGs are not too distressing. As far as restoration goes, some 20s/30s restorations really are remarkable and grab me as much as anything. That said there are lots of beautiful and transparent recordings from all periods, but I guess as someone brought up on LPs, and for whom concert bootlegs were just as important as official recordings, then listening through rather than to has always been a way of life.

I was trying to think about Hans' idea that the 70s and 80s have been neglected. I couldn't really think of any major artist that has been all that neglected, though there are obviously chunks of stuff missing, and the Braxton/Threagill boxes from Mosaic cover two big gaps. But really a lot of labels from the 70s and 80s still exist, there was in any case surely less done in that period, and since a lot of it was from major labels like Columbia the considerations are a bit different. In any case 70s and 80s LPs are mostly easy to find, not like 50s and 60s originals. You could say Mosaic struggled really to fill a Threadgill set since they included some recent material from the 90s which has always been easy to find and is hardly a reissue since it was only ever on CD. Black Saint/Soul Note kept their stuff in print and has now packaged a lot of it into boxes (including fine Braxton/Threadgill/Dixon/Taylor etc. boxes). But these are repackagings rather than reissues. Independents like Emanem and PSI, continue to reissue their own LP era material and also new sessions from that period. There are some specialist reissue companies which license major label material - Wounded Bird does lots of Columbia for example - but Sony do lots of their own, not only Davis but Shorter, Hancock and so on. So I don't see the situation as regards the 70s/80s as being so very bad, though I can see where gaps lie for collectors who want an archival digital transfer and are not interested in LPs which are often easily found and cheap. I tend to see a half empty glass as three quarters full so correct me if I am wrong. What artists are missing from the 70s/80s, or how many more massive chunks of stuff by major artists is in need of revival?

Toast sandwich? You were lucky... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA&feature=related

From this point on I find Miles Davis gigs a bit too variable, too experimental. That's true of some earlier live recordings too, like the reunion with Coltrane, but it is really the case with a lot of the live electric material, which to my way of thinking is more than occasionally uninspired (even if busy and apparently eventful, and always texturally interesting). So though I find these gigs somewhat interesting and I guess sometimes 'exciting' they are also quite raw, really, for my tastes, so even though they stand up better in good patches than most work by lesser musicians, they also document the hit and miss and often not well-focused nature of the open-ended approach to gigging of this and later Miles groups. In fact in patches I seem to hear a lot of tension in the group, as if the openness allows for simple good old-fashioned disagreement. That's interesting but not muscially interesting, maybe. Good to have the recordings though, and in fair-ish sound. That said, I have never loved Miles and always ranked him below Coleman and Coltrane. I feel he is too pre-occupied with audience.

The material you quote is about musical compositions, not sound recordings. Hm yes it may be thought the 28 year renewal does apply to recordings. While the lather about thieves irritates me, I think the issue around copyright is more interesting from the point of view of history than of private property. To me the issues are not just about preservation but about access. In the end the role of custodianship will be performed by libraries or in the future entities having a library-like function, and this will happen regardless of the perceived relative importance of any particular work - ALL will be archived. But outside this and slightly prior to it, there is an aspect of soft reception where access is important for reputation and for the weight likely to be given to phenomena by cultural historians. Things are only remembered if they are accessible and history tends to weight things according to their supposed dissemination (among other factors). There is a transition around technology which goes in this direction of course, and that goes alongside a transition from collectors to scholars, who like it or not are the key cultural mediators as over time all other parties fall away. I know what it is like to have a copyright taken away by law. Copyright is only ever granted by law, of course, it does not inhere in any way, either ethically or legally. For me, any article or book chapter of mine can be copied and disseminated free to students with no payment to me. It's educational, apparently. Is my loss of revenue offset by the potential gain to my reputation (uh, or collapse thereof)? Is it even clear that I lose money, overall? And isn't there just a public gain in me having my stuff dished out for free which maybe my publishers might not like but why would I care (I make a few points on the wholesale price of a book, nothing usually on journal articles, a flat rate usually on chapters in edited books)? When people tell me they have been looking at something I did twenty years ago I am delighted to talk with them about it and even a bit amazed, and I really don't worry about revenue. This is digressive but I am getting to a point about cultural goals, and as a scholar with an early C20th specialism I know what copyright issues can do for questions of cultural mediation in relation to print (check out my colleague Paul Saint-Amour's recent books). So apart from the fact that I object to the vituperative language about Pujol and co (whose products I avoid, btw) the extent that I am interested in the law is more about the contestation between the holders of certain lucrative copyrights and the destiny of all the rest. Jim says PD stuff (I guess he means European PD) should be given away free. Some musicians give away recordings free in order to secure greater objectives. Who did more for Dogon A.D. - Tim Berne when he distributed it for free at his own cost, or JLH when he pressed a limited CD? And as I said, due to a specific exemption in law around education, my own otherwise very current copyrights are invalid when my stuff is used for educational purposes (my work has no other purpose). Still here? That's it from me for now.

Unfortunately for your argument, in 1976, the US revised copyright law (the so called "Micky Mouse Law") to automatically extend all copyrights to their "full term", which, in the case of sound recordings is 75 years from the date of publication. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf. At the bottom of page 3: "Federal copyright could also be secured before 1978 by the act of registration in the case of certain unpublished works and works eligible for ad interim copyright. The 1976 Copyright Act automatically extends to full term (section 304 sets the term) copyright for all works, including those subject to ad interim copyright if ad interim registration has been made on or before June 30, 1978. This is the part I was talking about which complicates the basic outline on page 3: I was referring above to the fact that some 1964 copyrights would have lapsed since these are NOT or not necessarily automatically renewed. What I didn't manage to understand was what the renewal term was. That isn't properly covered in this document - it was covered better in the document I was reading but that was very technical and also not complete.

It is only not economically worthwhile to pursue supposed copyright infringement if you think you might not win and be awarded all your costs. If it were clear cut someone would take it on a conditional fee basis, I suspect. In any case, we are talking about companies like EMI and Sony who can afford it - we know they have spent a lot of money on lobbying for copyright changes in Europe (they won!) and it is clear that they prefer to concentrate on the issue of illegal file sharing. They are right in terms of their business model and this stuff we are talking about is peanuts. I am not saying things are clear cut, by the way, and I am only doing initial research to try and get some facts sorted out. I also think that CDs are a dead issue - I am in a way surprised that the (angelic) Cuscuna and (demonic) Pujol have kept the hard-copy thing going as long as they have. Incidentally BNs go in store here for 3 UKP, about $5 and less than a third of the price of a Pujol reissue. And of course no-one has to buy either. The "Euro Mosaics" (the ones with Argo/Mercury/Norgran/Clef/Verve material) were issued by Universal, not EMI. This was before the former bought the latter, of course Oops my bad. But those Universal ones are made in Europe, I should remind people (I know you know). There was also at least one Warner (Ellington).