Face of the Bass

Eicher does NOT twist great players' arms so that they record music they do NOT want to record. I spoke to Abercrombie about this very subject about a month ago. He lives in my neck of the woods, and I run into him occasionally. Get over the ECM bashing already. It is old and extremely close-minded. Good to know that we have received THE WORD. Once you rise above the need to place labels on music, you'll realize that no other record label out there has lasted as long as ECM has on the international stage with as much success. And remember, great players do not always record great albums. Eicher does NOT twist great players' arms so that they record music they do NOT want to record. I spoke to Abercrombie about this very subject about a month ago. He lives in my neck of the woods, and I run into him occasionally. Get over the ECM bashing already. It is old and extremely close-minded. Close minded? Listen to the difference between Marilyn Crispell on ECM versus Marilyn Crispell on other labels and for other projects. It's staggering. Is that really the best that you can do? No, where do you get the idea that this is the best I can do? Do all your posts reflect your best effort, all the time? I'm not writing a doctoral thesis here. I just increasingly see ECM as a great missed opportunity. Here you have this label that has great presence, great distribution, and great musicians recording for it, but the aesthetic remains stuck in neutral and has been for some time. There are some great albums that come along on ECM now and again. But, IMO, the label could do much better, and it could start by not trying to give every recording the same polished sheen, with the same moody, existentialist image on the cover. They cover the Nordic jazz scene quite well, but sometimes it seems like they are trying to extend that aesthetic to all the music they document. As for Crispell, having been very familiar with her ECM output of the last decade or so, I was really struck the other week to hear her in a different context, playing for the Joelle Leandre Project. She played with much more fire and with a much greater sense of risk-taking, more like the work she did in the 1980s with Braxton and on Leo.

Eicher does NOT twist great players' arms so that they record music they do NOT want to record. I spoke to Abercrombie about this very subject about a month ago. He lives in my neck of the woods, and I run into him occasionally. Get over the ECM bashing already. It is old and extremely close-minded. Close minded? Listen to the difference between Marilyn Crispell on ECM versus Marilyn Crispell on other labels and for other projects. It's staggering.

ECM poisons everything it touches. Okay, that's not quite true but they do have a habit of making great players sound a little bit boring sometimes.

Last bump on the Charlie Parker Mosaic and the Cecil Taylor Codanza. These will be going to EBay if nobody bites on them in the next couple days. Thanks for looking.

Hey everybody-- I'm looking for a copy of the OOP Lou Donaldson Mosaic set. Will pay a fair price or offer fair value in trade. Please PM me if you are interested. Thanks!

Another update...I have also reduced the cost on the Cecil Taylor set by $10.

Bump...Price reduction on the Chu Berry and the Benedetti Parker boxes.

Just thought I'd post this here. I traded this away a couple of years ago and shouldn't have. I've got a couple Mosaic box sets to offer (Chu Berry, Parker Benedetti) as well as the Cecil Taylor set on Codanza if anyone wants to make a trade, although it is somewhat difficult for me to imagine a Cecil Taylor for John Patton swap. Anyway, I'm not in any rush, but if anyone has one they'd be willing to offer, please send me a PM. Thanks!

Your descriptions are fine. I'd like to thank you for bringing these sets here before taking them to EBay, and at very reasonable prices. It's a sign of community building here at Organissimo.

PMs sent on Turrentine Mosaic and Monk Riverside Horace Parlan.

I'm offering the box set 2 Ts For A Lovely T if you want to feed the monster some more.

Hackett is gone. Ellington is still available. Remember that the prices listed include shipping to the U.S., so it's a substantial savings compared to Mosaic. And all the remaining sets are in like new condition. Thanks!

UP: Added seven box sets, including six Mosaics.

Yeah, I don't much care for the stripped-down presentation of this series. Of the ones I've gotten I do like the Steve Lacy very much, as I did not previously have that music. The other one I would have liked would have been the Bill Dixon, but I already have all but one of those discs so I'm not going to buy that set.

For anybody interested in the more "experimental" side of things, some of the Erstwhiles he has available, particularly Lidingo and A View From The Window, are quite good and a steal at those prices.

Hopefully the oppressed masses of the Earth will now invade her new castle and carry all its occupants off to the guillotine. Class warfare is good.

Thanks....looks like the online discography I linked to is probably wrong. After listening to the discs, I can't discern any difference in the bass between the different tracks, and there are certainly no Paul Chambers idiosyncracies (such as bowed solos, etc.) on display.

I've found a discographical discrepancy that I was hoping somebody could solve for me. The liner notes for Jimmy Cleveland's 1957 recording on Emarcy say that the bassist for all seven tunes on the album is Eddie Jones. However, the online discography here, at www.jazzdisco.org, indicates that there are two bassists on the album. For the December 12, 1957 session, which includes three tunes on the album, the bassist listed is Paul Chambers. For the Dec. 13th session, the listed bassist is Eddie Jones. Anybody know which is right? Thanks in advance!

Ugh. We had our heater die on us at a very inopportune moment two years ago and it set us back a few thousand dollars. Took us a while to regain our footing after that. My sympathies.

I just finished Szwed's excellent biography of Miles Davis, which I would say is not quite as good as the Sun Ra biography but still one of the best I've ever read. I'm definitely going to check out the Lomax bio now, as I'm beginning to realize that Szwed is easily my favorite music historian/biographer working today.

I'm a historian...I think that it's better to leave the record as it is.

By the way, the above post is my half-assed attempt at apologizing. I should not have called you an "asshole." That was uncalled for and I am sorry.

Actually the box set I really want this Christmas is the Vandermark Resonance set, but I'm kind of doubting anyone gets me that.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school. vomit. Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here. Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it? thank you, face of the bass, for pointing out an essential element i had inadvertently left out of my salient analysis of current internet forum trends in post-cold war U.S.A.: in threads like these (see my post above which facebass was kind enough to repost), you can almost always count on folks to chime in and say they think the thread has become a useless repetition of jive 'debates' that have come and gone endlessly in the past which never cast any real illumination on the 'subjects' being pontificated on. and then, like clockwork, you can count on someone to counter by asking said person to leave the thread if they don't like it. this request is as meaningless and unconstructive as the thread itself. look for my full report in an upcoming issue of Scientific American. big beat steve will be referenced for his 'smooth jazz' contribution... Well, what I found most interesting about your laundry list of boring topics inevitably beaten to death in jazz forums is that none of them described what we have been talking about in this thread. Which makes me wonder what kind of special asshole it takes to come into a thread and complain about how stupid such threads are without having made any actual contribution to the topic at hand, knowing that this will annoy people who are actually getting something out of the thread. If you come into a thread and loudly tell everyone how dumb and pointless the discussion is, expect to be challenged. you're funny. i was the first person to comment/post in this thread. way to go man. and look who's the one who feels it necessary to resort to personal attacks/name-calling when he feels "challenged." again - you're funny. I don't resort to personal attacks, I deploy them strategically. Because I'm just that brilliant and amazing a human being. Either that, or my use of ad hominems is actually a lashing out in order to mask my own sense of staggering inferiority when faced with ideas and opinions that are not in accordance with my own. Alien worldviews, and all that. It's one or the other: I'm either brilliant and amazing or incredibly insecure.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school. vomit. Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here. Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it? thank you, face of the bass, for pointing out an essential element i had inadvertently left out of my salient analysis of current internet forum trends in post-cold war U.S.A.: in threads like these (see my post above which facebass was kind enough to repost), you can almost always count on folks to chime in and say they think the thread has become a useless repetition of jive 'debates' that have come and gone endlessly in the past which never cast any real illumination on the 'subjects' being pontificated on. and then, like clockwork, you can count on someone to counter by asking said person to leave the thread if they don't like it. this request is as meaningless and unconstructive as the thread itself. look for my full report in an upcoming issue of Scientific American. big beat steve will be referenced for his 'smooth jazz' contribution... Well, what I found most interesting about your laundry list of boring topics inevitably beaten to death in jazz forums is that none of them described what we have been talking about in this thread. Which makes me wonder what kind of special asshole it takes to come into a thread and complain about how stupid such threads are without having made any actual contribution to the topic at hand, knowing that this will annoy people who are actually getting something out of the thread. If you come into a thread and loudly tell everyone how dumb and pointless the discussion is, expect to be challenged.