Rosco

Just noticed this on Paul Tingen's Miles Beyond site (http://www.miles-beyond.com/news.htm)- Also received my promotional copy of the Cellar Door today, and the belowmentioned sticker can be found on page 94 of the booklet, where the word "produced" in the line "BOX SET PRODUCED BY ADAM HOLZMAN AND BOB BELDEN" has been replaced by "compiled." Yeah... well worth a five month delay.

Stumbled upon an interview with McLaughlin (following links from another thread on this board!) which includes this snippet: Bill Laswell told Innerviews that he’s going to be remixing Tony Williams’ Lifetime’s Turn It Over, as well as Santana’s Love, Devotion, Surrender. Is that something you support? I didn’t even know he was doing that. How about that? Wow. Amazing. He’s doing a very interesting job on those Miles’ remix albums. Some of the recording quality of those times was really terrible. Bill is a great producer and he’s a musician as well. I think more power to him if he can do something to them and make a remix and enhance the poor recording quality in some way. I think it’s a good thing. If only I had a remix of [Tony Williams’ Lifetime’s] Emergency! That was one of the most atrocious-sounding recordings I’ve ever had the misfortune to make. It was a great shame. I remember the first playback. I was at the control room and I had been recording for a number of years, so I was able to say "I hate to tell you guys, but there’s something wrong with the board." And in fact, there was distortion on eight tracks of that recording. Anyway, it was put out as it was and it was a shame because that was a wonderful, wonderful trio with Tony and Larry [Young]. It was my debut in the United States after Tony invited me to come play with him in late ‘68. http://www.innerviews.org/inner/mclaughlin.html

[quote name='Rooster_Ties' date='Jan 12 2006, 09:46 PM' post='459460'"The Ghetto Walk", in particular (an in all it's 27 minutes of glory), is to my ears as wonderful as anything on the entire set.

Yes, indeed. Henderson played bass for Connors and even sang lead vocal on Connors' 'You Are my Starship'

It's been a long time since I dug an Isley's album. I think their last decent one was about 27 years ago. Love the old T-Neck stuff though.

Oh, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was waaaaay ahead of its time. I played it a couple of months ago and was stuck by how fresh (some, if by no means all) it still sounds. Didn't one of the other tracks run into some problems? I vaguely recall an American minister causing a fuss... could be wrong.

Longtime Heads fan here, from around the time of Fear of Music (1979? That would have made me 12! ) IIRC, British pressings of Remain in Light were notoriously poor. I taped that one from a music library and didn't actually get round to buying it until it was issued on CD many years later. I really must search out the CD of The Name of This Band Is..., an album I always liked. Somewhere in my pile of (these days unplayed) audio tapes I have a cassette of a live session broadcast on BBC tv from around (I guess) 1981 with a particularly out-there Adrian Belew on guitar. I might have to hunt that down. If it hadn't been for Talking Heads and Prince I probably wouldn't have listened to any pop music during the eighties.

Yes indeed. I've always felt this is why Mason never recieved the props he was obviously due.

UK date on this now February 20th!!!! WTF????!!!!!

.......Of course the 'Shiftless' on Mr Hands would have been a much later (1980?) recording. The idea of an earlier take is intriguing. Considering the success of the original album one would have thought Columbia would have released an expanded edition (or Headhunters II) if there was unissued material. What makes you so sure - just the release date ca. 1980? The album liner didn't give any recording dates, nor do the discographies. Personnel and sound are identical. Good point- I always just assumed that Mr. Hands was a 'new' album at the time. 'Shiftless' seems to be the only cut where Herbie sticks to Rhodes and Clavi, so it could be from the Headhunters sessions. On the other hand, I've never heard anything that suggests iMr. Hands is a collection of older music. Given Belden's involvement with this music, I'd suspect the latter.

I dunno- Mason on 'Shiftless Shuffle' is waaaaay busy but still grooves like an S.O.B. You're right though- when you listen to Clark you hear effort.

You don't have Live in Japan, then?

I love Mason's playing on the Headhunters album- funky with some extra jazz chops when he needs to shift up a gear. Mike Clarke, good though he was, just wasn't in the same league (as this live recording underlines- Chameleon seems curiously sluggish). Of course the 'Shiftless' on Mr Hands would have been a much later (1980?) recording. The idea of an earlier take is intriguing. Considering the success of the original album one would have thought Columbia would have released an expanded edition (or Headhunters II) if there was unissued material.

No more posts from 'groovewithjamie'? I was looking forward to his BFT.

I think you've jumped the 'Album of the Week' queue.

Listening now. Pity about the sound but fascinating nonetheless. Towards the end (after 'Chameleon') Herbie starts talking about his new album (Headhunters) and says that they recorded eight tracks, but could only fit on four. So... what's sitting in Columbia's vaults???!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/technolo...ml?pagewanted=1 Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet By ROBERT LEVINE Published: January 9, 2006 Working in the media and entertainment group of the consultants McKinsey & Company, Greg Scholl got a firsthand look at the inefficiency in the music business: the major record labels focus on creating hits, and they rarely make money on releases that sell less than a few hundred thousand copies. Now, as chief executive of the Orchard, a music distributor that sells to iTunes, Napster, Yahoo and other digital music services, Mr. Scholl is trying to exploit that inefficiency. The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music services. In most music stores, CD's of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed. So instead of trying to sell millions of copies of hundreds of albums, the standard music industry strategy, the Orchard hopes to sell hundreds of copies of thousands of albums. In that way, the company is anticipating that sales will follow a pattern known as "the long tail," in which a large number of only marginally popular items can eventually produce significant revenue. "We're not trying to make something a hit in order to make a business work," Mr. Scholl said. "We cast a very wide net, and we're going to catch some hits in it." So far, the Orchard has made deals to sell about 650,000 tracks from 72 countries to various services, including ring tone outlets. Those tracks include music from relatively well-known bands like Black Uhuru as well as thousands of Chinese pop songs. Much of that music is not yet online, and the company is not sure if all of it will ever be. The plan is to add music to various services gradually, so it can be promoted appropriately. The Orchard is not the only company looking to strike gold in the more obscure parts of the music business. One of the Orchard's rivals, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, recently got the rights to digitally distribute 60,000 albums worth of music from a Chinese state-owned record company. The Orchard also faces competition from distribution companies owned by major labels. The bet that executives of these businesses are making is that online services will increase demand for music that was not previously popular, just as eBay stoked the sale of old books and trinkets once considered largely worthless. As Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, put it: "In the world of shiny plastic discs, there are two barriers to getting the music you want: It's not in the store, or you've never heard of it. With digital distribution, the first barrier disappears. The second gets eased because of search engines, recommendation engines, technology like that." The Orchard was founded in 1997 as a distribution company by Scott Cohen and Richard Gottehrer, a songwriter whose hits included "My Boyfriend's Back." Named after its original location, on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it began losing money and eventually acquired a reputation as being less than prompt with payments. In 2003 the Orchard was purchased by Dimensional Associates, the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management, for what Mr. Scholl indicated was less than $10 million. Dimensional also owns the online service eMusic and a music publishing company, and was interested in the Orchard partly because of the digital distribution rights it had acquired. "We were aware of the reputation," said Mr. Scholl, who was brought in to run the company, "and we worked to pay everyone back and begin more transparent accounting." The Orchard, Mr. Scholl said, is a "digital aggregator," a middleman between small independent labels and digital music services. Major labels, as well as most sizable independents, deal with such services directly or through an established physical distribution company like the Alternative Distribution Alliance, owned by Warner Music. The Orchard, as well as the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, mostly represent small labels in quantity. Along with a smattering of tracks recorded by stars before they signed with major labels, they offer an embarrassment of niches: free jazz, black metal and, in the case of the Orchard, a label that specializes in calliope music. And as the cost of putting tracks online is low, anything that can sell a few copies is worthwhile. "I'd say we more or less want everything," remarked Kevin Arnold, founder and chief executive of the independent alliance. Most digital distribution deals give the distributor 15 percent of the wholesale price of a track, usually somewhere around 65 cents, according to several people in the industry. Mr. Scholl said that the Orchard generally receives a higher percentage because it can effectively promote music to the services that sell it. To generate attention for some of the music from China, for example, it arranged for Jackie Chan to provide a list of his favorite tracks. "It's the equivalent of taking the music from the backroom, where you'd have to look for it, into the store," Mr. Scholl said. For some of the Orchard's international partners, the strategy is working. Epsa, an Argentine tango label, distributes about 500 albums through the Orchard. Laura Tesoriero, the label's chief executive, who also works with the Orchard as a representative in South America, said it had sold 10,000 digital tracks last quarter - no more than a rounding error by the standards of the United States pop music market, but enough to leave her feeling encouraged about the future of digital sales. A significant number of those sales, she expects, were to Argentines living in this country. The most significant growth in the sale of foreign music could come as the idea of buying online gains traction among such immigrant communities. "People in China don't think of Chinese music as world music and neither do Chinese people in the U.S.," said Yale Evelev, president of Luaka Bop, an independent label owned by David Byrne that specializes in pop music from Africa and South America. The Orchard will face greater competition as major labels sell the music they release internationally in the United States. The EMI Group, for example, plans to make available in this country a majority of the music it sells anywhere in the world, Adam Klein, a vice president, said. As an example of the potential of this, Mr. Klein said that Hotei, a band signed by EMI in Japan, had one of the top 10 rock albums on iTunes after one of its songs appeared on the soundtrack of "Kill Bill: Volume 1." Even with a business model that does not rely on hits, they would be welcome. "One man's niche is another man's mass market," Mike McGuire, a Gartner analyst said.

Ooops.. I didn't realise there was already a thread on this! That one was started when they played the first chord and I've only been on here for eight months. My bad.

HALBERSTADT, Germany (AFP) - A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform. The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992). Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be released later this year on May 5. But at 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) on Thursday, the first chord was due to progress to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project. Cage originally conceived "ASLSP" in 1985 as a 20-minute work for piano, subsequently transcribing it for organ in 1987. But organisers of the John Cage Organ Project decided to take the composer at his word and stretch out the performance for 639 years, using Cage's transcription for organ. The enormous running time was chosen to commemorate the creation of Halberstadt's historic Blockwerk organ in 1361 -- 639 years before the current project started. That original organ, built by Nikolaus Faber for Halberstadt's cathedral, was the first organ ever to be used for liturgical purposes, ringing in a new era in which the organ has played a central role in church music ever since. As part of Halberstadt's John Cage Organ Project, a brand-new organ is being built specially, with new pipes added in time for when new notes are scheduled to sound. Cage was a pupil of one of the 20th century's most influential composers, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Cage's avant-garde oeuvre includes works such as the notorious "4'33", a piece comprising four minutes and 33 seconds of total silence, all meticulously notated. The organisers of the John Cage Organ Project say the record-breaking performance in Halberstadt also has a philosophical background -- to "rediscover calm and slowness in today's fast-changing world".

Indeed. There's something about the distortion, buzzing and fuzz that just makes it right! If it was recorded clean and crisp it would probably lose some of its period mystique. That shit was meant to be fuzzy, dirty and- well, let's just say it- psychedelic! Now, add some good ol' surface noise in there...

None of them. They all sound like crap. Although somehow it works in the music's favour. Wonderful album.

The Sabadabada site has been updated in the last week and currently has a Wilson Simonal album for download. Catch it before it disappears! The Mario Telles album is worth a listen, too (arranged by the legendary Moacir Santos) and the Rosa Maria is very nice too... not 'hard' maybe very cool. http://www.sabadabada.com/music.htm

Up one year on for some extra stuff... 1938: Teddy Wilson records for Brunswick 1939: Count Basie records for Decca 1944: Cootie Williams records for Hit 1950: Stan Getz- tracks from Quartets (Prestige)

Don't know about availability of these in the US but there are two fine compilations on the UK label Harmless, Stand Up and Be Counted- Soul, Funk and Jazz From a Revolutionary Era, Volumes 1 & 2. Track listings are: Volume 1 1- The Flames: Stand Up and Be Counted 2- Gil Scott Heron: The Revolution Will Not be Televised 3- The Impressions: Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey) 4- Billy Paul: East 5- Mike James Kirkland: Hang On in There 6- Esther Marrow: Things Ain't Right 7- James Brown: Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud 8- The Last Poets: When the Revolution Comes 9- Pace-Setters: Push On Jesse Jackson 10- Archie Shepp: Blues for Brother George Jackson 11- Eddie Kendricks: My People, Hold On 12- The Pharaohs: Freedom Road 13- Kain: Loose Here 14- Nina Simone: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free Volume 2 1- S.O.U.L: Tell It Like It Is 2- The Alexander Review: A Change Had Better Come 3- Jimmy Sabater: Times Are Changin' 4- Gary Byrd: Are You Really Ready for Black Power 5- James Brown: I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing 6- The Watts Prophets: Dem Niggers Ain't Playing 7- The Whatnauts: Why Can't People Be Colors Too? 8- Nikki Giovanni: Great Pax Whitey 9- The Rance Allen Group: Lying on the Truth 10- The Voices of East Harlem: Right On Be Free 11- The Isley Brothers- Fight the Power 12- Rusty Bryant- Free at Last

I don't have this album myself, but the line-up sounds like the Heart of Things band Johnny Mc had in the mid-90s. There was one studio album and one album live in Paris, both of which got some of the best reviews McLaughlin had had in a long time. AMG review of the Paris CD here (Recordings dates on AMG are about 10 years out!)