tatifan

Whoa, that high on ebay, holy cow. Looking on the bright side, I really wanted the set, so I'm not looking to turn my good fortune into an ebay profit, so I think it's found a good home --- now if I ever find ANOTHER one..... I feel sorry for the store, they had a copy of the Bear Family Louis Prima set that some bastard sold to them with several discs substituted by Capitol cds!! Strangely they knew that set was worth something, whereas in the case of the Cole set, obviously they didn't.

I did a double take at my local Half-Price Books today, as I was staring at nothing less than the Nat King Cole trio set on Mosaic for all of $80!!! Mint condition! It's mine! What has this gone for on ebay recently?

The SECOND Jsp Django set is basically ripped off transfers from the Mosaic set, and has nary a track not included in the (wonderful) Mosaic set -- I would still recommend the first JSP for the (well-transfered) tracks not included in the Mosaic. Anyone heard the newest JSP Django set with all the Rome recordings? Have fun!

You've gotta be kidding? The same sentence as Mosaic. What a bunch of crap. "without entirely sacrificing the period feel"!!! Bullshit if ever I've smelled it.

So, if we do set aside the moral dilemma, perhaps my greatest concern is that whenever possible I want my reissues to come from the best sources possible, transferred by someone with good equipment and good ears. When all of this seems of secondary concern to a company, and let's face it, there's a sucker born everyday for these companies to sell an inferior product to, then we have a problem. The comparison was made above with photocopying a book. To me, buying MANY of the Proper boxes has been like buying a fancy hardbound volume in a slipcase, only to get it home and find inside a cheap, fuzzy photocopy of the text printed on toilet paper.

There's no reason the K2 transfer would sound different as the cd layer on an SACD hybrid. The reason they DO sound different is that they are from different remasterings. Whether the K2 is mastered at some stage in 24 bit or whatever, it's still down-rezed to the same red book cd standard as the SACD's cd layer.

I can think of one other reason to treat Proper boxes with caution: in my experience absolutely nothing they've issued is better sonically than previous issues of the same material -- most are quite a bit worse -- and many sound no better than MP3 audio quality. At least when JSP steals they know how to maintain the audio quality. Makes me wonder if Proper is trying to cover up their sources by degrading them. And what bothers ME, is the kind of sameness to the steamroller roll off of the highs on every Proper set I own, regardless of the various recordings used. So the upshot to this for me, is that owning a Proper means the search is still on for listenable versions of the recordings contained in them.

Sorry to pull this topic back from the dead, but I've just picked this set up. I noticed that Mosaic has changed the track order for at least the first album -- I sure wish they wouldn't do this. Clearly "Night Tide" would make a much more effective and sensible ending to the album than "Full Moon and Empty Arms". The original liner notes give the original order, but this is not always the case. Are the other Mosaic Selects jumbled to give us SESSION rather than ALBUM order? I really dislike this Mosaic policy in the Jimmy Giuffre box -- those albums were very carefully ordered, and Mosaic destroys this in a misplaced nod to the discographically inclined! Whoa! Don't know how part of this post ended up in the one above!

Sorry to pull this topic back from the dead, but I've just picked this set up. I noticed that Mosaic has changed the track order for at least the first album -- I sure wish they wouldn't do this. Clearly "Night Tide" would make a much more effective and sensible ending to the album than "Full Moon and Empty Arms". The original liner notes give the original order, but this is not always the case. Are the other Mosaic Selects jumbled to give us SESSION rather than ALBUM order? I really dislike this Mosaic policy in the Jimmy Giuffre box -- those albums were very carefully ordered, and Mosaic destroys this in a misplaced nod to the discographically inclined!

Dick Tracy in Bb is included in the Roan DVD set of the mid-40s Dick Tracy films, and the Wizard of Oz on Radio is part of the 2nd (current) DVD release of The Wizard of Oz.

I suppose this is an endless discussion without the possibility of a final answer. One thing I don't understand is how the French "Classics" label is any different -- they are using a variety of sources for their releases, and working from the BEST source is not a priority for them (I'm not saying it is with Proper or Definitive either, whereas JSP at least now makes an effort to steal from the best). I appreciate their effort to organize their material, but I think it's very overpriced (in the US, at least) -- perhaps if THEY put out some reduced price multi-disc sets of older issues I might feel differently. I think the issue is clouded by the fact that their issues ARE high priced, thus they don't undercut legitimate issues in the marketplace like Proper, Definitive & now JSP are doing, taking away profits from the companies that pay engineers to do original transfer work & do the actual legwork to gather rare material from generous collectors. Of course, a vast majority of the material will never be issued by the major labels that currently own the surviving masters and the "rights" to issue them, so I'm not for a moment denying these independant labels the right to issue PD material, just to consider the morality of stealing transfer work. Perhaps these labels don't even know -- I know it has happened when one unscrupulous "engineer" has been hired by a label, and then has merely cloned another's actual work in order to collect a fee!! Untimately a producer has to be blamed for his ignorance of this kind of thing. I can't muster enthusiasm for the arguments about the PD status making it ok to steal someone elses remasterings -- if it's OOP, maybe that's ok. The silent film analogy doesn't even work -- for instance, I have recorded several solo piano scores for some very rare silent films released on DVD recently. The films may be in PD, but that doesn't give other companies the right to copy this version and issue it at half the price. This has happened to my producer, and he HAS been able to sue the offending company. The way they were caught was that the thieves were too stupid to replace the musical score recorded 5 years ago -- that CAN be shown in court -- whereas it is nearly impossible to prove the same with sound recordings and the transfer work done to enable their issue, and the lawmakers aren't really aware of these fine distinctions anyhow.

Maybe this one will be reissued at the lower price WITH a metal spine -- perhaps recycled metal from the other sets melted down

The Capitol CD is very well transferred, by the way -- I was also turned on to these sides by the Schuller book, and they're probably my favorite Django right now! Nice musical examples in the Schuller -- these recordings are a great example of jazz as great individual improvization AND great listening and reacting among the players -- jazz as chamber music as much as Miles Davis 2nd quintet (in a completely different style, of course).

I've never seen this packaging, except for, maybe, in pictures. What made it a nightmare? I had to call Columbia customer service to have two of the four discs replaced. Glue from the sleeves got onto the discs making large portions unplayable. Same here! No amount of cleaning would make one of the discs playable after the glue got on it! Also, the Armstrong Hot 5 & 7s set is pretty good for scratching the discs -- I would recommend storing the discs in some other way away from that box. On the other hand, Sony's customer service is good at replacing defective discs with a minimum of fuss, which is more than I can say for some other behemouth companies!

The Hoagy box draws on at least 2 single cd issues that Davies did maybe a decade ago. A few of the double cd sets also started out this way (Venuti/Lang Victors, maybe the Henry Red Allen & Armstrong Big Band stuff). There are probably a few more boxes they could put together like this. Those single discs used to cost almost as much as the 4/5 disc sets!

The questionable JSP sets tend to credit... nobody, in contrast to the good old days with the huge visible credits to J.R.T. Davies and Ted Kendall, etc. As I recall, the Blind Blake is one of these without credit. Some of the recent sets may be a return to form though, didn't I see Kendall's name on the new Django Rome recording set?? Anyone have that one yet?

Oh, well. Maybe I'd buy 'em again if they came out as hybrid SACDs and in the original album order. At those prices, that is.

"Stealing" masterings notwithstanding, I can't believe there's much validity to this claim since most if not all of JSP's releases are of old recordings that are most likely in the public domain (at least in Europe if not yet the U.S.)

Make that three of us from Houston on here! This is only my 6th post though. A number of Mosaic Selects are calling me, and this is one of them (Brookmeyer, that is). I can't seem to get the sound clips to play on the Mosaic site -- is there a trick to this? I'm using Windows 98 (still).

Just to plug it, Wilson's contribution in the Mosaic Columbia Jazz Piano Moods set is wonderful as well, and nicely recorded for so early in the lp era.

I've upgraded to RVGs on a few things -- The Monks, Powells and Birth of the Cool are much better for me, but now there's SACD to deal with. I may try some of the Prestige titles, but I'm curious to see if Blue Note is planning a major RVG outbreak on SACD anytime soon. Anyone know something? I must say the SACD of Blue Trane is a dramatic improvement over the "Ultimate" version! SO much more life and breadth to the sound. I don't know the recent RVG -- anyone compare those yet??

I've been happy with some of my upgrades, especially compared to the early cd JVC issues, but now i'm wondering if dual layered SACDs will be the next upgrade of choice??

The FIRST Django set is great, and contains legit transfer work, and material not reissued to death. So, on that basis I picked up the 2nd volume when it came out, and discovered EVERY track was in the Mosaic set of a few months before. Not only that, but to me the sound was a clone, which to me equals ripoff since Mosaic was first, and I didn't see any credit to either EMI or Mosaic. Well, at least they don't ripoff someone else's work, and try and screw it up a little so it sounds "different" to cover up the source of the ripoff (i.e. Definitive).

I haven't heard the RVGs, but one thing in their favor is having the original track order -- the boxed set is in session order, and is difficult to program in album order because some albums are split over 2 cds.