Meanwhile... another box set

 

No, I didn't get hold of PMP2301 yet, but while I'm ridiculously stalled over this latest post which I don't seem to be able to finish - just don't ask* - I did manage to snap up something else: a very reasonably-priced secondhand copy of the Black Saint / Soul Note box**,  which I missed out on when it was first released (can't remember why or how, exactly - that period is a bit of a blur if I'm honest) and have had at least half an eye on for years now, not wishing to end up paying a silly price for it. In the end, I got it for rather less than the seller was doubtless hoping to get for it, since (to my surprise) nobody else bid on it at all. 

Part of the reason I didn't want to go overboard in securing a copy is that I already own quite a bit of the material - slightly more than half, or slightly less than half, depending on how you look at it. The Monk covers album - on which B. retraces Steve Lacy's 1958 footsteps, in the company of Mal Waldron and Buell Neidlinger - was the very first of B's albums I bought, before the missus and I had even left London, and some years before I became a born-again completist headcase for this man's stuff; my chief motivation at the time was the fact that it was a set of pieces by Monk, but I had already earmarked the leader as one of those "out there" figures I planned to explore in greater depth as my familiarity with jazz increased and expanded. Eugene (1989) came into my possession rather later, round about sixteen years ago (as I see from this post); it's an album for which I have retained a high regard (I revisited it in passing, later that same year) - but then, nothing new about that. Rather more recently, during my "fallow period", I snagged a used copy of Composition No- 173 somewhere or other, giving a good home to someone's unwanted item...

... which was at least an official release, something which can't be said for (my copies of) two of the other albums up for consideration here. Around 2003-4, between jobs, out of London but not yet settled in Wales***, I spent a lot of time on the internet, and much of that involved trawling through listings on eBay and elsewhere, looking for items to boost my growing collection of jazz and creative music; back then, I very naively thought that anything openly for sale in such places must be a legitimate release, so I picked up cheaply a number of items on (what I later realised was) a knock-off Russian label, which chucked out unauthorised copies of all sorts of releases on many different labels big and small; among these, I acquired (bootleg) copies of Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983 and Five Compositions (Quartet) 1986#, something which I have long felt needed to be rectified at some point. 

Three of the eight albums I have never owned at all (though naturally I have heard all of them) - and, of course, there is also the non-trivial matter of all eight albums being remastered for this box set. I have hankered after a hard copy of Birth and Rebirth, the superb duo album with Max Roach, for quite a while now, and have also craved my own copy of Six Compositions (Quartet) 1984, an album which I loved on first hearing (back in the very early days of this blog). There has never been quite the same sense of urgency to acquire  4 (Ensemble) Compositions 1992, admittedly, it being an album which (I decided recently) may be somewhat problematic in at least one respect; but it's still quite a significant release, and I still wanted my own copy of it (and indeed very nearly bought one last year, only to have it whisked away from under my nose just as I set about looking to buy it). Anyway: now I have all of them in one place, and in their remastered form :D

For the benefit of anyone who may be curious, then: the box has all its recording information on its rear side, there being no booklet of any description included; but although the individual discs have uniform/generic printing on them - as one would expect from this type of reissue - each is housed in its own cardboard sleeve, a facsimile of the original album cover (front and back), something which seems a nice touch (even if the scans would seem to have been taken in most cases from LP covers rather than CDs, resulting in some very very small writing in most cases - too small for me, even with my reading glasses on, at least in artificial light). Of course, it is only the front and back covers which are reproduced from the original releases: one really would not expect the liners to be present, and naturally they are not (something which would have presented logistical problems - as well as pushing up production costs beyond a unreasonable level). I would have to say, the overall impression is not a bad one.

And now that I have it in my hands? Of course, the first disc I played was this one, followed in short order by this one, since - as noted above - these were the two "missing" albums I most desired to own. Needless to say, I enjoyed every minute - and will make time very soon to hear them again, entirely without distractions. Can I vouch for the quality of the remastering? No, for several reasons##; but I very much doubt that anybody would be looking on this site for that sort of detail anyway. They do, of course, sound absolutely superb. If I wrote fairly recently about the inevitable "nearly" status of the '84 working quartet, that must never detract from the sheer pleasure to be obtained from listening to this wonderful album, a miniature masterpiece (clocking in at less than thirty-six minutes). It's not as if Lindberg was a slouch, after all - even if his extended solo on the last track reminds us that for all his merits, he simply wasn't Dresser; but for me a great deal of the delight to be found in this album lies not in the bass or even in Hemingway's drums, but rather in the glorious interplay between the leader and Crispell. The composed music itself, on the cusp of achieving great things, is absolutely worth revisiting at any time... and the same is very much true of Birth and Rebirth, an album I last wrote about... ooh, more than twelve years ago now. This is an album I have only ever had in mp3 form, as it happens, so the chance to hear Roach's million different attacks in crystal-clear detail on CD is very much appreciated. 

I'll be getting plenty of play out of this, then (and will have to explain some other time what strikes me as problematic about the 1992 sessions)... but don't worry, I also have absolutely not forgotten about matters in hand, and will be getting back to those soon..!

* ... and nobody will, but just for the record: some of it is seasonal and/or cyclic - I don't seem to be able to sustain my posting for more than a few months without needing some downtime - whilst some of it is possibly mental overload from my day job, and then there is also probably an element of deflation, resulting from my realising that I would not be attending the Proms concert. (Although, as it turns out... I just might yet, after all...) Whatever it is, I am halfway through a post which I just never seem quite ready to finish :-S

** The title The Complete Remastered Recordings On Black Saint & Soul Note would seem to be generic, used for all of the various box sets like this one; in practice, all of B's albums for producer Giovanni Bonandrini appeared on Black Saint. 

*** We were already living in Wales by then, we just weren't settled here - indeed at that stage we still expected to move away from here, although we had no intention of returning to London. [Exactly when we (became) settled here is open to debate, not that it matters...]

# Weirdly, during the course of writing this post I went and checked, only to discover that my copy of the '83 quartet is, in fact, a genuine release, albeit a rather shabby one which I evidently acquired secondhand (at least...) - and which, in my memory, I had somehow conflated with the one unquestioned bootleg on this list, that being of course the '86 quintet. I simply couldn't be bothered to rewrite what I had already written... As for the bootleg (and others like it; I may not have any more of B's albums on that Russian "label" - which I shan't name here - but I do have some by other artists): I must have known deep down that these were not the legitimate product they purported to be, for all that the listings at the time tried to make it sound as if they were. I may have conned myself into thinking that even if they weren't official, they were being purchased used - and therefore the bootleggers were not profiting from the sales. This was crap, if so: in all probability the account(s) which offered these items for sale were directly linked to whoever was putting this stuff out, and they will have carried on making illegal money off them until all such accounts were closed down. Not good :(

## I don't have the high-end equipment necessary to make an informed judgement about that sort of thing, really - nor the inclination to do it, even if I did - and besides, as already explained here, in some cases I do not have the original releases available for comparison. (Probably there are other reasons too... ask me if I care..!)

Holding post

I am working on another GTM post right now, but don't seem to be able to achieve the level of concentration necessary to get it finished just yet; in the meantime, here's one of those less-detailed-but-hopefully-somewhat-informative "holding posts" that I fire off from time to time.

1. Another new release - of sorts, but not exactly a normal one: I was rather amused to see today that the sizeable Braxton discography on Discogs.com has sprouted an entry under the previously-unrepresented "singles & EPs" category. Naturally, this does not indicate a misguided assault on the singles chart; rather, it just happens to be one user's interpretation of a new (ultra-)limited box set, comprising four single-sided, lathe-cut 7" vinyl picture discs, under the title Difficult Messages Volume Five: Wolf Eyes & Anthony Braxton Live in Los Angeles. Doubtless this is the kind of thing which could make hardcore collectors lose their shit entirely, it being pressed in a run of just thirty copies, each of which features unique and hand-painted cover art by John Olson and Nate Young. It will probably sell very fast and will inevitably start commanding ridiculous prices on resale, as such things have a tendency to do... As for the music, it purports to be "the entire set", whatever that means: no date or venue is given on the current entry, so it's far from clear which live set we are talking about. The concert which I wrote about earlier this year, in which B. took a nasty-looking (but apparently not serious) tumble onstage, comprised a first set lasting almost fifty minutes, and a second of just twelve minutes; the present release totals just over twenty-five minutes across its four sides. So, this is not from that concert, then: but although I knew about two further dates this year, those were in NYC and Philadelphia, and I had not heard about any repeat encounters in LA. What gives?

- Wherever and whenever this new thing was recorded, the actual release will realistically only ever be available to a tiny number of people* and is therefore destined to be little more than a footnote, at least as regards B's discography (the Wolf Eyes discography is presumably full of stuff like this** - and that's not even getting into the far more complicated matter of discographies for Olson and Young individually). It's still worth mentioning, though... as for the question: is it an album or an EP?, that's the sort of thing which would never get settled, no matter how many collectors weighed in on it. The designation "mini-album", which I found pretty useful as a teenage record collector in the '80s, has long since fallen into disuse, and inevitably it's now the case that one person's album is another's EP***. There being no hard and fast method for determining which category a given release falls into, it is doubtless one of those things which "you can just tell" - meaning, of course, that in practice people will vehemently disagree about such things (since each of them believes unswervingly that his - almost inevitably, his - instincts on the matter are "superior" to everyone else's). That's collection mania for you... I'm quite happy to sit this one out, even while I'm quite charmed that such an item exists.

2. The BBC Prom concert which is due to take place in just over a month's time will very probably have to happen without me; when I first wrote about this, I just assumed that I would attend... but that has looked increasingly unlikely ever since. The sad reality is that I hardly know anybody in London any more, and the hassle of getting up there, into the centre, out again and all the way home afterwards is quite considerable. At the same time, London is so prohibitively expensive these days that renting somewhere to stay overnight is not really an option, or at least not which I'm prepared to countenance. If I knew anybody who would go with me, or indeed if I still had a direct line to B. himself and could arrange to meet up with him afterwards, this would absolutely be something worth doing. As it is, unfortunately, listening to it on the radio seems like by far the more sensible option. Sad but true :( 

3. Continued (sporadic) efforts to get hold of the Czech box set Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013, as previously discussed most recently in March (and in rather more detail last October), are foundering - having looked quite promising at one point. There does not appear to have been any real attempt to distribute the release outside of Eastern Europe, which needn't come as any great surprise I suppose; and although some websites closer to home did begin listing the album at sane-ish prices, that looks to have been fairly short-lived and said prices have begun spiralling upwards into insane territory again. It is of course possible to buy the album directly from the label, or from another source based in Eastern Europe, but the very reasonable price for the actual album would be decidedly offset by the punitive cost of getting it sent to the UK, especially since my country is no longer part of the EU (don't...), and thus now levies extra taxes on top of the shipping cost. I do really want to buy this album, but I reckon it's going to have to wait until someone in the UK wants to sell it to me...

* In principle it could get released on CD or in digital form, but in practice, what would be the point? This type of release is all about owning something strictly limited, not about actual musical content. That's always been the case, and anyone who tries to say otherwise is kidding themselves...

** I haven't exactly checked, but that certainly appears to be the case - and it is what I would assume anyway. It's a (very) long time since I made any attempt to keep up with this kind of stuff, but I'm not completely unschooled in it: in my twenties and early thirties I did take an active interest in the industrial / noise music scene and even dabbled in collecting it, so I do remember the pull of tiny, hand-numbered and -crafted editions featuring borderline-unlistenable sounds. (Some of it worked as music, some of it didn't; some of it was really never intended that way.) Anyone who wanted to amass a comprehensive collection of, say, Olson's American Tapes label now would need a huge amount of money and patience, and a whole house to put it all in - and what would one then do with it, besides sitting on it and waiting for the optimal time to cash in by selling it to some Japanese fanatic?

*** This has nothing to do with length/ running time, as one might think: for example, the grindcore band Agoraphobic Nosebleed has put out multiple "albums" which last less than twenty minutes - absolutely standard for this sub-genre, among others - and an "EP" which lasts more than twice as long. There are ways of looking at this question according to which this does indeed seem to make sense, but as noted above, it's always going to end up being subjective, and giving rise to bad-tempered dispute.