unreleased on CD BYG actuel stuff...

[Guest akanalog]

i am listening to dave burrell's "la vie de boheme" or whatever it is called right now and it is great.

this made me think about this album and others such as "other afternoons" and "aquariana" and the ken teroade BYG and wonder if they will ever appear on CD. is there a reason for their not being on CD such as the master tapes are lost or something? or were the musicians deemed less commercial (though "echo" is on CD). just curious because i think these are all good to great BYGs and worthy of release considering what is out there now. if the BYG guys are really greedy bastards, wouldn't they want to make some cash on their old material? obviously there are more unreleased on CD sessions, but these are the ones which popped into my head.

[Chuck Nessa]

FWIW, I believe all the Byg sessions released on cds are dubbed from vinyl. The tapes are "lost". Brownie is the expert on this.

[Guest akanalog]

hmmm. well they sound ok.

i know some of these albums like "aquariana" have been released on fancy heavy LPs, so why not CD?

we take for granted the sound sucks on many BYGs anyway.

this burrell i am listening to is a dodgy LP burn CD and it sounds good enough also.

[clifford_thornton]

The tapes are all owned by Charly/Affinity, am I right? Dunno how many of these are licensed from original masters - my guess is they're audio-cleaned from LPs, as CN says.

Then again, my Sunspots CD of the Silva "Seasons" sounds AWESOME, enough so that I haven't pulled out my original LP since picking this up a few years ago.

Edit: Seasons is from ORTF tapes, so I guess that's the source for that one.

Edited August 12, 2006 by clifford_thornton

[brownie]

This was dealt with in this thread Actuel/Byg

No further news from this end. The original tapes have still not been unearthed!

And chances of an agreement between the original partners are more remote than prospects for the return of peace in Iraq!

As for Alan Silva's 'Seasons', the tapes were leased from the ORTF indeed. This was authorised.

What was unauthorised was the release of ORTF tapes from concerts by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Duke Ellington and others which appeared in Japan on Byg vinyls!

Edited August 12, 2006 by brownie

[clifford_thornton]

...and those Japanese BYGs are great, too!

[Chalupa]

What's an ORTF tape???? Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française???

Is there a noticeable audio difference between Fuel 2000, Charly, and Sunspots editions?

[Late]

Chalupa — I don't notice a difference between those CD editions. Maybe the Sunspots discs sound a bit better. I think all editions are dubbed from vinyl (with varying results). The music, though, is often great. (Still haven't picked up Sunny Murray's Homage to Africa. WTF?)

ORTF = Old Rooty Tooty Fruity?

[Chalupa]

Thanks for the reply. I just ordered Homage and New Africa. I have the Way Ahead on Sunspots. I think it sounds fine. If it's a LP dub they fooled me.

[brownie]

What's an ORTF tape???? Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française???

ORTF was the name for the goverment-owned and controlled 'Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française' which operated from 1964 to 1974. It was known as 'Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française' (RTF) before. It was modeled along the lines of the BBC.

When the ORTF was replaced by several different bodies in 1974, the archives were transferred to the government-controlled INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel) which still keeps tight control of this material.

As I have previously stated, all the Byg/Actuel reissue material that have shown up in recent years come from non-original material.

[ep1str0phy]

The Luna Surface CD reissue that has been circulating is a Sunspots reissue, and it sounds like crap (much, much worse than the Sharrock or Seasons), so I personally doubt that there's too much of a sound quality difference among the various reissue programs.

[clifford_thornton]

Well, I have the original LP of it and it, too, sounds pretty much like doo. But despite that fact, it's still a great record!

[ep1str0phy]

The jury may be out for a lot of folks, but I'm a fan of the "critical mass", wall of sound BYG thing. I spun Echo for the first time a couple of days ago and it's a joyous, raucous session (it's the Sunspots reissue, and it doesn't sound much better than Luna Surface... clean as it gets for this stuff, I suppose). There's more than a tinge of reckless abandon to the late-60's free thing, and--in many ways--there was nowhere else to go but in some lateral direction or, as with the more constructivist music of the 70's downtown guys, back "in". Wish I coulda been a Paris barfly back in those days...

[clifford_thornton]

Not to derail this into another "type" of thread, but I think that playing very free music, in the sense of not constructing obvious parameters, still had positive sway in the post-BYG age. For example, though the (loft-era) Umezu surely swings and is based on a loose head-solos format, it still has the rambunctious, raw energy of something you might hear on a late '60s Af-Am free jazz record (ditto his more unruly side on Des-Chonboo). Then again, you have people like Clifford Thornton and Joe McPhee whose music from the late '60s/early '70s seems very clearly constructed - so the pendulum swings both ways, often concurrently.

As for Echo, I enjoy it, though the tune "Peace" gets more spins from me.