JSngry

And yet Dusty Groove and other such outlets continue to stock items aimed at the same market as some of these blogs. Somebody's releasing them, and somebody's buying them (and a lot of these micro-labels have websites where you can download per-song at quite reasonable rates). In reality, not that many people have ever bought that much music. Back when I was a kid, my parents and their friends bought a few singles, and even fewer albums. And that was the norm. Even during the "boom years" of the 60s & 70s, serious music buying was a specialized interest. People with 100 albums thought they had a lot. Seriously! I truly believe that the "freeloaders" and/or the "bystanders" have always been with us and they always will be, and as such should be figured into the equation as part of the "cost of doing business". Would that it were not so, would that you, I, or somebody, could spur some action in this regard. But realistically, there's always a fairly notable # of people who like hearing music, like having some of it, but just don't care enough about it to buy it. In fact, I'd wager that a lot of the blog freeloaders listen to the music they get at best casually. Very casually. And that they'd never buy what they download. So is that really a "lost sale" or is it sale that was never going to happen anyway? The problem is that this is neither 100% one way or the other, and yeah, some potential sales are effected, and yeah, the "culture" is changing along with the technology. But I don't know that we've ever lived in a world where everybody buys everything they want all the time. Some people "prioritize" and eventually buy what they can't afford right now, Some people "prioritize" and don't ever buy things they want, some people "borrow" what they don't want to or can't buy, and some people flat out steal. As it was then, so is it now. The more things change...

Well, it's a slippery slope and not exactly "100% pure", and lord knows, lets hope a better way comes around, but for right now... the scenario I describe above rings at least a little true because...it's based in reality. As are Chuck's vexations at finding what he's not been able to reissue yet offered for free. It's all reality. Reality, as the man said, is a bitch. There are lots of grey areas in this whole thing that should be acknowledged equally alongside the black ones and the white ones. That's all I'm saying.

Out of left field - "Yesterday" by The Singers Unlimited, from The Complete A Capella Sessions. Much more a dark, subliminally psychotic madrigal than a simple Beatles cover. Seriously.

As long as we're talking about Jim, and Joe, and Randy... Let's pretend it's 1968 instead of 2008, and that instead of creating their own product as they (wisely, imo) did in 2008, they recorded/released their albums for some "regular" label. They sold ok, nothing got to be a hit, but they did ok. Now, fast forward to 2008. The label that Jim, and Joe, and Randy recorded their albums for is long gone, part of some vast corporate "holdings" where it's probably not even known to exist. (Or, if the 1968 "regular" label was a local/regional job, perhaps the owner of the label has passed on, his family having little to no interest or concern in the specifics of the catalog.) They - the holders of the catalog - license a few things here and there, the more "popular" numbers, but the Jim, and Joe, and Randy cuts are languishing, gathering dust, forgotten as they can be. Or maybe nothing from the catalog gets any play anywhere, simply because everybody's forgotten about it and not that many people knew about it in the first place. Until... Some crate-digger finds one of the old LPs, digs it, cleans it up, and blogs it. Then, hey, a few more people get to hear it, and they like it. Some hipass DJ samples one of the cuts for some dumbass MC. Now more people are interested. Suddenly, Jim, and Joe, and Randy are getting phone calls from magazines in foreign countries asking about their band and it's history, and...who's got the masters to your shit, anyway? Next thing you know, there's a little reissue coming out, ain't no whole lot of money in it for anybody, but it's more than anybody's made off of it in years, possibly even more than anybody made off of it even then, since Jim, and Joe, and Randy, now older and wiser but still some badass players, parlay all this into some club dates and festival appearances, and it still ain't no whole lot of money, but etc etc etc. This is not a particularly far-fetched scenario, as Dallas' own Roger Boykin has gone through something like it with his own Soul-Tex label, a very local label that he used to put out his own stuff back in the late 1970s, and one which lay totally dormant until the crate-diggers/bloggers got hold of it. Ain't nobody made no whole lot of money out of it, but...you know. Where once there was no real value, now there is some. Potential vs kinetic value, if you will. So yeah, for every 100 bad blogs out there, ones that outright thieve, there's 1,2, maybe 3,4, or 5 ones that are involved in a dynamic like the one above. And if somebody can explain to me how value ultimately created by initially disregarding the letter of law is still not ultimately value created, perhaps even added, I'm willing to listen. Generalizations are just that, that's all I'm saying, just as a movie is not a book, and a book is not real life.

Two questions - 1) Is this just wishful thinking, or is something fixing to happen for real? 2) Does "all" really mean all?

But unfortunately not nightly...

Yeah, the whole Paul Shaffer shtick has gotten to be a joke, but people need to remember that when that show and that band first hit, it was a pretty radical departure, and that Hiram Bullock, Will Lee, & Steve Jordan weren't some old vets cooling out in their later years in the comfort of a steady gig, but were some of the studs of the NYC "urban jazz" studio scene. Of course, 98% of the people watching the show probably didn't know that, but still... there were nights when they'd come back from commercial, and Bullock would be just going for it on some garage band schlock, and I was thinking to myself, "damn, how cool is THIS?" But that was then, this is now. Steve Jordan's long gone (Anton Fig never cut it for me), Will Lee is the new Ross Tompkins (Tonight Show band joke...), & Hiram Bullock is dead. Life is short. Carpe deim, y'all.

Hell, depending on the quality of the wings & the cost of gas, that ain't necessarily a bad deal.

I hear ya'. You know what's funny to me, though, is how the "evolution" of the post-Wynton school of jazz is from mid-60s Miles to late-60s Miles to where now, guys are starting to incorporate KEYBOARDS and FUNK RHYTHMS and POETRY (i.e. - intelligent rap lyrics) shit, like it really is some sort of real evolution instead of just replaying the evolutionary cycle of the past. At the rate we're going now, it won't be too much longer before a new Wynton comes along to make shit even more restrictive. For that day, I can hardly wait. To me, "the past" has (at least) two elements - the temporal & the eternal. I guess for each of us it's our call as to exactly which is which, but the idea of "going back to see what we missed", although attractive and at times even useful on a small-scale basis, inevitably falls short as a way to "move ahead", because what was going to be done, what needed to be done, was done. All of which is to say that, yeah, playing standards with fewer substitutions is fun, and, yeah, it can force you to rethink (which is always a good thing), but beyond that....there ain't no beyond that. Not that there needs to be. I'm just sayin'...

Count me as another one who's long wondered about the long-term benefit for a struggling family who suddenly has their overhead substantially increased. I mean, it "feels good", but feel good don't pay the bills. Except, of course, for the network...

Yeah, until you leave the house. I mean, yeah, I know what you mean. But you gotta know that it's the spirit that's getting to you, not the song or anything else "concrete" about it. Not unless it's "nostalgia" at work, in which case how much of a misunderstanding of the greatness of Louis Armstrong's best work is that?

Here's a blog: http://the78rpmblog.blogspot.com/ Charming, ain't it? Harmless, right? Absolutely. And the gap between this type stuff and so much LP-era recorded music is how much? And narrowing how rapidly?

No, I think I get it, at least some of it. You built your life on one set of realities & principles, and now, almost overnight, they ain't there anymore, and they seemingly ain't coming back. I get that, and know that it's gotta be a kick in the nuts, to put it mildly. I'm just not sure what you or I or anybody can do to change it. Which is yet another, harder, kick in the nuts. If I was God, you'd be set. But I'm not.

Well, aside from thinking that the primary commercial purpose of music is to "earn money for the artist" (when has the primary purpose of any business been to earn money for labor instead of for ownership? And I say that with no animus whatsoever.) I think this is a false dichotomy which you set up. No, not false. Incomplete. Incomplete because there are listeners such as myself who are interested in recordings for more than simple "entertainment". We want to study the music, the sociology, the...thing around and within the music. And we do spend money, lots of it, on legit product, including (especially including) legit releases that we have first encountered elsewhere (including the old "mix tapes" from long ago). When I do download, it's not to "get some cool shit for free". It's because an opportunity has presented itself to explore something that I, for whatever reason, consider relevant that would not, as of this juncture, been available elsewhere, for reasons completely outside my control. I do feel an obligation to download ethically, and I do feel an obligation to "follow through" as appropriate. And if I am not in the majority now, I ask you this - when was I ever in the majority? Railing against the internet and what it has spawned will not create higher ethics. It';s happened, it's here, and barring some global reign of totalitarian oafishness, it ain't gonna go away. Higher ethics will create higher ethics, and the first step towards that is recognizing reality, not denying it.

No Chuck, let's do mind, because I know where you're coming from, at least as much as somebody like me can know what it's like to be up against what it is you've been up against almost your entire adult life. But let's be honest - what "value" is there to be accrued from a catalog item that was obscure in the first place and has only gotten more obscure with the passage of time, and whose owners probably don't see it as having any marketable value now or possibly ever, or quite possibly don't even know that they own it. You know that this is also a reality, you know the reality of the business as its evolved towards more and more "corporate holdings" and less and less about "musical catalogs". How is this shit supposed to stay alive unless somebody does rescue work. In the past, I've heard you speak of Jerry Valburn in unequivocally equivocal terms, that yeah, sleazy cat, but he also saved some gems for all of us to get to, so let's just let it be what it is and leave it there. That seems perfectly right to me. Never mind the vulgarians out there, of which there are an uncountable many. It also seems that the best of these blogs (and I only know of a handful that qualify) fall into the same category, and merit at least the same equivocality. They might well be proving to be the Valburns of our time.

Fair enough. That is indeed part of this complicated equation, a very real part. Now, once you get all your shit out, can you go to work on the other owners of materials, the ones who have no clue or interest in their holdings? It goes without saying that you are an honorable man doing the right thing, and I know that I and any number of others treat you and your catalog with the respect that you and it deserve, precisely because you continue to demonstrate the integrity to command that respect. But you are not norm, sadly. And on the other side of the equation, the bloggers that really kill me are the ones who basically upload the entire Dusty Groove inventory, a big bunch of which consists of licensed (hopefully...) reissues put out precisely to offer legitimate copies of rare material that has created a buzz. That ain't gonna work...

Similarly, that's why "free" playing sounds/sounded so fresh - after a while, all changes begin to sound similar... I mean, really, I've never had a problem working with singers, because virtually every standard is constructed from the same relative handful of devices. The difference, when there is one, is how they're put together. But one time throught the singer's vers, comes time to solo, and 99% of the time, I'm good (ok, "good") even if it's the first time I've heard the sucker, because eventually, they're all the same. Of course, there are a handful of exceptions, and "jazz originals" are not quite so predictable (although complexity and predictability are often confused, I think...), but ultimately, "song form" is what it is, for better and for worse, and "surprising" it what it usually ain't...Free playing has also reached that point by and large, so I'm not playing favorites or anything here. Ultimately, spirit is what carries the day. And form must serve spirit, not vice-versa. This is not a call to "it's all good" slovenliness either. I'm just saying that no matter how good you learn to connect the dots, they're still somebody else's dots, somebody else's picture. You gotta make your own dots, and you gotta make them REAL. And that, as they say, is the difficult part...

But Chuck, said "value" of said content is a relative, not absolute, thing, isn't it? And might not the value of a Freddie Robinson World Pacific side actually be, ultimately, increased by keeping it "in circulation" long enough and visibly enough to the point where some buzz is created? And is not that value ultimately decreased by its owners by allowing it to sink into obscurity (assuming of course, that they even know that they own it, and that it might be capable of generating a buzz). Granted, owners have the right to do what they want with their property, including waste/destroy it, but it seems to me that if one is going to argue the concept of "value" as being that of an asset to protect, then one must look at all the potential ways to create, maintain, and benefit from same. And "digital reality" does reframe the paradigm (is a paradigm is in fact something to be framed, and hell if I know whether or not it is...). The "legalities" are still rooted in an analog paradigm, but to what end? To what effect? And to whose benefit? There are no consistently easy or "right" answers to this issue, not that I can see, not at this juncture. Interesting times, these are...

Can't say that I've followed his career in years, but still, I hate to see people like this go while they still got it to give. I always dug the guy simply because, apart from his musicianship, he seemed like a free spirit who simply really loved playing music. No real "boundaries" or anything, it just seemed like the guy dug playing whatever he got a chance to play. Seeing him on the Letterman show was always a groove - the cat had no qualms about going out there when/how he felt it, and it was so natural that it didn't really seem all that out there until you thought about what it was you were hearing and where it was you were hearing it. Also, can't forget that he was part of the David Sanborn band that included Marcus Miller & I forget who all else. Hideaway, Voyeur, that stuff. That's a genre of music no doubt outside the scope of interest to most here, but that scene had a level of organic musicality and spirit that virtually none of its "followers" did. It was music of a specific time, place, and motivation, but there was no shame, and most importantly, no fakery in any of it. With that I find no real fault and, sometimes, some real appreciation & affection for what they did and how they did it. So long, and thanks.

Fair enough, I think.

As is this: http://www.nytimes.com/ vs this: An oversimplification, perhaps, but hey...

Yeah, I've got an old fake book from, probably, the 1950s which consistes of a lot of"assembled" copies of original lead sheets, and the first thing that struck me was that the ii-V progression was virtually non-existent. Damn near everything was IV-V. Especially a minor-ii-V progression. No such thing as a half-diminished, it was always a "minor 6th" chord built off the IV. Which makes Dizzy's comments about how when it first showed up in bebop he had to refer to it as "a minor 6th chord with the 6th in the bass" to get cats to grasp it all the more revealing, I think. Then again, there's the whole functionality-of-song thing. A IV-V progression is just going to be more "suited" to the "environment" of a formal stage production than a ii-V. The "space" between the ii and the V creates an openness in which shit can...happen, that is intrinsically contrary to the tightly scripted needs and motivations of a theatrical narrative from that time, which is better served by the "tight" space of only moving IV to V. Or hell, more suited to that time in general. Life was rife with "the expected" back then, it was expected to be!

Mike Fitzgerald was involved at some level, iirc. It's money, imo.

I see a jar of pickles.

Been meaning to post a heads-up on this for a few weeks now. A fine article indeed, and highly recommended! Also in the same issue is a nice piece about Sam Rivers that, although a bit sloppy from the "fact-check" angle, nevertheless is a nice read and, through intervirews, reveals some interesting facts about Sam's life, such as how he also owned & operated ran a successful telephone answering service in NY during & after the Rivbea days. All in all, a nice read of a consistently never-less-than-interesting magazine.