So: pretty much straight after I outline my current lines of enquiry for the blog, something else comes up... but isn't that always the way? - and obviously I did know that it would happen; I even said as much at the time.
Besides, this present matter is effectively a continuation of a previously-stated problem, albeit approached this time from a different angle. Here, the issue is not to try and identify individual musical pieces (or fragments thereof), but rather it consists in a challenge which is surely familiar to any serious fans of any group or musician: a recording turns up which claims to be one thing but may possibly be something else. What do we make of it?
The background to this: in discussing recently which of the NBH recordings McC and I did and didn't have between us, it emerged that neither of us has a copy of the TCF "official bootleg" BL006: Orchestra (Paris) 1978. This latter purports to present at least part of the Paris performance of the same Creative Orchestra programme captured for posterity on the album Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978 (which, in turn, is like a "new and improved" version of the '76 Arista album, featuring a different all-star group playing extended versions of most of the pieces - made possible by the longer preparation and rehearsal time); like the vast majority of the official boots, it is no longer available from TCF. As to how or why neither of us had already got it: in McC's case this was an accidental oversight, which is to say that he thought he did have it until he actually went to check. In my case, I can no longer remember why I don't have it; back in the day, I grabbed most of these recordings as soon as they were made available, omitting only those which I was sure I already had. BL006 did not fall into that category; but for some reason I either didn't download it, or did, but managed to misplace it at some point. In any case, it's not among my digital music files now (and if there ever was an actual explanation for that, it's long since disappeared in a haze of ganja smoke... I wasn't at my most lucid at that point in time, as I'm sure some of the blog posts from that era make abundantly clear).
Now: around the same time we were discussing this, McC first tipped me off about a new online resource for B's live recordings - an actual official resource, that is. This was first flagged up on the TCF site almost a year ago, but McC only came across a few months ago (and of course I wasn't aware of it at all): B. himself, and longtime "super-collector" Hugo de Craen, had presented TCF with a vast treasure-trove of live recordings, which were passed in turn to Yale Library once digitised. In the first instance, this was only available on a "sample recordings" basis, with access to anything else subject to a formal request being made; but within the last few days it has been officially unveiled and is now supposed to be fully accessible and functional*.
So, once we'd established that neither of us had this particular recording, McC made a request to the library to see whether it was available. He obtained two (unindexed) digital files, both of which purported to be from May 16th 1978, at Espace Cardin in Paris. If correctly labelled, then, these comprised the source recording(s) which had presumably been used for the BL006 boot as discussed above. The question, as also indicated above, is: were they correctly labelled? Did they contain what they are meant to contain, or are we dealing with another date from the same tour? McC passed them on to me, and I set about seeing what conclusions I could draw (if any).
***
My initial impressions - formed without even listening to the music itself, but simply by skipping through the files in order to see which compositions they contained - saw me declaring prematurely to McC that "whatever else this is, it's not the Paris '78 official boot - at least not if the accepted tracklist for the latter is at all accurate". Part of this was based on a literal understanding of the two files - the longer of which is labelled Part 2 - being presented in "set order", i.e. with the pieces in the shorter file representing the earlier part of the recording. That appeared to make sense on the face of it, as the first file (on which the sound quality is fairly atrocious**) begins in the middle of Comp. 55 and continues with Comp. 45; in the truly random nature of such things, this is then followed up by a totally-unrelated French news bulletin, and finally by an excerpt from what sounds like a '70s fusion concert***, before the file ends. The second file, far more listenable in terms of sound quality, comprises Comps. 59, 51 & 58. That programme, in that order, follows the template established by the official release recorded in Cologne - and I am disinclined to think that B. would have varied the setlist from one venue to the next, although of course I could be wrong#.
But having said that, the listing for BL006 places the second half of the programme above first, and follows it with Comp. 45 - or at least, that is the order in which the tracks are presented for the bootleg release, which does not necessarily indicate that they were played in that order. Still, without really thinking this through, I worked on the assumption at first that the Paris concert did have a different running order - as you can see, I changed my mind about the plausibility of that - and the putative order for these "Yale files" seemed like part of an argument for these being from a different recording; or possibly for their belonging to two different recordings, since there was always the possibility of the three tracks in the "Part 2" file being from the Paris concert, and the incomplete file having been sourced from another performance again... that wasn't beyond the bounds of plausibility... or was it?
The other thing that led me to conclude so swiftly that the Yale files are not the same recording as the BL006 boot was the relative track lengths. Initially I had said to McC that they were totally different, but I realised then that I was actually looking in completely the wrong place for my comparison, i.e. comparing the timings for the compositions on the Yale files with the Köln album, not with the bootleg. That was just a mistake: after all, why should the readings be the same length from one night to the next, necessarily? Of course the head arrangements (etc) will be basically the same across the duration of the tour, but since this is a big band full of improvisers, the actual performances could vary quite a lot. Once I'd straightened that out, I started leaning towards the idea that "Part 2" very probably was taken from the same recording as BL006, but that "Part 1" was still something else: here, the timings for Comp. 45 didn't seem to match up whichever way I looked at them. But then, I still hadn't actually listened to the music at this stage and once I did, I might well end changing my mind again.
The following day, I got the chance for a proper uninterrupted listen and made some notes. The first thing that got established: there don't appear to be any dropouts, so any timings which can be gleaned from the recordings are the same as when the pieces were played. These don't match the timings listed for BL006, but they are not all that far off (depending on how one measures Comp. 45, as per below) - and besides, how reliable are the ones listed online anyway? That, I observed, is something we will never know until one of us gets hold of the official boot.
If we suppose that there is no complete recording (of whatever concert is represented in "Part 1") in circulation, and that Comp. 55 is only to be found in truncated form - missing its first half - then it's entirely possible that anybody wanting to release the recordings on TCF would have lopped that bit off, prior to release; though even this seemed somewhat questionable, since I vaguely remembered that when they first started putting the bootlegs out, the TCF guys said something to the effect of not making any attempt to tidy the files up, rather just chucking them out as they found them. And of course BL006 would have been one of the first batch, to which this haphazard approach would have applied. Anyway (I reasoned), supposing that, it is quite plausible that the files could have been released including just four numbers, albeit out of sequence; in which case, in principle these Yale recordings could represent the same performances as those in BL006 - although that still doesn't account for the different timings.
Now, I had also listened to the Köln album again by this point (for the first time in years) and the main thing I took from that is that in this context, trying to establish a "beginning" for Comp. 45 is pretty much a matter of sticking a pin into a rather long transition phase. Part of my original certainty that the timings for this number didn't match up at all - between the rendition to be found on the "Yale Part 1" file and the listing for BL006 - stemmed from my having initially located the beginning of the piece at precisely the point where its distinctive main theme is first stated. But the Köln album includes quite a bit of music in disc 1/track 2 after the end of Comp. 55, then places the next index in the middle of the transition phase which follows it; Hat tend to be a bit haphazard with their indices in such cases, and usually add a liner note along the lines of "they are only for playback convenience". In this instance, track 3 on disc one - Comp. 45 - begins several minutes before the theme itself is first played. So of course if I really wanted to compare the length of this number as it appears in the Yale file with the stated length of 45 on BL006, I needed to allow for quite a bit of slippage in terms of where one might decide to "start" it##. But, looking at the two more sensible options available to me - the unedited Yale file could not have been used, as that would give a time of 28.15 (not including brief applause), which is way longer than the 25.04 cited for the BL006 version of this number - I ended up with a "long estimate" of 24.32 (if you say that 45 begins right at the end of 55, and include the entire transition phase) and a "short estimate" of 23.15. When I was actually listening to the file in real time, my impression was that I wanted to regard the brass freakout that follows the climax of 55 as unrelated to what comes next, and count the beginning of Comp. 45 as being the low-pitched sounds which begin a little later in the file, suggestive of something new happening. That was just my take on it... but like I say, whichever way you slice it up, you don't end up with a track length of 25.04 unless you place the beginning somewhere really random, i.e. while the band is still quite clearly playing (written material from) Comp. 55.
Part 2 of the Yale files is rather more straightforward, as previously implied. Comp. 59 lasts 21.30, give or take a few seconds, although it may have been longer in the performance ( - we don't know how much is clipped off the beginning: the file begins in medias res and we could have missed one or two seconds, or...). This is longer than the stated time of 21.10 for the boot. Comp. 51 lasts 10.18 (shorter than the boot) and Comp. 58 is 8.50, plus applause (also shorter). At this point it becomes really tempting to state "definitively"### that these are two different performances - regardless of where you put the indices, those three tracks total about 42 mins on the BL006 boot (supposedly...) and more than a minute less on the Yale file. But of course if BL006 includes a bit more at the beginning of the first track - and has the indices placed differently from where I would put them - we could still be dealing with the exact same recording, presented differently.
In other words... after quite a lot of time and effort, I'd concluded basically nothing. For the benefit of anyone who has both read this far, and hasn't personally attempted the sort of detective work I was undertaking here... you can now get a sense, I hope, of all the various ways in which you can mangle your head with this kind of research. The more you look into it, the harder it is to be sure about anything. Weird as it might sound, though, I actually enjoy it - so long as I can find time for it, and don't get interrupted much^; if you can't say as much, just don't even try it..! Your sanity could depend on that XD
Now... has anybody out there got the BL006 files?!
* My colleague has been checking this out, so I'll take his word for it. Me, I'm too scared: I could just be sucked into a black hole from which I might never emerge, and it's not as I don't already have a backlog of music to listen to. I expect I will get round to it eventually, though; in the meantime, it's very encouraging to know that this resource exists, for various reasons...
** I am pretty much the last person to get overly fussy about the audio quality of live recordings; in this case, the problem is not so much the audible hiss which accompanies the earlier portion of the music, but just the fact that it's so muffled and quiet. The listener can more or less hear what is being played, whilst never being able to say confidently that the whole ensemble is audible. The second file - which is to say, the second set from whichever date it actually was, because 58 surely has to have been the closer - has no such problem and is far more readily listenable.
*** Not that it matters at all, because the clip really doesn't belong here, but the best guess I could come up with was that this excerpt is taken from a live rendition of "Watermelon Man" by Herbie Hancock (the reworked electric version, from Head Hunters). Even I am not about to show my workings on this one ;-)
# Admittedly, my principal supporting evidence for this assertion dates from more than a decade later: Eugene (1989) and the official boot Creative Orchestra (Portland) 1989 (released in two parts as BL024/-025) share the exact same programme. Whether B. was already thinking along the same lines in 1978 is open to question, but it's partly just a gut feeling I have: it makes so much more sense to have Comp. 45 close out the first set, then send the audience out into the night with the joyous Comp. 58 still ringing in their ears. (Just listen to that rapturous applause! who in their right mind would want to follow that?!)
## By this point it was also becoming very clear how much difference there really might be from one performance to the next: the Yale file, wherever it's from, includes a drum solo as the final part of the transition phase from 55 to 45, and this does not occur on the actual album at all.
### - anything but, actually, but you know what I mean ;-)
^ This represents growth, progress..! Pre-diagnosis I could not have tolerated any interruption at all when I was "onto something" - even if that did turn out not to lead anywhere... who sez us old dogs can't learn new trix XD
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