David Ayers

Mass murder as entertainment for the masses. Nothing new there.

Hope this Guy gets the job he was SUPPOSED to be interviewing for. GO GUY!!

If you miss a last chance set you get kicked off the board. Didn't you know that?

Well I don't disagree with that! Having just treated myself to a few tracks from one of my favorite Mosaics...

Thanks Reinier. I do wonder though about sets that exclude 'already available' material. It can happen that the material excluded is more important than much material in the set. The notion of the integrity of the set goes out of the window. 'Already available' material may in fact be in need of re-editing, re-mastering etc. And why buy a set if the best material is already out and cheaper? What is available one day is often gone the next. These questions aren't aimed at you or anybody else! Just thinking out loud. I dislike the patchwork effect of the Selects and don't like it leaking over into the 'real' sets. Anyway, I'll be getting this in the euro-nice-price edition, as and when, so I won't be complaining!

I don't know, but it isn't listed on the site. I sincerely hope this isn't another one of those sets with arbitrary exclusions of good material. Same reason I don't like muddled concept of many Select sets. Somebody tell me I'm wrong!

Thanks for the link, Claude. On my reading, I wouldn't exactly say that they are willing to make concessions:

Just worked through the Thad Jones set. Ah the long gone days when a three CD set came with a full size booklet!

I read in newspaper that copying music for personal use (e.g. ripping CDs on to hard drive or mp3 player) is illegal in UK. Surprised? I was. They surveyed people and found that 55% of adults did not know this (I'm surprised ANYBODY knew). Now, of course, for legal purposes I have to state I have never done such a thing and wouldn't know how. But, uhh, the law looks like a bit of an ass on this one. Since there is no legal difference between copying music you have paid for and music you haven't... you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, right? These are old laws, granted, framed before the existence of mp3... but NOT before the existence of copying technology per se (e.g. cassette). It puts me in mind of the contemptuous FBI warnings seen on US EMI Jazz issues. Why are music consumers constantly criminalised? What does the music industry gain, except to generate the determination of consumers to undermine them?

I'd love to know what the difference is between "Classics" and "Originals". Sounds like the marketing department just couldn't make up their minds. Apparently the original classics were to have been classified as originals to avoid any confusion with the classic originals originally classified as classics. The original classic sleeves have been retained in their classic original form for the classics, vice versa for the originals.

According to a print version of the catalogue I have, the two new series, Classics and Originals, will 'gradually replace' the VME, VBR and LPR.

This thread is Procrastinator ready....

I'd love to hear it all, but is there really enough material for a Select? ummm - I was wondering this - it is more like two 80 minute CDs worth, I should think

In the wake of the avant-garde Blue Note really lost prestige. Many of their musicians were viewed as safe and the LPs though design classics were thought of as samey. Why am I saying all of this in the past tense? The CDs probably sell more now than most of the LPs. Nostalgic, safe, a closed world, and people who want see music as an extension of politics (usu. male persons of a certain age) have turned elsewhere. Master would not trick Smeegol. Yes yes master would. Come on Samwise the brave you irritating diddyman, lets toss the last of the Mosaic Blue Notes in that badly simulated volcano and piss off back to the cast camp so I can get this firkin make up off and start a proper career. In the Elven Lands. What was I saying?

Any thoughts on the Four Freshman Box? It may be more of their music than I really need/want. Trust your instincts!

Since this thread has bubbled up to the surface again, I'll repeat myself on the topic of the two Fontanas. I really hope that people get to hear these titles in CD release. Maybe a Shepp-Tchicai/NY Contemp 5 Mosaic Select could feature all studio and live tracks? Somebody out there, do something!

You might be in a position to answer this one: had Definitive ripped off the Mosaic remasterings or not? It is often said that they did but no-one seems to have heard both sets. What was your impression? From memory, the sound quality on the Definitives on a lot of the songs is poor - some seemed like direct dubs from heavily used LPs but I'm not sure as it's been almost 2 years since I listened to them. The Mosaics however, are in excellent sound. Perhaps this leaves room for doubt as to whether it was an outright rip-off, more like the borrowing of a concept to undercut Mosaic's release? Thanks for the insight. It seems that the Definitive issue as not as 'criminal' as I had supposed. It also makes the Mosaic that much more essential - speaking as someone who reluctantly passed on it!

I'll have to join that oldsmobile as far as buying the vinyl on first release goes. As for cutting the Qu'ran track - the moral courage of artists sets standards that should shame the rest of us. The more I look at it the more unimpressed I am by the moral retardedness of Eno and Byrne in issuing this with a track missing and not even mentioning the fact up front, let alone explaining it. Are these the kind of guys who will jump on a moral bandwagon when it boosts their back catalogue sales, but run a mile if they fear it might cost them?

Hey! Just wait until I start my Top 100 Conga Players poll!

Congas. Love 'em or hate 'em?

I don't think I've ever seen anybody be given such a hard time over their taste regarding which discs they sell! Leave the man alone! (this board can be a tough environment...)

Peggy Lee seems to have branched out a bit since those Beauty and the Beat days...

Actually, didn't that originate in Marxist circles? The term, I mean. Yes it did, although surveying the sources on this (as I have done for something I am writing) I find that some of the American leftists so labelled by the Right who took up the term were unaware of its origin (not everyone had read up on the Russian Revolution, it seems), although they knew that on the Left it was sometimes used ironically - they just often lacked the context. Part of the masterstroke was finding a term that tended to label liberals as subversive (Leninist) repressive (Stalinist) and downright unAmerican (Russian!), all linked to the well known Orwell novel (and to the received idea of that novel for those who had never read it). But this part only applied to the minority who were in the know on such things. The real masterstroke was in the catchiness of the term combined with the strategy of complete misrepresentation that accompanied the creation of the myth. The left spent all the time whining about how unfair it all was instead of coming up with something as catchy, derisive and unfair of their own. Incidentally, Lyn Cheney has an early part in this, and there is a Paul Wolfowitz connection via his teacher, Allan Bloom, and his teacher, Leo Strauss. It came to a head when the ideas was planted in Bush's mouth, but as you will well know was part of US campus and intra-faculty struggles dating from the diversification of intake and introduction of campus speech codes from the late 1960s.

'Political Correctness' was a masterstroke of naming.

You might be in a position to answer this one: had Definitive ripped off the Mosaic remasterings or not? It is often said that they did but no-one seems to have heard both sets. What was your impression?