A Lark Ascending

Anyone know the answer to this? New ones appear virtually every day. Is this Chronological Classics putting out their discs in a new way or a blatant case of copy and paste? Doesn't matter, does it? The music's out of copyright (in Europe). This might persuade me. MG Without treading once more into this minefield... It just seems a pity if the people who put the series together didn't have first shot at its download version. The trouble is, they have little else to offer - the Jazz Chronological Classics packaging was always minimalist. Early jazz is not always cost effective on e-music. Because they charge per track and early jazz tracks are short you eat up a lot of credits that way. I have an extravagant £40 200 credit monthly package - that would get me 8 of these discs (whereas I think at my last refresh I ended up with about 20!). About £5 each. Obviously with the lower packages the prices rise so you'd end up paying around £7-8. If it's the only legal way to get the music then it doesn't break the bank. I know I used up 100 credits last year to get the JSP Eddie Condon set which had disappeared as a CD box. It would have been cheaper to buy as a CD set had it existed. I tend to check places like iTunes for discs with over 20 tracks - they can often be cheaper.

Great programme this evening - really enjoyed the Armstrong and Mobley tracks. Nice to hear Phil Robson on the radio too. Pleased to have the Armstrong and Mobley in my collection. Armstrong's stop-time chorus on "Potato Head Blues" must rank as one of jazz's supreme moments. "Potato Head Blues" - amazing, isn't it? I think it was the track that cut through the mists of the distant past for me and got me hearing those late 20s tracks as just wonderful music.

Anyone know the answer to this? New ones appear virtually every day. Is this Chronological Classics putting out their discs in a new way or a blatant case of copy and paste?

Great programme this evening - really enjoyed the Armstrong and Mobley tracks. Nice to hear Phil Robson on the radio too.

Listening to music is what I do to relax. I can't think of any other purpose I use it for. Of course, relaxing can take many forms.

I bought an 80gb ipod in July - it's still only 1/3rd full and has a vast amount of music on it. I'd probably say go as high as you can afford - I like the luxury of putting things you 'might' want to listen to rather than just the things you know you like. Just like at home, sometimes you want to be surprised.

I enjoyed the Coltrane book, particularly the emphasis on how his music has been received by different audiences. A pity there wasn't a note on the dust jacket instructing me to despise it.

Really strange - bitter over the last few days and when I went to bed the cold was creeping under the duvet requiring a really thorough tucking in. Woke at 1.00 a.m. and got up and it was noticably warmer. When I went to work at 6.45 temperature was +2; -3 24 hours earlier. The weather forcast did promise cloud cover for the north. There was an item on the evening news yesterday from Antarctica - temperatures there were +4!

Try to make for nearby Birmingham. I'm sure resources will be better there. Any Brummie jazzers on the board who can give details? Last time I was there (March) Birmingham was not much better. There used to be a good jazz shop outside the immediate centre, just over one of the interior spaghetti roads - by St Chads church? In arch it was HMV, Zavvi and a Borders all of which were pretty depleted. They had a Tower once but that is long gone. There is a very nice independent in Cheltenham called 'Sounds Good' though that is a good distance. There may be second hand places I don't know of.

Go to the cathedral instead! Where Britten's 'War Requiem' was premiered. I think I only visited once about 20 years ago - it had one of those soulless, post-war, concrete shopping centres with nothing to speak of record or CD-wise. I've never heard of a record shop with any reputation there. I'd imagine it will have, at best, a functional HMV with precious little jazz.

I agree--the best version I've heard features the Kind of Blue edition of the Miles Davis group, it's on the CD '58 Sessions. One of my favorite moments in recorded jazz happens right at the beginning of the second chorus when Trane comes in and Jimmy & PC start to walk at that medium tempo. Sublime. Sends shivers up my spine every time. A priceless moment, especially the 'cry' when Coltrane peaks.

Yeah, but you'll be able to download it at mind-boggling speed to your million gig hard drive that will be implanted under your skin at birth. I imagine by then some other form of music storage/distribution will have come along. People will be pining for the natural sound and greater warmth of the mp3.

I'm sure a significant minority of listeners in 2059 will be listening to the music of 2009. There will still be people around who remember it as the music of their youth; and others whose curiosity about music inevitably leads them to explore the past. What is certain is that some of them will be complaining that the music of 2059 is not nearly as good as the music of 2009. In fact, as I won't be around in 2059, can I be the first to say it?

Here's an experiment to try on Monday. Go to your bank and try and negotiate a loan to open a record shop! In the long run I can only see 3. as the way forward - and the second part at that. With bands (or people associated wit them) creating CD-Rs for gig sales. It won't happen immediately because I'd imagine that most record sales are to casual buyers and casual buyers won't go to the trouble of downloading. But it will be the specialist sectors - classical, folk, jazz etc - that abandon the physical CD first. It's going to be fascinating looking out in 2009 for the first label to do this. I have a feeling the classical labels will be out in front. The challenge for the industry is to ensure the quality is up there equal to CD. This is happening in some places but not all - you do get blips on downloads (like you got plops on LPs). In their rush to get thing online they are letting errors through. A little more care, a bit of time listening to the transfer will lead to customers coming to trust the medium and ignore the disinformation still coming out about 'crappy mp3s'. But this was exactly what happened with CD - 5 to 10 years of careless transfers creating a belief amongst audiophiles that CD could not match vinyl, followed by another ten years remastering! The beauty of the new model is that you don't have to rebuy your existing collection. If you choose to store it on a computer or squeezebox then you can just rip your existing collection.

I suspect Spillers is quite unusual. Nottingham has the long established Selectadisc which used to operate on a broad front but has cut back on the specialist front in the last ten years. If HMV goes (two stores) then they will be more or less all that is left. I stopped bothering to visit Nottingham a good year back because there was so little in the shops. So Selectadisc lost my custom too. I can't think of an independent in central Sheffield any more - I think Record Collector is still going but that is a fair way out in the suburbs. But for the millions of us who live in small towns or villages the options are really just the online CD stores like Amazon or downloading. Interesting that Amazon.co.uk has started offering downloads. People over 25 are still suspicious of downloads (for good reason). I think that will change.

And that may be one practical reason for their survival for a time yet. Good to hear you're doing well operating independently.

The Nice featured quite strongly in both the doc and the BBC extracts programme just before (doing 'America'). The Moody Blues were my first favourite band c.1970. They are forever associated with Newquay where I bought their albums with the money I earnt washing dishes in 'The Fort' restaurant overlooking the harbour. As Dennis Potter often maintained, even the most inauspicious music can retain a power by association, throwing you back to an earlier time in your life.

Sgt. Pepper was given pride of place as the LP that made the 'album' as it became possible. Procul Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' also got special mention as a single that came from somewhere else. The Moody Blues 'Days of Future Passed' (which had Nights in White Satin as its closing number) was a curiosity - I can't recall the full details but I believe it started as a Decca light orchestral record to demonstrate audio equipment. Someone came up with the idea of have a rock group between the orchestral bits and a real 'concept album' took shape. Edit: I'm not quite right there. Wikipaedia tells us:

She did go to Ronnie's sometimes so maybe she just had curiosity! There was a great programme about the mellotron a year or so back on Radio 4. They are making them again, apparently. Some lunatic has catalogued every record to use a mellotron here: http://www.planetmellotron.com/index.htm

Yes, I take your general point, although I'm not sure that it is totally true - there are some very bizarre sites out there where people with minority obsessions set up sites to talk about what enthuses them, regardless of whether anyone is reading. You are, of course, right to say that if there is no market then you're not going to find much (and I have to say that you are the only person I've ever come across who actively seeks out sermons!). But all it takes is one person with your passion for a minority music who is also PC savvy and prepared to devote a bit of time and a portal develops. When I'm talking about the immense opportunities the net offers for accessing music I am, of course, talking from a Western (or developed world) perspective, merely expressing a view of optimism in contrast to the frequently expressed pessimism surrounding the collapse of the old model. Of course this is pretty meaningless to the developing world where a host of issues from poverty to civil war to government corruption to AIDS make distributing music via electronic means quite irrelevant. Whether we buy our music in the West in CD format or as Mosaic boxes or as downloads all looks equally scandalous when you look at the realities there.

Ian MacDonald. I think he ended up in Foreigner!!!!!!!!! I hated the Wakeman solo albums even at the time - in fact I was never that keen on Wakeman. The arrival of synths in these bands in force around 1973 also took away some of their lustre for me. I was always happier with pianos, electric pianos, organs and the glorious mellotron. Synths (which were monophonic at that time) encouraged keyboard players to squiggle a great deal. It's worth remembering that 'prog' was but a part of a very varied music scene and was far from an exclusive genre. At the same time there was lots of soul and Tamla type music in the charts, bubblegum pop and then glam-rock. The 1969-76 years of prog also saw folk rock (Fairport, Steeleye, John Martyn etc), lots of ongoing blues-rock bands. Where do Led Zeppelin and their ilk fit in? - heavy metal hadn't yet been codified and those of us buying Yes albums were also buying their records. Then there were all the American bands - Chicago, Grateful Dead, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young etc. And it's often forgotten that one of the biggest successes of the 71-3 period was 'soft-rock' - Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young ('Harvest' was huge in 1972) etc (that's what the girls were listening to if they didn't care for the charts!). There was also a subterranean scene of country influenced bands in the UK, drawing off the likes of the Byrds and the Burritos - I recall Bob Harris having a particular thing for bands like Home and Help Yourself. And all manner of outright weird experimentalism from people like the Third Ear Band and Henry Cow. And psychedelic/spiritual kooks like Quintessence and Gong. And much, much more. Most people I knew were listening to the lot and picking our own favourites rather than adhering to a single genre. One of the points that it was easy to lose in the programme was when they were talking about the festivals and how you'd get a complete mix of performers and the audience would listen curiously to the lot. I recall going to an all day event where I sat through the short lived Carla Bley/Jack Bruce Band, Steeleye Span and the then chart topping Steve Harley! Maybe the same holds true today - I don't know. I do know that in the punk aftermath what really turned me away from rock/pop music was how mono-dimensional and doctrinaire it seemed to become (more 'you can't do that because it's pretentious' then 'why don't we try this'). The official history of rock writes off the early 70s through the prism of the punk perspective of '76 - and its easy to dismiss it as 'bloated prog'. For those of us who listened through that era and didn't re-educate ourselves when the fashions changed it still holds a memory of a time where anything was possible in music. In retrospect I can see that most of the musicians lacked the musical knowledge to take things much further...or perhaps, more truthfully, were unable to follow their instincts without losing what audience they had and, consequently, the record company support. But what I really value about that era is that it introduced me to so many musical possibilities. When rock dried up for me c.1976 I had a number of seeds that I could follow up - jazz, folk, classical.

Then 'Discipline' is the album you want: I didn't much care for that version of KC at the time (not enough of Fripp's wonderful snakey guitar); but have come to enjoy them since. Should be obtainable very cheaply.

That was one of the funniest bits - when he admitted that their concept album ('Trick of the Tail'? - I'm not into Tull) was a p-take with its 40-odd minute single track and intended as a sort of 'Spinal Tap'. I think he was reinterpreting the past to suit himself there (The album was 'Thick as a Brick'). I was never much of a Tull listener, but I did have 'Thick as a Brick'. They followed it with something called 'A Passion Play' (I think) which got absolutely slaughtered by the critics. I think it was where the reaction against that sort of music really started...Summer '73 if I recall correctly (a good three years before punk exploded). A few months later they went for Yes' 'Tales of Topographic Oceans' in the same way, an album which is still wafted as the prime evidence to condemn prog-rock (it's actually a very good record, probably the last decent one they made!). So I find his arguments a bit disingenuous - Jethro Tull were huge c.1972-3 and just as prone to giganticism as many of the others. Tred carefully with King Crimson - they are most definitely a rock group. And their records are so diverse (expect near heavy metal chording, whimsical pastoralism and abstract improv...but not always on the same record!) - the first one would probably sound hopelessly bombastic to a listener today; the 80s band has more in common with Talking Heads. They are probably the band of that era I return to most frequently - there's a long thread about them elsewhere. Edit: Re: Jethro Tull, this is interesting: NME item from 1973 As for Jethro Tull being above pretension: NME Concert Review

I recall watching a rebroadcast of that in the late 70s at a time when when I was just starting to teach the First World War (and take trips out to Ypres and the Somme). Very moving and influential. But... You might find this book interesting: It discusses the huge influence the series had along with things like 'Oh, What a Lovely War' (and in the context of Vietnam), drawing much of its interpretation from the perspective of the war poets. Sheffield puts together a very strong argument that it misrepresents the reality of the Great War based on the values of the 60s and bears little resemblence as to how it was seen in the 1920s and 1930s. I found it a really challenging read because it upset so many of my preconceptions drawn from learning about WWI in the 60s/70s. But he convinced me!

We may not be tuned into that, but I think younger people are much more comfortable with sifting the enormity that is out there. They accept a TV that has a zillion channels (most of it of little interest) as the norm - yet still some things emerge as very popular; and some things become central for particular 'tribes'. In much the same way as we have gravitated to a place like Organissimo as a 'portal' for jazz information so their are 'portals' for hundreds of other areas of interest. I suspect the 'local' thing will still matter because live music will inevitably be mainly local - most UK jazz musicians, for example, don't get much opportunity to play abroad until they reach a certain level of visibility. So having a download of your music available after a local gig is going to be important. I'm always amazed by the rush at the end of concerts to buy the CD...and even more amazed by the musicians who don't have any or have left them in the last hotel. Unless you are a big name your performance will figure in an audience's brain for at best a few days before other interests crowd in. If you want to make a sale you have to be ready then. If the listener can go home, log on, download some recent recordings of the songs they just heard to get to know them better, then you are going to get your music more widely known. Though that does pose another question...is the current practice of recording the new compositions and then gigging them artistically the best way of doing it? The uncertainty of the industry can be seen in a label like ECM. Their music is now up on the commercial download sites, most of the back catalogue is on e-music (in some regions) where it can be acquired for a fraction of its former cost (and this from a label who until very recently did not do budget priced reissues)...yet they also launch the physical CD Touchstone series. But the recognition is there that the electronic route cannot be ignored. I'm going to be very interested to see how Blue Note play it. There are a lot of Blue Note albums on iTunes and elsewhere. With a major batch of deletions of CDs due I wonder if they will leave them there (i.e. move towards permanent availability) or withdraw them from there too (keeping to the traditional model of withdrawing material to allow a new demand to build up). Finally, an interesting development with Naxos. Their initial downloads were at the much derided 128 kpbs. They are now/have converted to 320 kpbs. But instead of inviting everyone to buy their downloads again in higher resolution (the 'remastered edition' approach of the 90s in CD) they are allowing customers to upgrade free of charge. It's going to be a very different world and I don't think any of us can know how it will eventually pan out. But I'm pretty sure it's all going to happen much more quickly than we imagine.