Rabshakeh

Just watched it. Please would someone give me that sort of confidence. "If you go online, you get what you wanted..."

I think Ted Gioia should do a quality comparison between classic bagpipe Italo-library records and modern Spotify ghost bagpipe playlist tracks. Then write about it in short sentences. If Ted publishes that article, I will subscribe for life.

If it was Iridium, then he'd still be there.

Cecil Taylor and Feel Trio - Celebrated Blazons

Spotify is hiring real people and paying them. I don't think anyone suggests otherwise, do they? (At least until AI gets better.) Whether the results are any better than in the library music days is not clear to me: "Often very good" seems to overstate how good those records were. Retrospectively some that have been rediscovered are very good, others aren't but are good enough for sampling and often quite innovative in the way they used rhythm or synth sounds. But most library records were just as depressingly terrible as you'd expect. I don't hold out much expectation that Spotify's background jazz is going to age that well.

Oliver Lake Steel Quartet – Dat Love

I generally agree (although there are other periods when I sometimes allow myself to question whether he is just winging it...). But the Ghost Trance stuff always seemed to be designed with a view to securing funding, more than making music worth releasing. I'm impressed, looking back through the power of Google, at both how unanimously full of praise the critics were at the time, and just how many academic treatments of the music and concept are returned by a simple search. But what an amazing line up of musicians! Almost half of them went on to be future leaders. Not so young now, sadly, but for a long time the great hopes.

Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband with Wingy Manone & Edmond Hall – Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband With Wingy Manone & Edmond Hall More for the second side with Edmond Hall. One of my favourite arrangements of St. Louis Blues on record. Now dipping my toes back into this: Anthony Braxton – 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 This is the first listen in over a decade, during which I have retrospectively warmed to some of Braxton's box sets. I still don't care for this one at all. I find it very charmless and undercooked.

Check out my NTS show at 3:30am when I’ll be playing somnambulant black metalgaze, buried playlistcore classics and narco-cumbia anthems.

The other close comparison is to 'library music' or 'production music' of the 1960s - 1980s: royalty-free music produced to order by writers and musicians, generally uncredited or working under pseudonyms, and licenced for use in the background of TV shows, radio, educational videos, audio-books etc in circumstances where the creator doesn't want to pay royalty on a per-use basis. Some of that stuff is much prized by crate diggers, and is getting thr glossy high end reissue treatment these days (although I doubt that will apply to Spotify's insipid output).

I like how the painting behind them isn't even right. That's before one notices that La G has a foot for a hand...

The comparison to Muzak is a better one than Gioia's kneejerk Payola comparison. Noone is paying Spotify money to artificially promote these artists by pretending that they're popular. (People are paying Spotify to artificially promote other artists by including them on playlists, but that's another matter.) This is essentially cheap background music for the purposes of increasing productivity. Nobody cares whether it is Miles Davis or some made up group masking some Swedish studio hack, or, soon, AI. What irritates me about the Gioia article is the way that he pretends he was out there saying all of this long before it was known, like some sort of musical Jeremiah. Articles about how Spotify uses studio musicians to produce royalty-free music have been being published in the broadsheet press since before the pandemic, and all Gioia has been doing is repeating what he has read elsewhere. I find the fact that Spotify does this very interesting, but not particularly outrageous or unexpected. It is an old business model. The studio output of the 1950s was full of pseudonymous groups with covers illustrated strapless blonds pouting at the bongo player, serving to mask the production line efforts of pudgy, chain-smoking arrangers, chained to their desks and suffering from rickets. I think he's an example of audience capture. He was once a writer of stolid music history books, then he went on substack and he's discovered that what people want to read is these rants about the culture industry, written in short sentences with hard paragraph drops. So that's what he does now.

Cheers!

But which struck you most? If you had to identify two. Currently listening to: Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband and Champion Jack Dupree – Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband And Jack Dupree I really do wish that there were better resources out there for revivalist trad / Dixieland / hot jazz. There's next to nothing in print and a complete absence on the internet. That's a fact that we shall all be rueing when the inevitable "inclusive" Dixieland revival trend kicks off on tiktok and none of us know anything about the one kind of jazz to which the Kids are listening.

What are the others? I would be interested in hearing more.

La Mont Johnson – Sun, Moon And Stars First listen to this. Goodness me it is a lot of fun.

I can believe it. The percussion is really crisp. The yodelling baritone vocals perhaps less so.

Webster Lewis And The Post-Pop Space-Rock Be-Bop Gospel Tabernacle Chorus And Orchestra BABY! – Live At Club 7 For reasons that escape me, this record has just received a 4 LP deluxe reissue, like it was On The Corner or Languidity or something. Does anyone know anything about it? It sounds like the kind of record I would be happy to find by accident if I was a hip hop producer in 1995.

Dutch Swing College Band – Digital Dixie

Lloyd Miller, who led some interesting dates in the 1960s based out of the University of Utah, mixing West Asian classical musics with third stream type jazz, also died at the every end of this year. Probably after these lists were assembled.

RIP.

Bobby Bland - Two Steps From The Blues

Jimmy Witherspoon - At The Renaissance Trying to soothe my wife's hangover with this one.

I don't normally buy vinyl records that I haven't heard and haven't heard of. But in those days I had space, loft era free jazz was that bit cheaper, and those were names on which I felt I could take a bet.

Human Arts Ensemble – Under The Sun