paulfromcamden

The BYG/Affinity 'Live In Paris' double LP is taken from the July 27th and 28th concerts. No idea if this set includes new material but the wording kind of suggests not.

When The Cookers played at Church of Sound here in London a few years back we got to the venue (...a church) quite early and found Billy walking around taking it in. I wish I'd said hello and told him how much I love his music but I don't like to bother musicians.

That would be the logical thing to do I guess. Though it's tricky for the label to release with much fanfare if the tapes really don't sound good. Perhaps the answer is a digital release akin to the Fugazi Live Series (currently 750 shows) where people can pick and choose what's interesting to them and download for a few dollars.

This has been my frustration. I asked it about a friend's 80s indie band who had a bit of a cult following. Everything it told me was a complete fabrication. It wasn't even like it had scraped bad information off the web - it just made a load of stuff up. On the other hand I've been using AI to find me relevant academic papers and write snippets of Python code and it's saved me days of work..

If I'd been in the neighbourhood I think I would have stumped up $2.50 for that bill.

Just to let folks know that OtoRoku downloads are also available directly from Cafe Oto and generally at lower cost as you're not paying Bandcamp 15%. https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/shop/kan-mikami-john-edwards-alex-nielson-live-cafe-oto/

As a record fan it would be nice to have affordable vinyl reissues of some of the posthumous Impulse albums - Stellar Regions, Living Space, Olatunji, Offering etc. Though I appreciate these may not be strong commercial propositions and not a good starting point if labels are hoping to attract new listeners.

Slightly underwhelming 100th anniversary "Best Of John Coltrane" compilation from Craft featuring tracks from his Prestige LPs. https://craftrecordings.com/blogs/news/best-of-john-coltrane

I've often had the same thought looking at the amazing range of Japanese language books on jazz on sale in Disk Union...

UK pianist Pat Thomas (he/him) and American vocalist Pat Thomas (she/her). Also UK bass player John Edwards and UK big band trombonist Johnny Edwards. The bass player in Status Quo is called John Edwards but has yet to explore a jazz direction.

Saw Tony Kofi play a couple of nights ago. Gig was in a community arts space in North London that I'd never heard of but has been there for twenty years. Run by great friendly people and fantastic vegan food. Henry Lowther sitting in for a couple of tunes was a bonus. I've been a bit slow to pick up on how great Tony's playing is but have seen him a few times over the past 12 months and he's played a blinder every time.

Hmm. Maybe not there but between them Mats and Thurston have subsequently played with a fair number of the musicians featured. I'm interested to hear what they have to say. Bailey, Brotz and Bennink are marginal euro collector crap? We'll have to agree to differ there I'm afraid.

Interesting - though they've also issued later stuff. Monk in 67, Cannonball in 72. Academic for me as I don't have the budget for £60 Coltrane LPs. Also... $290 to ship some records to France! Ouch!!

Thanks for the suggestions! 👍

Interesting thread as I'm a newcomer to Teddy's work having picked up a copy of Heart & Soul on Contemporary a couple of weeks ago. I've been playing it a lot so will be keeping an eye out for some of his other dates as leader.

My guess would be these are someone's homemade dubs - as posted above it's modern tape and there doesn't seem to be anything in common regarding label, studio etc. There are also no notes or provenance on the tape boxes. Some folk who are fans of r2r tape do record commercial releases on tape for home listening just because they like the sound.

I guess I'm in the minority here but I don't really want any bonus tracks on a vinyl reissue. I realise that maintaining the original album formatting may be slightly arbitrary in some cases - I doubt Miles had much say in how a lot of his Prestige albums were compiled - but I enjoy having an album with the tracklist as it was originally conceived. If there's a bunch of alternate takes stick them on another disc.

The cassette revival is puzzling in some ways. I've bought cassette only releases in recent years. I have a tape deck but it's generally packed away so they're kind of a pain to play. In some cases I've bought them just for the download code included. In some cases it's the completist collector thing. I can kind of see the connection for metal because cassette was for many years how lots of bands self-released their music - I still have a handful of late 80s self-released death metal tapes. It seems like kind of a nostalgic move to release them today. But there's a lot of nostalgia in metal with 'old school' death metal being a genre in itself now. Of course all this stuff is just messing around compared to paying £450 to get a Jerome Sabbagh album on reel to reel!

I kind of resemble that remark 😃 Though in truth I'm a lightweight - I can't think of a time I spent more than £25 on a secondhand record. Partly finances and partly because the condition of so many records is graded somewhat 'optimistically'. Even buying from a shop or fair it can be easy to miss damage. But I still love hunting for old records and if I see a nice original Prestige or Contemporary or whatever for a tenner I'm probably going to buy it. It's fun and those records sound great.

Fair point Steve 👍

Obviously depends on the venue but just to note that in small venues the records and CDs (and tapes!) on the merch table are often the artist copies supplied to the musicians by the label. I've done the merch table in those types of venues a bunch of times and know how much the musicians appreciate any income it brings - those guys often aren't making a lot of money. In a way it's another benefit of physical releases - it's very hard to sell a download at a gig!

I regularly see 1980s French Blue Note reissues of common titles priced up at £30-40. In my mind these are still the £10 records they were a decade ago 😂

Feel sorry for us Europeans paying 25% more for Blue Note Tone Poet reissues! Funnily enough over here a lot of used jazz vinyl seems to be dropping in price if anything. I think the market has shifted heavily towards original pressings and 'audiophile' reissues. Lots of regular 1980s (non Blue Note) reissues of common titles can be found cheaply. This was confirmed to me by a dealer I spoke to last year who is struggling to shift this stuff even at beer money prices. And still people are buying expensive reissues of Pablo records when the originals can be had for a few quid. Seems nuts to me.

@Pim that's pretty much how I feel about records too. My idea of a perfect afternoon is a hour rummaging in a good secondhand record shop, getting the records home, cleaning them, them settling down with a cup of tea and discovering what they sound like. I just love it. Maybe the sensible thing to do would be to stream most of it, save a pile of money and get a lot of space back. But I don't find scrolling down a screen as satisfying as flicking through a stack of records. Records are just nice objects. I've been buying them for forty years and expect to carry on. Not rational but I don't think appreciation of art should always be entirely based on reason.

I have a theory that now you can stream most things some folk prefer to invest their record buying budget into occasional purchases of exclusive limited 'art editions' and so on rather than just buying a whole bunch of records to listen to. £150 seems like an insane amount of money to me for a record but they sell out so I guess there's a market. So long as the music is available elsewhere no harm done. And if it helps finance the label so much the better. I'm quite happy with my 1970s Delmark reissues.