Stupid Discography formatting question

[chris]

I was listening to the Curtis Fuller Mosaic tonight and realized that the notation for the discography in the booklet for each disc doesn't make sense. Specifically, on the insert for disc 3, I see a listing like this (in part)

tk5 - Down Home - UAS 5041

tk6 - Down Home alt tk - Unissued

tk7 - CTA - UAS 5041

tk17 - When Lights Are Low - -

tk4 - I wonder Where Our Love has Gone - -

tk5 - Bongo Bop - -

My question is, what does the first tkxx refer to? It can't be the track number on the original recording where the song was issued because there would have to be two Track 5 cuts on UAS 5041 (Down Home and Bongo Bop). It isn't the track on the Mosaic disk (wrong song, and there are only 10 tracks). Neither of them is unissued because it would say so, as it does for one song, whereas the second tk5 just as a dash indicating, as far as I can tell, "same as above"

[Daniel A]

The 'tk' stands for "take" rather than "track", so it's just indicating in which order the different tunes were recorded. There appears to be two take five on the session you-re listing. My guess is that the sesion was done in two halfs, but on the same day, hence the take count was restarted somewhere along the line.

[mikeweil]

If these titles were recorded at the same session on a single day, these are take numbers for individual songs. That means they needed 17 (!) takes to complete a satisfactory version of "When Lights Are Low". All false starts and aborted takes were counted in this system, even if it was just an opening chord. Matrix numbers were placed before these takes numbers, when used.

Blue Note used a system counting all takes of a session, no matter what the song title was, in one row, from beginning to end, so their take numbers are an indicator of the position at which a track was recorded during a session. But this is not the case here; Blue Note's system was the exception.

Positions of tracks on LP sides are encoded with a system like this: A-1, A-2, etc., B-1, B2, etc.

[brownie]

I'm not so sure that United Artists ('Sliding Easy' was a UA release) used the same BN take numbering system.

[chris]

I don't think the tkxx is the take number for an individual track because some of the tracks say alt take in the description (like tk6)-- and 17 takes for one song? Maybe...

I guess it could be the track number within a session-- so "The Lights Are Low" was track #17 on the tapes from the session-- except that there is duplication WITHIN a session, since the listing I gave is all from the same session according to the notes.

Daniel's explanation makes some sense too, though if the Mosaic is the "complete" sessions, what happened to all those in between-- if "The Lights Are Low" is #17? Since 12-16 (at least) appears to be missing

[Shrdlu]

12-16 would not be complete takes. Most would have been a few notes, that is, false starts, or takes that were stopped because someone made a mistake, etc. Usually, for a particular tune, there are at most two full takes.