David Ayers

Well if you watch the video I posted you'll see a trumpeter who literally sucks. It's not very funny.

Yes! The first batch is available online for about £6 a shot.

Here's the problem right here! You might prefer to look up the individual clips - this is edited selections with clumsy cuts - search Fast Show Jazz Club.

I had the Handy's on LP and I don't recommend them for jazz purposes, but I do like the title track of Hard Work for its mild catchiness (I believe it was used in an ad...). The cover of Carnival is all you really need to know about that one. I know Pneuma, which I guess I don't play er much. I'm curious to know what the Blue Mitchell is like. Some of these are most definitely minor records and quite niche product, quite a surprise in a way that they are doing them. Can't argue with that one though, can you!

Surely some buyers for the Marion Brown, I should have thought?

Guess you're right there... just had the Columbia Small Group Swing Mosaic in my hands today - got it when it was running low - seems they only sold about half of the planned edition of 5000 before it timed out. Too bad! Yeah it is strange how the number in those box sets remind you what a minority you are in! And deluxe box sets are a niche within a niche within a niche...

That's kind of unfair. If and when Mosaic uses needle drops, they are very up front about it and do so only after they've looked at all available source material and determined that the ND is the best possible representation of a piece of music. Further, the percentage of ND's they resort to is miniscule in comparison to the totality of what they're reproducing. I agree with Dave, that's not fair. Needle drops are Mosaic's last resort and are done in very few cases. All I did was suggest that Mosaic should charge less when they do needle drops. It can be done.

Well, we pay full price+ when Mosaic do needle drops, so I guess we won't object to paying a price which more properly reflects the costs...

The question arises as to how 'the music' is influenced by 'the sexual preference' (scare quotes because, in the process of making such an analysis, you'd expect the elements so termed and isolated to enter into new relationships and require other vocabularies). I won't try to conduct you through the whole of queer theory (I couldn't) but those who doubt that such an inquiry can even be begun should simply ask themselves have they ever witnessed any aesthetic phenomenon which they would call camp? The answer of course is yes - camp is normal. This is not to say that 'gay' and 'camp' are coterminal, not at all. But to acknowledge that there is/are such a thing/things as camp aesthetic/s is to admit that this question can be opened. That camp is now normal entails further analysis. This is a whole field. In relation to music it isn't just a question of private life but of many aspects of performance space and other aspects of mediation. Jazz is also somewhat gendered and that is part of the same story.

Hold the press, breaking news on Sun Ra...

Here's an article by Sherri Tucker which has a go at this question. You might not like the style. http://www.criticalimprov.com/issue/view/88 Re. bisexuality, marriage (can't get multiquote to work) we can remind ourselves about Wilde and Tchaikovsky, among others. Stan Kenton has been outed!

Well, as I am always hinting here, the problem of jazz is that it is boring to most folks, and rightly so. Interesting to musicians, and the recorded music is interesting to collectors (often people without any musical preparation). So it is for musos and - ok I won't provide a term but people who like lists of records, personnel, recording dates, and the corresponding lines of objects. It is basically rarely interesting as composition (instrumentalists mistakenly think they are composers and think that their passe musical ideas are different idiomatically rather than just being cliched and outdated) and does not really work well as either a popular or public music - i.e. not catchy, but no gravity either. I'm not applying this to the music of the 20s and 30s which worked differently and in a different context, and in terms of the 30s is still organically connected to a lot of what gets done popularly today. Much music is minor music, that's it, and it is all optional (Zappa's idea: the world's finest optional entertainment). Contrary to the presumed attitude of the jazz audience aloc described, jazz is not so highbrow, but it is fiddly, fussy and musician centred, and if you ever worked with musicians you'll know, uh, all about that...

Yes, and it's waiting for us to join it.

Ah, no sooner is DVD replaced by Blu-Ray and we start a nostalgia thread. How sweet.

I found the part where 'Andre ties a practitioner to a tree with his own legs' particularly moving. [clarification: Andre does not use his own legs, which would defeat the purpose, but those of the practitioner]

So bad writing on jazz = Nazism? OK, just so as I know.

He's, uh, a ninja... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-14689055

I like Om. Though whether I need to hear it again is another matter... Edited to add: I see Om, Cosmic Music, and one or two other titles are part of the recent UCCU batch of SHM-CDs, along with Vista, Ju-Ju and a few others which get the occasional mention here.

Here in San Diego we're organizing a relief convoy. We're worried that by the time we get there the zombies will have taken over and there will only be Will Smith left. Right now we are seeing footage of a chandelier swinging on CNN! Just hope you east coast guys can still read this - I guess it's a bit like The Road out there right now. Guys, cannibalism is wrong, but it's relative, and when there is no other way...

Well the combination of Ornette front line and (pianoless) classic quartet rhythm section is of course mightily interesting! It's an experiment, a kind of forbidden Yes-meets-King Crimson supergroup-fest, in a way its not real - but it was done and it's quite a document. PS no need to correct me on Yes/Crimson, I know, I know...

Incidentally I played though the atlantics recently after a (very) long period without them. Not so 'free'? Maybe. BUT incredibly lucid, much more thought-through and composed and less belonging-to-nature than I guess I used to think. I never found as much in Cherry as I do here, where the context or guidance or just sheer on-the-day in-that-band form makes him sound like a genius, and the genius he sounds like is Ornette.

Very, very interesting comments, ep1.

Another vote for Golden Circle 1. Classic.

He's a senior guy, a serious appointment. He'll do what he can with it, I feel sure.

Try here or, for the British, here. No guarantees. Good luck. Thanks!