Where do alternate takes belong?

[mgraham333]

Reading BruceH talk about the Kelly/Chambers Mosaic suffering from "altake-itus" made me wonder if we'd ever had a poll on this. I couldn't find one so here it is.

[mgraham333]

I prefer them at the end of the disc. Multiple takes can get pretty tiring when they are back-to-back.

Fortunately mp3s largely make track order irrelevant. But at the office I still use a CD player. I know those can be programmed, but I never have really used that feature.

[Christiern]

Let's face it, most of them belong in the vault or on the degausser. Perhaps some should be preserved (unreleased) for scholarly study, but the advent of CDs (prompted by psychotic collector madness and record co. greed) has generated a release of alternate and partial takes that is totally out of hand, IMO.

[Hardbopjazz]

At the end. You want the music the way it was released when it first came out. Give the desert at the end.

[BERIGAN]

I'd say at the back of the disc as well....especially when there are 3 or 4 alternates of the same track! You can then program them together if you want.

[Guy Berger]

I like alternate takes if they're sufficiently good and/or enlightening. If there's space on a CD for more material, definitely include those at the end. Incomplete takes (I'm thinking of the Verve issue of Bird'n'Diz) should almost always stay in the bin, I don't want to hear 30 second snippets that never amounted to anything.

I'll admit that I don't understand why some CDs were issued with alternate takes in the middle of the CD. Why disrupt the original programming?

Guy

[jazzbo]

I guess I'm the oddball. Alternate takes fascinate me, I like them sequentially.

[John Tapscott]

What Guy said. Fill up the CD, but put them at the end.

[Guest]

I like alternative takes, at least as long, as there are not three or four of the same track.

But without a doubt for me, these takes belong to the end of the disc.

Greetz, Sonny

[md655321]

Anyone paying close enough attention to examine two takes in a row is paying close enough attention to flip tracks around. Put them at the end.

[Harold_Z]

My answer varies based on when the mataerial was recorded. I like 78 era recordings with the alternates following the master and I like lp era recordings to follow the lp sequence and put alternates and bonus takes at the end.

[brownie]

Don't really care but I'm always interested in listening to alternates from successful sessions.

When it comes to sessions by some of the giants, I want the alternates to be included in the order they were recorded so as to catch the work in progress and be amazed at the way they improvise and put order to their ideas.

This goes for dates by Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Charlie Christian...

I also love the 'Control Booth' series of the Billie Holiday sessions from 1940-1941-1942 that were released by Jazz Unlimited. These were in recording order.

Same goes for the Stan Getz 'East of the Sun/The West Coast Sessions' that Verve issued a few years ago.

Wish there were alternate takes or control booth-type material from the Armstrong Hot Five/Seven, the Ellington/Webster/Blanton sides, the Jones-Smith 1936 session by the Basie small crew!

All in sequential order!

Fascinating to hear giants as they create. Also goes for painters. Those films showing Pablo Picasso ('Le Mystère Picasso') or Jackson Pollock at the moment they work on their paintings are magical...

[clifford_thornton]

I like Harold's response; probably I would say I like 'em at the end for jazz, and in sequence with folk, blues and rock recordings.

It might also be nice to make people pay more by including a second disc of alternates, right?

[Christiern]

This goes for dates by Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Charlie Christian...

I also love the 'Control Booth' series of the Billie Holiday sessions from 1940-1941-1942 that were released by Jazz Unlimited. These were in recording order.

I have already confessed to splicing together all the alternates of Christian's "Breakfast Feud" solo. I'm afraid that I am also inadvertently responsible for the Billie Holiday 40-42 session alternates. The reason they survived at all is that they were recorded on 16" transcription acetates (w. wartime-compliant glass base, BTW). Using acetates, everything was preserved, including a lot of studio talk-back, false starts, etc. I found these discs at Columbia while producing a Billie Holiday LP reissue. This was also when I came across a track with Billie and Lester that had been discarded only because it was too long to fit on a 10" 78 rpm disc. I issued it, because it was a fine performance that wasn't discarded for artistic reasons.

Anyway, I ran a tape of the Holiday (and, likewise, Ida Cox) sessions for myself. When I gave a bunch of tapes to my friend Karl Knudsen, these were accidentally among them. The Swedish guy whose label, Jazz Unlimited, issued them obviously picked them up from Karl (who later apologized to me).

[mgraham333]

Go ahead and confess Christiern we know it was you who leaked Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine to the internet.

[medjuck]

Hey I was about start a thread on a similar topic: The integrityof original Lp issues. Eg I always loved that the solo version of Lotus Blossom ended "His Mother Called Him Bill". On the other hand I was happy to get the extra tracks when they wre released. But then they were put in chronological order and the solo version of Lotus Blossom was buried in the middle.

[paul secor]

I enjoy hearing alternates in sequential order with the released takes, but I'm not a fanatic about that.

[mikeweil]

I observed I prefer recording order in most cases, and that includes alternates, as it transports more of the energy development on the date. But it all depends on the album.

When material was originally released on 10" LP, that should be the "original!" order, of course. Having faster or slower tracks at the beginning of LP sides has something to do with the tracking which is slightly different on inner and outer regions of an LP side, so that must not be the track order a musician preferred.

If you use programming, it is less effort to program six tracks in LP order than to resequence the complete session of ten takes - given that recording or LP sequence is printed in the liner notes ......

When there are too many alternates on a disc in recording order, hit the random play button ....

[Brad]

I prefer them at the end so I can hear the original session as released. However, I do understand the contrary view so you can hear the development of the master but I think it weighs things down. The one exception for me would be Bird. There I like to hear them in order but even there I find myself wishing for them at the end. Of course, there is the trusty remote control.

[Rosco]

I'm in two minds on this one...

If it's a reissue of an album I like the original running order uniterrupted, with the alternates at the end. (Not jazz but I recall some reissues of Elvis Costello's albums that had the original album and its extra material seperated by a 10 second pause track which I thought was a nice idea)

If it's a 'scholarly' release, especially a boxed set, I like recording order.

If a session is particularly successful I see nothing wrong with releasing alternate takes. The reasons for a particular take being chosen are not always necessarily musical (especially in the LP era when time constraints were a consideration) and with music of consistently high quality often arbitrary.

[Matthew]

Just leave 'em in the vault, if you don't mind. And whoever at Verve thought of putting all those breakdowns on cd .... well, I hope you're enjoying purgatory.

[Christiern]

As you welcome alternate takes, please bear in mind that the performers were routinely not paid for that music. According to union contracts (this may have changed, for all I know), a session consisted of 3 hours in the studio or 15 minutes of usable recording. Going over the 3 hours put you into overtime, ditto releasing more than 15 minutes. Albums were usually done in 2 sessions (1/2 hour of music), which is--of course--less than most albums contained, but I think most jazz labels fudged a bit rather than go into a 3rd session. Chuck can correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, what that means is that musicians were not compensated for unissued alternate takes. Releasing reissues is a better bargain for the record companies than you imagined, I guess. Do you think there would be so many alternates and "bonuses" if they had to pay the musicians/singers?

Not!

[Chuck Nessa]

As you welcome alternate takes, please bear in mind that the performers were routinely not paid for that music. According to union contracts (this may have changed, for all I know), a session consisted of 3 hours in the studio or 15 minutes of usable recording. Going over the 3 hours put you into overtime, ditto releasing  more than 15 minutes. Albums were usually done in 2 sessions (1/2 hour of music), which is--of course--less than most albums contained, but I think most jazz labels fudged a bit rather than go into a 3rd session. Chuck can correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, what that means is that musicians were not compensated for unissued alternate takes. Releasing reissues is a better bargain for the record companies than you imagined, I guess.  Do you think there would be so many alternates and "bonuses" if they had to pay the musicians/singers?

Not!

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The two session habit is one of the reasons so many '50s/'60s lps time less than 40 minutes. This practice was widespread among "independent" labels. I believe the "free use" of alternate takes is/was "legal" by union agreement. This is a hold-over from the day's of 78s when the alternates were frequently used to replace exhausted masters.

For musician/composers the up side is increased publishing royalties.

Edited October 6, 2005 by Chuck Nessa

[Michael Fitzgerald]

But the presence of the alternative takes is an incentive for previous purchasers to buy the whole set again, thereby generating additional revenue in terms of royalties and mechanicals for the artist, composer, publisher.

I know that's how it generally works for me - give me something new extra and I'll buy the whole damn thing over again.

And I would imagine that the labels have more support from the artists if they tack on the "free" tracks as bonuses to existing albums as opposed to creating "new albums" that consist entirely of "free" tracks. Although I imagine that even when that is done (Blue Note Japan did this quite a bit), they do still pay the artists, composers, publishers as usual.

Mike

[Kalo]

I vote for putting them at the end. Yet, in some cases, as several of you have mentioned above, putting them sequentially can make sense. For instance, I like the way Mosaic put the alternates to Sam Rivers's "Downstairs Blues Upstairs" all in a row.

My answer varies based on when the material was recorded. I like 78 era recordings with the alternates following the master and I like lp era recordings to follow the lp sequence and put alternates and bonus takes at the end.

←

Interesting thought there. The idea makes sense. Yet I still think I'd prefer to hear them at the end. And, as someone else mentioned, for "scholarly" sets it can make sense to have things in strict sequence.

The most perverse inclusion of an alternate take to make a scholarly point, that I know of, was Gunther Schuller's inclusion of two well-nigh identical takes of "Rose of the Rio Grande" on the Smithsonian Records Duke Ellington 1938 LP set. The point of this was to show that jazz musicians don't always improvise their solos: "..it is audible proof that Ellington's soloists often committed solos to memory and played them the same way--with but minor deviations--night after night, often over a period of years." You're Gunther Schuller, man, we'd believe you if you just wrote it, rather than having to hear what sounds like the identical record twice. And Lps you couldn't re-program.

Just leave 'em in the vault, if you don't mind.  And whoever at Verve thought of putting all those breakdowns on cd .... well, I hope you're enjoying purgatory. 

←

I'm with you on that.

Edited October 7, 2005 by Kalo