David Ayers

This kind of data is very closely guarded! I would like to know about top-selling jazz artists and labels. I did read that in classical, which is a bigger field, that the best-selling non-crossover recording artist is Cecilia Bartoli, whose albums sell in total 200,000-500,000 each. Her albums are quite heavily marketed and elaborately packaged, and each has a carefully researched and developed concept. I wonder how top-selling jazz compares to that? I also know that some small labels are funded at a loss by their owners and that at the very bottom end some titles only sell 100 copies. We also know from some years ago that Blue Note were deleting reissue titles which sold less than 500 copies annually. In that Blue Note case, you are talking about very cheap reissues that were regularly marketed as a series and sold in-store, so probably they are a benchmark, of sorts. I am also told by another label owner that CD sales are in constant decline - which we know, of course, and which is why some have given up completely. I am curious about ECM which is the one major label seeming to survive and thrive, but they never talk numbers. Always interested to hear more, and of course we say CDs but downloads are pretty important to revenue so we should mention those too.

first review I've seen here http://www.londonjazznews.com/2014/02/cd-review-jon-irabagon-trio-it-takes.html That sort of review - by shallow stylistic comparison - kills things for me. Makes me disbelieve the whole sector.

Excellent! I've never understood why CD is the benchmark, though. CD and CD-quality files are described as 'lossless' but - they are lossily mixed down from 24 bit recordings and remasterings.

It is Ezra Pound-style rhetoric. Just a style. There is no 'behavior' against anyone on the board.

'Moms' is a proven musical talent of long standing.

I don't see the problem with robust aesthetic discussion. In fact I think it is a good idea.I am more interested in things that move me along than in things that confirm my 'taste', which is just a kind of weird comfort zone that - in the end - I am not comfortable to be in. And 'Moms' is not speaking from nothing - far from it.

Trying to figure out why the names on the left are all of living people and those on the right are not. It seems an awkward comparison which begs all sorts of questions about designating as composers people whose music is very rarely performed outside their own direction. But. if you are being serious about absolute comparisons (the Brotzmann x-tets are just FUN groups) then - is there a Braxton composition that in your opinion matches in absolute compositional terms Pli Selon Pli or a Mitchell composition that equals ...explosante fixe... ? Not 'sound world', which as I think you know is a trivialisation of questions of formal composition and artistic purpose, but in absolute terms. Is there a piece by, say, Henry Threadgill, which you consider to have the same compositional novelty and accomplishment, and the same place in the history of music, as Schoenberg op. 9? Just a question, mind you, but one invited by the comparison to concert music. Which is Hemphill's 9th, so to speak - ?

Toyed with both and decided against. I own recordings of most of the French repertoire and with Debussy and Ravel I don't want to spoil hearing them in concert by over-exposure. Richter, I know much of that repertoire and am not a piano fan. Plus these days it takes me a month to get through two or three CDs. So I'm keeping it real. Berlioz too - we had Sir Colin's Berlioz, then Gergiev's Berlioz - I need a rest, though I'm itching to hear Les Troyens in concert again.

Good prices on Richter and Ansermet at amazon.co,uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00GYHSYW4 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00DT2322E

Yes. Oh - wait - no....

Bit of a derailment, but Holloway's essay can be found here http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/26th-august-2000/41/music

What mortal can resist the yawn of gods?

Bev - we know, it's fine. That is why I have been 'doing' Weinberg - because several recording labels are proposing him to me, so I take that seriously. I am hoping to find something really outstanding which will justify all the recording activity - I yet may. But. You are mistaken about the questions of collective imagination which are involved in the development of interpretation - modern scores really need a great deal to be brought to them, and that is a matter of imaginative investment, not only by the interpreters - and there is only so much time, and so many claims on the collective attention..

Well, we'll see whether a real platform for Weinberg develops outside of Russia and, I guess, Poland. My guess is not, based on what I have heard. That's all I am trying to assess. We'll see. His opera The Passenger deals with Auschwitz. See Alex Ross's discussion here http://www.therestisnoise.com/2010/09/weinbergs-the-passenger.html . Maybe too much extra-musical meaning for you, Bev. Ross asks the right questions and wonders whether, despite his sense of Weinberg's epigonism and the less than inspired nature of many works, there is a counter-narrative yet to emerge in which Weinberg's ideas were being adapted by Shostakovich.

In fact the first says the disc 'is full of first class interpretations'. Put those reading-glasses on!

FWIW the Spotify holdings I have been working through are here Weinberg

True and much here in London too. But this wasn't about contemporary music, just a question about how much there is in Weinberg, and whether existing recordings justify the wave of hype.

Get that chip off your shoulder!

I listened to it, then judged. Why do you assume others act and speak in bad faith? And you think you are better worked out on the philosophy of modern music than Adorno? Good luck persuading people of that.

My source for that claim is, I think, Fay.

Steve's point is just that 'jazz' and improv is dominated in terms of record consumption by its past. Personally I don't care so much about that as I don't think that recordings make any money for contemporary artists - it is just much more about being out there. They are out there, audiences are often small, so we all carry on. Apart from anything else, when you see these people and get to know some of them your sense of wanting them to thrive grows.

Nobody has said any of that! Steve just thinks it is better to support living music. He was asked like what, so he answered.Who, now, defines themselves like a 60s teenager by musical taste? What really matters is what goes on in the art, not in the consumer. But art needs understanding, advocacy and audience. So let there be a little advocacy. If I could suggest one shift in the implicit framework it would be from the consumer as monadic judge and petty patron - king of the psychological world - to experience - to say no more about what and how this might mean. In any case, the appearance of debate here is not about changing the mind of the discussants, it is about allowing other readers to shape a view. Be happy with old records and knowing better than those who differ - the 'elite' - others may choose to move on.

I guess if you were interested in the question of musical meaning you'd have worked your way through Adorno and Dahlhaus by now, for starters. I thought you hated art-for-art's sake? In this case meaning can be read as giving a purposive shape to scored music, as we are accustomed to, say, in Sibelius. The Weinberg I have heard on Spotify - ther is quite a lot - is the product of rehearse-record sessions for collector's labels and I don't find the passages where the musicians have really got hold of it and made it bloom. So the notes are there but the sense of shape and purpose which might eventually bind people to this music is not. Sadly that sym no. 12 is not yet on spotters. If you are wondering what it 'means' there is a small clue in the title...

@bev: the judgement is in the making of music - it is all judgement - it is only judgement - @lon: of course, people can listen to what they like - but so what? the people who sit outside a process will never shape or contribute to it. All Steve is suggesting is that there are living and unfolding arts which people could attend to - some people don't like modern art - that defines them, but not the art. PS that wasn't my list - I chipped in to defend Steve

Collecting records - which I do - does not influence much what music was, is, or can be. It does create an illusion of agency-in-consumption. Sociologically interesting. Curiously gender specific. But why does Steve's (unranked) list of people who interest him earn a rebuke from you?