David Ayers

Re. bootlegs and other grey area stuff, a lot of gambit and lone hill cds were listed as newly available in the UK on the Crazy Jazz website which is a useful guide (to me) as to what is around here. Legality aside, I was struck how impressive those Andorran lists are. Lots of it is on Spotify so you can work through it quite easily. As it happens the OC tracks are on a gambit release called Love Revolution. So much stuff out there you can access however you like these CDs seem a bit redundant to me, maybe, but back in the day of LP boots of artists I loved were gold as far as I was concerned. Didn't really know what the legal issues were, if indeed at that time there really were any.

Oh. Well I don't need the CD, I meant for the benighted masses...

Yes I see it is a Lotus etc. batch. These likely fall in the period that Italian copyright law did not cover live recordings. From the days when countries were all separate and did things all their own naughty way

Yes. Got the LP. CD reissue needed.

Ok guys I was NOT trying to cause an argument. The two titles mentioned are part of a batch of unusual and interesting forthcoming releases from this label. Since they don't look to me like a bootleg label on the face of it I am just wondering. Prevailing laws and actual contracts can make these things ambiguous. I know that many Ornette titles including the Impulses are labelled by him unauthorised in the booklet of that LP the title of which I can't remember. I'm assuming this 'new' one is the sme as the LP originally released on Joker in Italy. I was wondering though if there is actually a story behind this whole batch or if this label is for some reason now in the business of making an opportunistic market drop.

Good question on what was really the track time. I never timed Sebastian but I know every note and the 10.54 version on Spotify is certainly what was on the 45. I've got it here but my deck is out of action. It states on the label 'Live version: Increase volume to compensate for reduced level'. No kidding! Can't post a pic of mine but it is identical to this: http://www.45cat.com/record/emi2299 PS I will play it when I can to be sure that familiarity with an mp3 I obtained a while back has not distorted my memory, but I don't think so.

The expert views are making me cautious There does seem to be some reticence about what sources were used. Hm.

Well...Crown Tokuma seems like a legitimate label. How do we know they don't have licenses for the historical American jazz they issue? Or anything else they issue for that matter? Not sure sometimes how we arrive at these conclusions.

I really don't mind crackles. Something to be said for warts-and-all transfers.

Charm.

Ballet is the most beautiful of all the arts. IMO

I do have a candidate, which is the live version of Sebastian on the b-side of Cockney Rebel's 1975 Mr Raffles. It clocks in at about 10.50. That's going some. Any more?

Pity. I really want there to be a transposing instrument which has to play in D-flat to get to C.

Bit easier to play in C....

Zürich Concert was recorded in 2011. It is on Spotify, although in common with other Intakt issues on Spotify the longer tracks are excluded. I'd say it is hard to get your head round not because it is busy or raucous - it is not - but because it is, as more than one reviewer has called it, 'enigmatic', that is, ambiguous as to mood and direction.

Adorno is talkin in the 20s about the neoclassical reaction against expressionism, and his principal topic at that time is Hindemith and then Stravinsky. In the 30s he is talking about the stabilisation of classical and 'light music' in the context of the culture industry. The regression essay can be directly downloaded from this link: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCoQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww2.warwick.ac.uk%2Ffac%2Fsoc%2Fphilosophy%2Fnews%2Fcalendar%2Flydia_goer_postgraduate%2Fadorno_on_the_fetish_character_-_double-language.doc&ei=BwwvVNqgKa6f7gb__IDQCQ&usg=AFQjCNEOdz6-OF509CafFEPe7_H8VMGdBw&bvm=bv.76802529,d.ZGU

And - why not - references on the above for those interested: "Die stabilisierte Musik" (1928) "Stabilised Music" "Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens" (1938) "On The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Hearing/Listening" The latter in the anthology of Adorno, "Essays in Music", the former maybe not translated, not sure.

And incidentally - what I realise is the central thing I am thinking but didn't state - is the thought that what is heard represses what is not heard. That a stabilised music represses hearing. Stated in this way, in its broadest form, in terms of its widest implications, and to cite again Adorno.

Good discussion. The specific thought I had in mind was not only the Laubrock review but the DB review culture in general, as well as my more general observations on review culture, and also the thread here on the 'wife' reviewing her husband's records. DB is evidently aimed in part at musicians, since it carries advertisements for instruments and equipment. I notice that many of the reviews are quite technocratic, by which I don't mean technical, but that they simply report in a summary fashion on the effectiveness of (usually) each individual musician in achieving goals which are not often discussed. At random more or less form the issue I have to hand: 'the horn men weave in and out of each other's message'; 'the band plays loose and out of time behind Lawrence's commanding solo'; 'the band is extremely tight in the execution of Rosenboom's ideas' . OK I picked weaker examples and the reviews do contain important information, but I did find these very quickly on a random dip. It is hard to write about music and I am not knocking it, and indeed these kind of comments are well within the reality of much jazz that it is based on solo, 'interaction', tightness to agreed structures. Yet the step back which 'wife' takes to how and what this is and how to hear it seems to me often missing, once the basic goals are taken for granted. And the reason this is important is that all the people who try to do something else with the 'jazz' tradition - and I have said before that I think 'jazz' unites things that are much more disparate in terms of function than the term allows for, and I mean the notion of a jazz story that goes from NO to Swing to Bebop, let alone what follows - that those people who have done something else are returning not to the question of innovating based on the tradition but to a more fundamental question of what we hear, how we hear it, and why. So with IL's Zürich Concert you plainly have to hear it in terms to other than that of the individual voice and the conventionally assigned role. In fact it is composed music and the point of comparison might be more Quartet for the End of Time than the John Coltrane Quartet, if you see what I mean. Laubrock's projects call on you to listen and not just to expect, and returning to the DB review I notice that he (Alain Drouot) brackets this by saying that it was a 'brave decision' to concentrate on ensemble rather than individual as 'fans' might be a bit disappointed not to hear the soloists 'stretch out'. Yet his review maintains this by picking out the accordion player who 'leaves the strongest mark', but he struggles to give much voice to what he has heard when he writes 'the instrumentalists' lines are juxtaposed or interlocked and, as a result, can sound a tad premeditated.' Hm. As in a composition, one might say. Now, I do not criticise this (three star...) review as it got me interested albeit by reaction against, but it did raise for me some of the questions I am attempting to articulate.

Too much here for me to respond to but I am taking it all on board. Re. Zürich Concert, the DB reviewer kind of said what ubu said and focussed on questions about solos. In my opinion that solo-centered way of thinking doesn't fit the project, and the DB reviewer didn't really find a way of talking about what he HAD heard. That opens an issue in general about how review vocabulary signals an aporia in how we think about 'jazz' in general - what we hear, what we think we hear, what it is and what it is not. Re. my only direct hearing of Laubrock last night, it was as I said all about the tone, notably low registers, but also here use of the very high false registers (well, we hear them so often we don't think of them as false) which she used with orderliness and elaborate melodic invention quite unlike any energy player - absolutely unlike.

R.I.P.

We must all now admire Ingrid Laubrock. Although Ingrid appears on Illusionary Sea, I only investigated her after I read an unhelpful review of her Zürich Concert in Downbeat this summer. By happy coincidence I was able to hear her tonight with Haste trio (Veryan Weston, Hannah Marshall) tonight. Oh my goodness. The most amazing tone throughout the tenor and a huge bag of original ideas. She is a real great and a must-hear. This was the first gig in a UK tour alongside Lauren Kinsella/Chris Batchelor/Liam Noble. I suggest UK-ites google forthwith to check for a gig near you. The tour ends at Oto on 9 October. Don't say I didn't tell you.

To refer again to my Adorno/classical paradigm, I'd be interested to hear if there are examples of very late innovations, rather than just great last records. Coltrane is the very obvious example of an artist who died while in full flow of innovation and invention. I'm trying to think of others.

Agree with Brad. It's a must. For me the SQ question is much more about different views of how to do things and I'll be interested to hear how it has been done.

Dotted notes. Absence of legato. Stravinsky liked pulse. You guys listen to so much jazz you have forgotten what it sounds like!