ghost of miles

He was just here at the station! Signed my copies of LOVE BUG and BLUE MODE... all three of them were really cool and fun to talk to. Showed Mr. Wilson a picture from this thread & told him there was much positive discussion going on here... he was very pleased. (And he now knows who Organissimo is, too!)

This program is at long last archived.

Not sure about its status. Maybe it irks me so much because I think jazz programmers (present company included) should do all they can to support their local scenes. (I'm lucky; Bloomington has a very good one, thanks to the IU School of Music and the jazz studies department. It's a genuine pleasure to put the folks around here on the air.) In any event, I think it's a lousy business concept, in addition to being a reprehensible one; screw 'em and put up MP3s on your own site.

Saw this in a jazz-radio thread over at AAJ: Pay for play Somebody (new member with this as the sole post to his/her credit) was trying to get a Virginia-area jazz musician to use this service. Am I alone in finding this reprehensible in all kinds of ways? I guess it's somewhat akin to vanity publishing... but for some reason, it strikes me as even worse.

Dick Haymes smokes Camels (w/thanks to the Songbirds list)

Well, sure--Blue Note for one, to make a case quite close to home. Where did most of the posters on this board come from? Of course you buy for the music, but I don't think you can deny that a # of the people who post here certainly "trust" the Blue Note label of yore. And Mosaic, IMO, has very much built upon that sort of identity/brand/label loyalty. I agree w/most of what you're saying and don't think that ultimately this is a big deal, but I would certainly define Mosaic as a "label"--even if they do only reissues. A label in the sense of a record/business company purveying a certain brand of music. And yeah, Blue Note recorded a diversity of artists, but there are a lot of folks on this board unhappy with the current incarnation of the label for the direction they're taking and the artists they're signing. Like I said, no big deal to me, as long as they keep putting out the classic stuff... and yeah, the timeframe inevitably stretches and has to... I mean, hell, the Tony Williams set covers recordings made after Mosaic was launched. But that doesn't have much to do with what gets defined as worthy jazz... we have yet to see a "sweet-music" band set from Mosaic, even though they do lots of early jazz. There's a lot of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s that I'd like to see Mosaic get around to putting out, but none of it emanating from the "contemporary" purview.

This is pretty much my thinking, too. If Mosaic needs to expand its horizons in order to keep releasing the good stuff, it's OK with me. I'm not sure I understand what people are concerned about "tarnishing the brand" unless it somehow impacts their ability to continue the boxes. To the extent that brand identity reflects reality, my notion of Mosaic is a quality product, involving only recordings of clear artistic merit. I might not like some of them, but I respect all of them as being chosen for their merit as music. I have thought of Mosaic as the George Washington of jazz labels. If Mosaic is going to become a hit and miss label, with Chu Berry coming out one week and the collected late 1970s works of Bob James the next, it will change the way I think of it. Instead of automatically considering all of their releases for potential purchase or gift lists, I will pause and wonder if a new release is trash or treasure, and will wonder if I have the time, patience and energy to analyze which it is, and why. I may come to think of Mosaic as the Lyndon B. Johnson of jazz labels. Fascinating analogies but unless you've had a standing order for every single Mosaic, don't you already analyze the inherent value of each new Mosaic offering? True enough, but I think he means that the "trust" which tips some decisions might be lost... i.e., the "Mosaic put this out so it must be music of merit, music that I might really appreciate at some point even if I'm on the fence about it now" factor that might help sway some folks. Ultimately, I guess it doesn't really matter if one chooses simply to ignore the new label all together. I'll be curious to see what they do down the line, and will probably order the Hubbard. I'm sure MC & others involved gave a lot of thought to this latest project.. they surely were aware it would strike some as an unfortunate step. I don't know the current economic state of their operation, or if that even played a role in taking this direction. I just hope that they eventually get around to the Braxton Arista Quartets...

Resale value & collectability doesn't concern me (I'm of the "you'll-have-to-pry-this-music-from-my-cold-dead-fingers" school), but I can understand it as a concern for others. I guess what I mean about the quality of the brand, though, is somewhat related to what Hot Ptah addresses above. I just took a look at the "About Mosaic" page again: That's what they themselves put up on their website. I think Mosaic is nearly all about the brand... they pride themselves (and sell themselves) on it. They want their customers to think of their releases as nearly-magical jazz commodities. That's why seeing something like an "Ultimate Earl Klugh" collection threatens to snap the spell and makes some folks go "Huh?!" I want to see Mosaic stay viable, because I want to be able to buy those future Chu Berry, Johnny Mercer, Bobby Hutcherson/what-have-you sets, and I know what a cold, bleak, cruel world the jazz reissue marketplace is right now... and nobody's doing it better than Mosaic, although Water and some of the boutique labels can give them a run for their money on single reissues. As I said in my earlier post, this offshoot operation certainly won't prevent me from buying the classic sets and singles that they do produce, and hell, I'd even like to hear that Freddie myself. If they ultimately "water down" the brand & alienate much of their customer base in doing so, however, it might eventually be a cause of real concern. In the long run they probably benefit somewhat from this, in terms of bottom line. But it is a modification, I think, in how they're defining themselves. Hmmm--maybe more of a message to that cover on the new Tolliver than we thought!

SUPER BLUE is already up for pre-order on Amazon.

Quite possibly the case, though I think they're messing a bit with the brand. It won't keep me from buying the Chu Berry sets and everything else they're going to release in the future along those lines, but it does seem a bit--well, at odds with what I've thought Mosaic to be. Ultimately it's a business, of course, and perhaps MC is also prepared to make the argument that some good jazz has been overlooked simply because it's been put into said "contemporary" category. (There's a lot I haven't heard because previous experience has led me to develop a prejudice against it in general.)

The Mosaics I will be enjoying (just ordered today): Tyner Select Hutch Select Condon Mob W. Herman S. Hampton

I thought it might be, but I just called Mosaic & they confirmed the launch of the label.

Lois just posted this over at JC:

I'll doublecheck the article tomorrow, Bertrand--it's possible that the writer got the date wrong, or that I got it wrong when I typed it up at work today. The tribute album by this group came out in 1994 and won a Grammy; did they do any live dates around that time? (In addition to the '92 tour.)

I remember he said he took special care that the drums were loud enough in the mix - I agree with Tony that on most jazz records the drums are not loud enough, not on the same level as the other instruments and as lod as they really are - compare it with the balance on a live gig. He also said that most people are afraid of the power of a drum set - another thing I agree upon. I think he wanted that power to come through much clearer and in a more direct way, so he changed the sound. It was during his own Lifetime band period that he made the change - it's there for the first time on that undervalued LP The Old Bum's Rush and in full blossom on Stanley Clarke's first Nemperor LP - there was a hiatus between them. I have the impression he did a lot of thinking during that hiatus .... and his compositional lessons may have started around that time. When did he move to California? He started taking lessons there, IIRC. I saw two dates given while I was researching the Night Lights show--1977 and 1979, so it must have been sometime near the end of the Seventies. He started studying composition at Berkeley not long after (1981, I think). I'm at home now, but I'll pull my script tomorrow & post some of the comments he made about how moving to California affected him. Basically it sounded as if he felt he'd hit a dead end in NYC around that time (emotionally and aesthetically), and he wasn't very happy with the album he'd recorded for Columbia (Joy of Flying), which probably places his departure closer to 1979.

He was just here the other day for an ISDN interview with World Cafe. We're hoping to get an interview ourselves, but haven't been fortunate in that regard yet. "Minute to Minute" and some of the other Scarecrow stuff holds up very well, I think. I listened to that album for the first time in ages last week. Still like much of Jubilee too.

Here's some more from that Roney article:

Allen, maybe this sheds some more light (I'm pulling out all the articles I Xeroxed for the recent Night Lights show)... Wallace Roney on his and Williams' gig in the Miles tribute band circa '95 (with Carter, Shorter, and Hancock): Roney describes an invigorated rehearsal routine with that band, saying that "at rehearsals Tony would imitate different drummers, just for fun. He'd take a Philly Jo phrase and speed it up, then play it on different parts of the drums, break it up between the different floor toms in different parts of the beat." That all comes from a Feb. 1999 Modern Drummer article.

What, ain't my copy hot enough for ya? Guess I'll have to atone by buying the new CD in bulk.

You've been added.

Maybe because he was so much more focused on writing in the last 10-15 years of his life? At least, that's possibly one part of the story... many of the interviews & articles I recently read from the 1985-95 period find him talking about how unhappy he'd been with his identity as "Tony Williams the drummer" and his sense that people valued him for only that aspect of his personality. Even though he said playing the drums was still fun, he seemed much more interested in pursuing composition. (I still enjoy his drumming on the Mosaic set; the rap against him during the period that set covers is that he was playing too LOUD.) Or maybe it's just that brilliance of the kind TW exhibited throughout the 1960s and much of the 1970s is difficult to sustain for decade after decade.

My wife, who spent most of her childhood and adolescence in Berlin, Massachusetts, says the first week of October--and that the second week is usually good as well.

What do folks here think about Joni's run of jazz-influenced 1970s recordings? I've been thinking about checking them out (HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS, MINGUS, COURT & SPARK, DON JUAN, etc.). Edit: I see there's been some previous discussion here.

Wishing I had more time to read these days... right now, Thomas Merton's NO MAN IS AN ISLAND.

Like his break on "KoKo"--which Metronome ripped as “a horrible, utterly beatless drum solo by Max Roach.”