Stompin at the Savoy

I got the downloads for all three sets from Qobuz. Their downloader app is a piece of shit, constantly breaking and today I was forced to download each track individually but it's about half the price of the cds. Whenever I can I usually get downloads from Presto rather than Qobuz - their software is better and the online transaction is smoother. Qobuz sucks but tends to have more jazz. I always keep a few backups on portable hard drives which are only turned on now and then to add new albums. A 512 gigabyte sd card in a portable player also functions as a backup to many of the music files I have on my hard drives. A friend had the two earlier sets of cd's and I looked at the liner notes. Nice to read but not all that essential.

I had that same problem. Lack of sleep gets really rough. I found this book useful when a kid was waking us up ALL the time.

I heard an interview with George Benson on the radio many years ago. Might have been American Forces Radio or VOA. I seem to remember him saying something like originally he was mainly a vocalist and only got into the guitar because he thought singing might not be enough for a career for him in music. I don't listen to his stuff much but I like his guitar playing.

That is precisely what I meant by "unless and until adjudicated otherwise, out of print booklets are fair use!" This is the actual, real-life situation: the liner notes for thousands, millions of records are listed in that database and others and have been for years.

Your concept of the law in this area is a bit simplistic, Jim. The truth is there is no definitive answer about the legality of all these liner notes and booklets. It's the sort of thing that has to be tested in court to be fully defined and it has not yet been tested. Most likely because the labels, which own the copyrights, are ok with it for now. I think I once saw one in print booklet up there. I frown on that because it has the possibility at least of stepping on Mosaic's business.

See? You've now come around to my position: unless and until adjudicated otherwise, out of print booklets are fair use!😁 This has a number of benefits. It helps the artists to have these materials online. It helps listeners, particularly people who have paid for a legitimate digital release of material from Blue Note but the company along with all the majors is too cheap to set up digital booklets. In my view it helps Bob Blumenthal too. Given a choice wouldn't it be in his interest to have his notes publicly available rather than buried in 5000 paper booklets? Somebody might read his contributions to a 16 page booklet and get a notion to buy Bob's books.

Well, take a look at the back of any CD jewel case. At the bottom it has a copyright notice. Is posting a photo of that illegal by copyright law? Probably! I'm not a copyright lawyer. At the end of every Mosaic booklet is a copyright notice with a date. So it's probably not legal to post that. But if everybody has long been posting these things it becomes a fuzzy area, mainly subject to the copyright owner asserting their rights (which they never do because having people post promotional materials for your artist roster is generally a good thing).

Technically, probably yes. But this is true for virtually all the 'cover art' tabs you find on musicbrainz, not just Mosaic releases (ie damn near every record). And for most of the album cover art you find on the internet.

Nope.

I would definitely buy it. Possibly you haven't really looked at the mosaic booklets on musicbrainz. Even the highest res is not terribly high res. Many or even most of the images are somewhat dark and grainy. They are enough to blow up and read the content and sort of see the pictures. You have a better argument suggesting that the mosaic booklets aren't liner notes than suggesting some sort of copyright absolutism. However the booklets really do look an awful lot like enhanced format liner notes! I regard cover art, liner notes, booklets etc as forms of promotional material for the main item - the music. These all seem to follow a pattern: the contributor is paid at the point of sale (of the artwork, notes, etc) and no residuals are paid. Suppressing liner notes and calling them proprietary information does a disservice to the artists, IMO.

OK so you think musicbrainz is stealing Bob's writing to enhance their web pages. Just as they are 'stealing' from the writers of most liner notes - right, I mean this is not about Bob and Mosaic, this is all liner notes and all liner note writers. But there is another way to look at this: you are advocating suppressing liner note information about Lou Donaldson and preventing the public from reading it. And by extension, not just Lou. You don't want the public to have free access to album covers in general because the artist and photographer won't get paid when we see an album cover on the internet.

Cheezit, the booklet cops! Plus the copyright absolutist police. I don't know if you have ever visited musicbrainz but for darn near every record ever published they have cover art. Are you gonna shut down every piece of cover art, liner notes, booklet on the site? Those are all technically copyrighted too. Or is it just Mosaic booklets that you are so outraged about? Are you the self-appointed enforcers of liner note copyrights? Or are you gonna let the music publishing business take care of its own biz? This stuff has been up for years and there is no sign that any record companies don't want their booklets on musicbrainz. Most of the art is probably posted by the companies themselves (including Mosaic) because it's free advertising for the music, which is really what they are selling. If they were selling the liner notes (or if I were) that would be one thing. Then musicbrainz would be in competition with the labels. But the labels are not selling liner notes and are likely very happy to see them go up on musicbrainz. (If mosaic sold the booklets I would buy some). If Mosaic isn't kicking about it I don't see why you need to insist that these booklets exist as 5000 paper copies and that's it, nobody else is ever allowed to read them, because, um... copyrights!

There are quite a few of the booklets on musicbrainz (not to mention liner notes for lots of other cds and lps). As long as the set is out of print, I think it is a good thing. Music listeners gain from the information and Mosaic doesn't lose a thing. Once a set is sold out, they are not going to receive any revenue from it anyway. (No, I have never posted any Mosaic booklet on musicbrainz. I photograph them for my own use because my eyesight is not great and I have difficulty reading the hard copy. My photographs are pretty amateur and I just turn the pages and take a shot and don't bother cropping etc; whoever is posting them on musicbrainz takes the staples out and does a fairly professional job of it).

Say what you will, this was for the recent Paul Desmond set, and Scott did respond and did expedite the shipment. I don't think Scott will mind if I quote his email here: My point is not to define how service will take place or how they operate nowadays but rather that they really are pretty good about customer service if you give them a chance. It's a very small outfit and they depend on a number of providers to print the books, make the boxes, manufacture the disks and mail them; I expect delays occasionally and am not bothered by that.

Yes indeed, many thanks Ian for all the work getting these up so quickly after the volumes are released! I've been relying on your work as I listen to these. I am puzzled that the company doesn't provide something official but hopeful they will someday.

About a year back I noticed that musicbrainz had photos of the Lou Donaldson Mosaic set booklet ( https://musicbrainz.org/release/68c6e801-6648-4b4d-a246-7a1af02cb564/cover-art ) and went for a cd quality download of the music from Presto ($40, which is published as digital media by Blue Note). I had heard most of it at one time or another but enjoy getting a coherent bunch of albums with the Mosaic treatment. A lot of Donaldson's output has aged really well, IMO.

After they redesigned the site all the original accounts got lost, so they offered the option to create a new account. When that first happened I ordered without creating an account for some reason. Everything worked fine. The next time I created an account with the order. Everything worked fine. Whenever you experience a problem with orders, just write to them. They are very responsive. There was one time I bought a set for a relative. There was some delay and it looked like the relative might change address before the set arrived. I wrote to Scott Wenzel and he expedited the shipment and personally took the package to the post office. People complain about Mosaic but in what other record company would one of the principals write back to you and take care of your order? They don't have many people working there but since each release is typically only a few thousand sets (divided into a few pressings) they are able to give very good service to individual customers.

I like the Dick Hyman volume:

Yes, there are some discrepancies in the track order and the documentation, which is provided by a fan, not the company. The company starts this huge reissue program and then provides no discography? Nevertheless, what we have is better than nothing, I suppose.

Yeah there were spots in the Basie Columbia discography where they left things out because Lester Young didn't play. I suppose every additional disk reduces sales numbers so they have to strike a balance, esp when the set is already 10 disks...

Pre-ordered!

1955. It's kind of hard bop just emerging from bebop. Wallington was kind of a bop figure who retired from the music fairly early.