Tom Storer

I gather that that's just it--they count on most of their sales being not to jazz geeks like us but to the general public, people who have a certain interest in jazz but few or no CDs covering the period in question. Us jazz geeks make up most of the remaining core of faithful purchasers. It's the more casual clientele that can be led away by the siren song of even cheaper compilations, and they need that clientele if they're going to break even. That's how I understand it, anyway.

Yeah, that's what I thought it might be--the supermarkets. I never visit the CD section when I'm in a supermarket big enough to have one, so I haven't seen them; and for brick-and-mortar I go to the FNAC, and haven't seen them there. Fucking supermarkets!

I've never noticed look-alike ripoffs to this series, at least not in the FNAC. But I don't know, maybe they sell them at Carrefour and Auchan and other French hypermarkets, or other places where a large public looks for discounts. I've read that hypermarkets account for a surprisingly large proportion of book and CD sales.

That's infuriating. I don't know the first thing about marketing but I wonder if the "psychological barrier" isn't an obstacle. They might sell more by pricing them higher instead of competing with those who kill the market by underpricing. People will think "These sets are of rare value and are worth paying for" instead of "Great, cheap jazz! But wait, over here there's a box that's even cheaper!" BWTFDIK?

Yeah, but what disturbed me was that there was no sense in the movie of anything than rah-rah delight--and pushing the audience to feel rah-rah delight--when he smashes the Nazi to pulp with the baseball bat. (Not in combat, for those who haven't seen it yet--an unarmed prisoner.)

I enjoyed it but with serious reservations. On a moment-by-moment level I was in it all the way. My reservations echo some of those stated by others in the thread, including the sense that Taratino is above all concerned with the meta-movie aspects; technique, style and reference are all great but the story here was, as Alexander admitted, thin. A simplistic revenge fantasy about killing the bad guys--that was it. In addition, although in general I would agree with the idea that "it's only a movie," there were nonetheless aspects I wasn't comfortable with. Typically Tarantino's over-the-top technicolor gore is in contexts of crime and individuals, not politics and history. Here he does two things that made me uneasy: he leads the audience into cheerfully accepting extremely brutal on-screen violence as great fun because it's against the bad guys; and he trivializes the history of Nazi Germany. The kid in the audience who asked "Is that how it really happened?"--OK, he's woefully ignorant, but still, it's indicative of something. I don't like the idea of turning Hitler and the Nazis into just another cultural legend that people provide their own variations on until young people aren't sure what really happened or if it's important to make the distinction. It's too recent. IMHO. Acting-wise, yes, Christoph Waltz as Landa stole the show, I thought. Pitt didn't have much of a role at all, actually. He just had to read his lines with a good hillbilly accent and collect his paycheck. (An anachronism in the scene in the tavern revealed that Tarantino is not familiar with the history of whisky. They order a "33-year-old single malt," but between the mid-18th century and the latter part of the 20th century, single malts were virtually unknown outside Scotland. Whisky meant blended whisky, even to whisky lovers.)

Tommy T, thank you very much for that clarification! You've made me a very happy man. Long life to Jean Schwarz and André Francis!

I had been assuming the new copyright law would make it impossible to continue the series. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't know how it would be justified. The new EU rule is 70 years before something hits the public domain, right? I've been picking up the Le Monde series: every Saturday with the newspaper, two CDs of selected cuts by a big name, with a biographical booklet and full personnel details. There will be a total of thirty artists featured. Great work, once again. Now that I think of it, if Le Monde can get away it (since the tunes go up to 1959), maybe there are loopholes somewhere that Les Trésors du Jazz could also take advantage of. Or maybe they're just ignoring the new law and to hell with it. Hope springs eternal!

Betty Carter used to be scornful of Lou Donaldson's claim to be keeping the flame of the good ol' stuff. She said that in the mid-70's he tried to jump on the commercial funky-jazz bandwagon like everybody else and used to encourage young players to follow that path to fame and riches. But it didn't work out for him, and he became vocal in his scorn for any compromise regarding "real jazz." AMG provides some evidence for this view, describing 1974's "Sweet Lou" thusly: "The 1974 setting, following standard operating procedure for the period, is a nougat of trumpet and trombone charts plus a funky rhythm section infiltrated by trendy clavinet and synthesizer sounds."

I like the Broom record quite a bit. It's not a sui generis masterpiece, with each member of the trio playing flawlessly well, respecting the very essence of Monkness and yet adding a unique personal viewpoint. That doesn't ruin it for me like it appears to do for some. It feels good and I really like Broom's sound. Maybe I'm just not picky enough.

Happy birthday, Hank! He's scheduled to play a solo concert in Paris this fall. I have my ticket!

I saw it. It was terrible. A gangster movie retread, completely uninspired in all ways.

Hmmm. I love it. Oops, wrong word. You meant "started," right? I can't speak for AllMusic.com, but ever since he left Miles there have been naysayers. Some don't like his bass sound, some say he plays flat, some say he rushes the tempo; in addition his albums have not always been memorable. I think he's on a roll nowadays. All his most recent albums I've found excellent.

It's not unusual for enthusiasms to wax and wane. Sometimes you need air, that's all. If you've been obsessive for decades and find yourself losing interest, that doesn't mean that after a while it won't kick in again. Take up some other hobby for a while! Personally, I've never been a collector, just a random accumulator. I still trundle on buying 1, 2 or 3 CDs a month, plus my 40 tracks on eMusic. There are times when I feel like that's more than enough, and times I burn for more. Just ride the waves and troughs...

Interesting take. It echoes that of a guitarist friend of mine, who is considerably more favorably inclined to what he calls "Scobertheny" guitar than to the heirs of Grant Green. But little by little he has come around to the Peter Bernstein camp and now has great esteem for him, and even buys the CDs. I like Bernstein a lot, too.

Rather predictably, I would think. They're probably getting many times more email complaints and queries in the wake of all this than they ever planned for, so I can imagine a few offices full of harassed wage slaves each with a backlog of hundreds of emails to clear out of the pipe. Their eyes glaze over, they glance very briefly and with little interest at the detailed critiques and nuanced requests for information, then they send the form letter and piss off customers looking for individual attention and respect. Meanwhile, management congratulates itself on not varying from the core message decided at some point by a confused committee. Communication is the name of the game!

Let me just reiterate that Europe doesn't get ECM--the UK does, but not the continent. At least I think so. I'm in France and my eMusic page says "eMusic Europe": ECM is not available (with the inexplicable exception of Miroslav Vitous's "Universal Syncopations," where the label is given as ECM/Kontor). UK posters here, however, report getting ECM with their eMusic subscription. And North America gets labels we don't get over here, too! I can't remember which ones but I know I've been frustrated by this in the past.

Their first album, virtually all instrumentals, is great testimony to the jazzy, soulful dance music of the period.

I'm delighted to have been introduced to this extraordinary (well, let's hope so) piece of Americana. I watched many of the plentiful YouTube clips featuring ol' Jesco. What a guy. The jailhouse interview was posted two months ago. Does anyone know if Jesco is in the jailhouse now?

UK members get ECM?? I'm jealous! I thought UK was the same as eMusic Europe, which doesn't have ECM. Huh. Absolutely right. I'm going to stick with them, even after the new system hits eMusic Europe, which I'm sure it will soon, because come what may they're cheaper than the competition and I'm very far from exhausting their catalog, even after having spent months pumping tracks nonstop back in the days of unlimited downloads. But they screwed up big-time.

Let's hope he comes out of this healthilee and happilee! (two potential song titles for his next album)

Album pricing is fairer, I think, than track pricing, and it's clear that classical and modern jazz labels, which tend to offer longer tracks, were getting the short end of the stick. If two albums each last 60 minutes but one has two tracks and the other has 12 tracks, shouldn't they really be priced the same? We all got used to looking for advantage in track pricing by finding albums with long tracks, but often I've regretfully passed over albums that have over 20 tracks. The tendency with album pricing will be to reduce the proportion of low-track-number albums that were priced too low and also the proportion of high-track-number albums that were priced too high. Meanwhile, eMusic Europe has not mentioned SONY or any change in their pricing. Yet. I'm sure it will come soon.

Forgot to mention another essential Mose album, "Mose Alive!" It's available on the Collectables label, paired on the same CD with "I Don't Worry About a Thing." "Mose Alive!" has his iconic version of "Parchman Farm" as well as a couple of great originals such as "Smashed" ("I'm smashed, just like a busted fender / Crashed, where can a man surrender?") and "Tell Me Something": You say the world is mad You say that you've been had You don't like your part In the floor show You say it's all a bust There's no one you can trust Well, tell me something That I don't know You say the world's a mess It's anybody's guess As to who will deliver That low blow You suffer from the strain You don't dig pain Well, tell me something That I don't know

I saw it a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's arranged on a timeline, focusing on graphic design and influence on other arts, with plenty of early sheet music, advertisements (including for some Storyville brothels), record covers, magazine covers and photography, paintings, literature/journalism, and lots of film clips. The film clips are musical, and as you move further into the exhibition you hear more and more of them, building to a sort of soft and joyful cacaphony. Very well done.

Has Mose put out anything new since "The Mose Chronicles," the live-in-London from seven or eight years ago? One of my favorites is "Ever Since the World Ended" from 1987, with Arthur Blythe and Bennie Wallace providing horn solos (sample lyric: "Ever since the world ended / I don't go out as much"). Then there was the excellent "Gimcracks and Gewgaws" about a decade later, which included "Old Man's Blues," an echo of "Young Man's Blues" from 30 years earlier.