Big Beat Steve

How many of you (decade-)long-standing collectors out there did get this worked up about Count Basie getting proper royalties when they bought the (superfically speaking) "official" reissues of his Decca recordings in past decades? Do I smell a whiff of hypocrisy there somewhere, maybe? This just to mention ONE tip of a not so small iceberg - if the above is the main line of reasoning. Or is it to be condoned totally by the buyers if artists are ripped off by their own labels?

His "Diesel Smoke Dangerous Curves" was a gas (almost literally ) and this (and the like) is what he will be remembered for at any rate. RIP

I've only compared a good deal of the "Bird Is Free" album and I could not rightly say I detected any there. But then again, that recording has a lot of background noise (sometimes actually foreground noise) so I am not sure any correction would really have made itself felt in any significant way. It's far from unlistenable, though, and I remember that a long time ago when the mood beset me one of my late-late hour habits was to put on that album, turn off the lights in the room and relax in my easy chair. Made you feel almost as if you were straight in that club, sitting at one of the tables amidst all the chatter and glass and bottle clinker and listening to the band. Not musicologically correct, no doubt, but WTH?

So ... I received my 30-CD box set today. As I already own a few of the records contained therein I did an aural comparison (note it's strictly an AURAL comparison via my MOR sound system - which will eventually get upgraded but is amply good enough for the size of my music room - so I can't vouch for any subjective (ultra-)high-end listeners' sensitivities ) with parts of the following vinyls: - CD 17 vs Charlie Parker "Bird Is Free" (original/early repress on CP Records): No reduction of the club atmosphere background noise, overall same fidelity except that the CD seems a little bit brighter, clearer, but not significantly so - so the difference may be due to the state of my vinyl or the (not very old) stylus of my turntable. Hard to say ... OTOH some of the tracks on the CD do have a tiny bit of hiss at the beginning of some tracks that my vinyl doesn't (and that then ebbs away). - CD 4 vs The Marty Paich Quartet featurign Art Pepper on Tampa TP28 (Japanese - Victor - reissue) Clearness and fidelity overall the same - a little bit brighter on the CD maybe - but strangely in this case my NM, all shiny Japanese repress has some minor hiss in the quieter sections that is not present on this CD reissue. So on this count I find the CD just ever so slightly better. - CD 1 vs Cecil Payne performing Charlie Parker Music (very early UK pressing (DG) on the Egmont label) Fidelity overall the same (again maybe a bit brighter on the CD) but the stereo effect on the CD comes across clearer. The instruments are divided more clearly on left/right. I could live quite well with my vinyl but the CD is an improvement. Though I wonder whether this is the result of the present remastering or whether they "brightened up" an earlier reissue (I picked up my Cecil Payne LP secondhand in London in the mid-90s and remember that around that time this particular UK budget pressing was not exactly rare for a while there - as if quite a few collectors had dumped their copies at that time. Was there a current CD reissue of that record out at that time?). The liner notes say "completely remastered" (though not by whom or where) but overall I cannot see any really significant remastering improvement (except for that overall ever so slightly brighter sound, no matter how that came about) but OTOH no "deadening" of the overall sound either to my ears, at least not on those samples I compared. So i for one can live with the results. As the Bird Dials included in this set are around in a zillion different reissues and remasterings, no doubt others will have more/different things to say when comparing their CDs/LPs with those included in this set. The packaging is OK, sturdy and presentable, the booklet does not contain much info apart from the blurb on the CP label also found on their website, plus an essay on Charlie Parker and full track and session lineup details on all the contents. But hey ... this box set cost me a mere 39.51 euros from amazon.de. THIRTY CDs for some 39 bucks, i.e. not quite 1.32 euros PER CD! Who am I (who is anybody) to complain about anything at that kind of money? And BTW, before this degenerates into another P.D. label and/or "buying cheap" bashing spree (as happened recently on another thread on a box set series discussed before anyway), YES - some the recordings included herein are not yet 50 years old (some were made in the latter part of 1962 and in 1963) so whoever is behind this must know what they are doing with all their product marketing, and each CD bears a mention indicating Copyright by Membran Media GmbH AS WELL AS "Licensed by Copyright Group Ltd." (whatever THAT means ...). If these are all false claims, good luck for the sequels this might lead to ... In short, yer pays yer money and yer takes yer chances ...

Which is why one can read as many books by Hugues Panassié as one sees fit to and STILL enjoy both bebop and white swing. :g

This ... http://futurenoisemusic.com/product.aspx?id=738

Look at it closely .. I am not being any more reductionist than you are. In your above statement as well as in the one preceding it, you subdivide "all of jazz into various sub-genres" yourself. Which is a statement of fact because there ARE different styles of jazz so nothing wrong about that, no matter who makes that statement. And good and not so good jazz was made in all styles through the histroy of jazz. As for hard bop being the artistically most successful style of jazz, that would be a matter of personal preferences and can indeed be contested but depends on what criteria you would consider essential for "artistic success". ANY style preceding hard bop can make that claim depending on whether you are willing to accept to see each style of jazz on the terms of its time and depending on whether you value the groundwork or later embellishments higher . It may be argued that most hard boppers by and large were technically more proficient than most 20s jazzmen (though in order to prove that they would have had to show they were able to play 20s jazz just as well as or in fact even better than 20s jazzmen, assuming this earlier jazz is technically and artistically more simple ) and they may have accomplished musically more advanced feats than 20s and 30s jazzmen, but does this alone make them "artistically more successful"? Not by a long shot if one is willing to judge music on the terms of the time the music was actually made FIRST. So IMHO it again boils down to personal preferences and therefore is pointless to try to debate. And let's face it - while I would not dare to judge what made Jones/Baraka write what he did in 1963, by that year hard bop had already become an also-ran in the field of jazz. By that time contemporary jazz hard been split wide open into soul jazz and free jazz, to name just two which were apart from hard bop. 1963 was to hard bop what 1947/48 was to big band jazz. It was still around but was it still the pacesetting form of jazz?

But couldn't that be said about ANY style of music (jazz style, in particular) so does this statement advance this "debate"? Baraka/Jones' comments left me wondering ... I've always loved bebop (and with the listener's benefit of hindsight I can see the evolutionary line between swing and bebop) but somehow can take only moderate doses of hard bop at a time and feel quite comfortable with not going nearly as deeply into hard bop as I have explored bebop through the years. To me bebop always pushed straight ahead whereas hard bop rather seemed to go sideways instead of ahead. While I definitely am no music scholar but consider myself just a "listener" (and do not care about Free Jazz), I wonder if maybe what he says would be an explanation of this imaginary difference between "going straight ahead" vs "going sideways" (sorry, cannot express it any other way in a nutshell).

:tup

Maybe one really cannot generalize ... those "Rhythm 'n' Blues" 4-CD sets on Membran sound quite OK to me (although I admit that I do not approach that music from a technical angle but try to judge the overall sound). And as I have a lot of that music on vinyl too I have been able to compare. Those 4-CD sets certainly do not sound sterile or flat to me. I have heard a lot of overly cleaned, deadened-out CD reissues elsewere (on "name" labels too), but coming to think of it, I am not quite sure if even THIS would be worse than some of the "non-mastering" on certain Document and JSP CDs. YMMV of course.

Hee hee .... reading the first few posts of that thread and those comments on Kai being rough, my immediate thought was "How about Bill Harris"? And BANG - there his name came up! So if Kai Winding was rough, what to make of Bill Harris (at least part of his 40s/50s stuff)? "The trombone equivalent of those Honking Saxes"? I am not familiar with those High Note CDs but I guess they are the equivalents of the Harris/Ventura LPs released on Phoenix Jazz in the 70s?

I don't see people "equating" downloads with SINGLE-TRACK listening. This was just one aspect of downloading that was discussed with its pros and cons, and rightly so. What I dislike about it all is the lack of a tangible product (yeah, now I know one certain Texan will come breathing down my neck again for openly wanting to "possess" things ) that can be archived correctly for a long time to come (as long as the players are around) and made playable (without converting and recopying) on standard CD players, as well as its questionable long-time storage (archiving) aspects. None of which of course matters if you are just in the market for buying music for casual consumption (as most music "consumers" are anyway) and listen to music on your iPod only. True, CDs may not the biggest investments even after they go OOP but as long as certain CD reissues selling a UTTERLY SILLY prices (as if Asian origins automatically equated ultimate desirability) are still endorsed then who knows ... there may some margin left after all. Yet I admit there are moments when I feel like a dinosaur, seeing that most of the contents of the shelves covering one entire wall in my music room might fit on one single iPod memory, and when spinning LPs the other day this really made me feel like handling one of those ancient 8" floppy discs from way back (anybody remember THESE?). But yet I'll carry on ... The bottom line? To each his own ...

You'd better check your collection not only for which "Charlie Parker Record" LABEL (or Bird live recordings) you already have, but as the listing on the above Membran website indicates, wherever the name "Robert Scherman" crops up this means that reissues from the original (Westcoast) Skylark/Tampa labels are involved too. Disc no. 10 includes Tampa LPs 10 (Oscar Moore) and 11 (Jazz Americana V.A. compilation), for example. I have a lot of these (plus some of the live Birds, Cecil Payne a.o.) but still that box set has a lot of intersting stuff. And at THAT kind of money ... so I took the plunge.

Pretentious, maybe ... but would you disagree that in the world of jazz, in particular, there IS a substantial number of such albums? Even if it boils down to a live recording from a particular concert/gig only. Or why is it so that so many jazz collectors whine so loudly each time a reissue omits one or two single tracks from a 8 or 10-track original album? Cannot possibly be about "completist fetichism" in EACH and EVERY case only. Like I said above, I do not doubt single downloads are fine and the way to go (for those who feel comfortable with that medium anyway) if you are buying tunes that were released as "single" tunes anyway (or where their inclusion in an album is unrelated to the rest of the album contents), particularly in the many facets of contemporary pop. But was/is this particular discussion about today's POP music above all?

You are missing a point there ... Many original 78s and 45s were INTENDED to be listened to only one piece (or pair) at a time, and not in a sequence of 12, 16 or 24 chronological items by the same artist in one go. Which is why some reissues from that era tend to sound a bit monotonous if listened to via recent reissues because many artists (particularly in early blues and hillbilly/country music) have a certain degree of sameness about their individual tracks that becomes apparent if their music is "consumed" in larger doses in one go. Taken individually, you pay much more attention to the INDIVIDUAL tracks and above all notice the differences that there are, just the way it was (and was supposed to be) back then. The same may work for those current artists who deliberately release individual tunes via internet platforms today, and individual downloads may well be the way to go in these cases. But REMEMBER - ever since the LP era started, there has been an increasing number of albums where the contents (each individual track) were conceived as a unit, a single entity ("concept albums" are NO invention of the rock era) and I can very well see the point that these albums are appreciated to the full primarily if listened to in their entirety. Now if today's listeners are no longer tuned to that kind of intense listening and are only willing to take downloadable snippets in the form of individual tracks I think it's easy to understand those who complain. There may be a point to that statement about a "shrinking attention span".

Actualy I've listened to several Membran reissues (some of their 4-CD R&B sets, in particular) in recent days, and the fidelity isn't that bad at all. And compared to the actual fidelity of some of the original Charlie Parker Records vinyl releases they cannot have made matters worse, I'd guess. (No, the vinyl fidelity was far from unlistenable but certainly not top-notch). It will be interesting to see how they coped with the glass and bottle clinker and background (foreground?) talk during Bird's "Lester Leaps In", "Sly Mongoose" etc. nightclub performances on the "Bird Is Free" Lp.

As stated correctly at the very end of the entry in your blog, Hugues Panassié died in 1974, not 1964. I own and have read several of his books published in the very early post-war years (as well as his later "Bataille de jazz") in their original French version (important as far as I can see because who knows what might get lost in translated editions?) and find them very interesting in their assessments of the music, musicians and styles but they do need to be taken with a TRUCKLOAD of salt (or should only be read if you have a good deal of prior knowledge). Yet they are interesting if seen as ONE man's personal opinions. As for his involvement in the 30s French jazz scene and as for who accomplished what up to the big schism of 1947, I suggest reading this book (in addition to the earlier "New Orleans sur Seine"): http://www.amazon.fr/Charles-Delaunay-jazz-France-ann%C3%A9es/dp/2915118574/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329903535&sr=8-1 Apart from the credit is due Hugues Panassié for bringing back a few forgotten heros of classic jazz in the 30s, another point of merit is how, for all his narrow-mindedness when it came to the evolution of jazz into modern jazz, he did manage to acknowledge the lineage and see the musical links and continuity of a lot of 50s R&B and R&B-oriented "middle jazz" at a time when most of the oh so erudite highbrow jazz critics saw fit to denigrate anything that even remotely reeked of that oh so lowly "rock'n'roll". Hugues Panassié, OTOH, did realize that one mission that jazz after all still was entitled to accomplish was to provide music for pure, simple and unpretentious entertainment or dancing as an ongoing tradition reaching back to 20s jazz and that jazz even by the late 50s/early 60s was not all about concert hall atmosphere. So in his record reviews he for one acknowledged the work of R&B artists such as Fats Domino or the late 50s R&B-tinged Decca recordings by Cootie Williams that would likely have been given short shrift by other reviewers.

http://www.conelrad.com/media/atomicmusic/sh_boom.html

From within your house, a good way to do this is with an Airport Express: Apple Music streams from your computer to the AE; it has audio outs which can connect to your stereo. Going out? If your car stereo plays mp3 files, just burn a couple hundred of them to a CD. Leeway's response is also interesting. There are so many technological innovations going on in this space that half the time I don't even understand the responses posted on this board. I don't at all download from any "unofficial" sites. I only frequent eMusic, Amazon, and when they have sales, 7digital. Thanks for the info! Only ... I am all PC, not Apple ... I agree about your comment re- unofficial sites (especially with the now-acquired benefit of hindsight , but what can you do if the others blissfully ignore those areas where downloads could REALLY come into their own in the reissue field, i.e. NEVER before reissued music? Though that particular site has been into this for so long with their monthly instalments of new additions to the download files that I guess it cannot be a systematic problem with their downloads being bug-infested or else they would long since have shut down. But I cannot afford to let this turn into a hit and miss affair. Once bitten twice shy. There's enough music to listen to anyhow.

Amazing discussion ... I find I agree with virtually ALL of what has been said above because there are so many angles from which this subject can be seen, and each one has a grain of truth (especially the "eternality" aspect of the vinyl as opposed to erasable digital bits and bytes ). To me, to fill gaps that cannot be filed with vinyl (or are unaffordable), CDs play a major role. I'd love to go for downloads where the music is not available elsewhere (i.e. the Amazon mp3 vs CD alternative is not one for me; CDs will remain the way to go there for some time to come) but I've become exceedingly wary of downloads ever since I recently ended up with major malware on my PC during one such download attempt. Incidentally, in that particular case the site itself was OK and reputable and their download offers (from collectors to colectors) appeared to have been made in good faith but apparently the externalised server where this collectors's site apparently had hosted their digital files for download was not so OK, according to the PC whiz-kid who'd luckily happened to be at my home at that time to streamline my PC setup (and who then spent quite some time on eradicating that bug, which made for a noticeable increase of the overall servicing bill Bad luck I guess and a bit of brave new world ...) And since I do not fancy limiting my listening to the PC or other computer-based media, I'd still have to convert the files to some format suitable for any CD player so where would the overall gain be for me in the case of the music where a MP3/CD choice exists? And if no such choice exists (downloads of never-reissued music) but the above threat lurked ... ?

Not with that kind on (non-)description, that's for sure. Exept if there's an Ike Quebec completist nut out there who'd be able to see from the date scribbled on the label what that kind of performance MUST be.

Well, the reissue on Dragon Records states it explicitly. And since a lot of the arrangements from those sessions were credited to others (Gösta Theselius, Harry Arnold and others) there is SOME credibility because if the credits would have been usurped what would have prevented him from usurping 'em all? However, you ARE correct in one respect: The 1960 recording of Count'Em released on Argo LP 668 has Quincy Jones AND Jimmy Cleveland listed as the authors on the record back cover. So some percentage of the credits goes elsewhere after all.

A tongue-in-cheek record cover that should sit well with quite a few around here. For the record, that EP includes the following tracks from various 1958 sessions: Count'Em (the title track, obviously) / Meet Benny Bailey / Cherokee (the first two composed and arranged by Qunincy) All (and much more) found on Dragon DRLP 139/140. Fine stuff.

Actually they seem to have been fairly common almost everywhere. I have close to a dozen of the Bell 45s too - all of them bought at local fleamarkets through the years (and I know I missed out on others and passed up a few that were all too "non-rocking" , judging by the songs). And I know a few friends of mine from France have a handful of them in their collections too. How come they were arund here at a time when import records (i.e. not local license pressings) sold at a premium? Who knows ... maybe souvenirs left behind by G.I.'s doing their army stint over here? Am now spinning Edna McGriff's cover of Huey Smith's "Dont You Just Know It" (backed by the Jimmy Carrol orchestra again). Amazing how they go about aping the N.O. sound ... BTW, thanks for the explanation of why there were 7in 78s in those years, Jeffcrom!

Unfortunately that box sounds as if heavy noise reduction was applied, it killed the music. I don't find the vinyl set THAT bad. With 20s/30s recordings a lot of it always is a fine line between not doing enough and overdoing it, and not everyone is a John R.T. Davies who managed to strike the right balance, but overall I find this package VERY listenable.