Help!

 

I'm looking for something... but before I get to that, for those of you who might be looking for a quick and easy blast of Braxton on a Sunday in late February, here's a video of Bobby Spellman's Free Brass Trio playing Comp. 23j outside a record store in Newburyport, MA, in April 2016. Spellman himself does a sterling job on the written line, and although the support isn't quite in the same class, I'm completely with them in spirit. Just the thing to liven up a rainy and miserable Sunday! (Well - it is here. For those of you reading this in other parts of the world: hope your weekend weather is better than ours...)

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So, the request: I am trying to locate an online rip of B's quintet performance from the 1976 Newport Jazz Festival. I don't think I even knew about the existence of this event until last year, when I was listening to Four Compositions (Washington, D​.​C​.​) 1998 - a fabulous album, by the way - and reading Bill Shoemaker's notes, which explain that (the work now known as) Comp. 70 was originally written for - well, funnily enough, for the 1976 Newport Jazz Festival. The working group was of course basically a quartet at that point - Lewis Holland Altschul - but this was augmented relatively frequently* by Muhal Richard Abrams, and in the case of the work in question, B. composed it with this specific quintet in mind. There was no official recording made of the performance, and so it wasn't until more than twenty years later that Comp. 70 was properly documented... anyway, I read that much last year, but what I didn't realise at the time was that there was already an entry in the discography for the original recording, which was (apparently) offered for download in 2011. The link included in that archival entry no longer resolves to a valid page, indeed it doesn't even seem to redirect to a valid page; but once I could see where to look, it wasn't hard to find the right page within the "Wolfgang's" site.

Clips from the performance - with a pretty good sound - can be sampled right there. However, it doesn't look as if the full files are available for download as such, only for streaming; and that is limited to members. I have more than enough music to listen to without signing up for a service promising access to thousands of live shows; the "free trial" is one of those deals which is only available if you first hand over your credit card details, and I'm not about to do that, so this was a dead end. [Besides... I'm not convinced I like the look of the site. They also sell merch - in B's case, they have some of his CDs for sale, but at what look to me fairly outrageous prices.]

Still, now that I knew about the existence of this 1976 Carnegie Hall concert... I figured it had to be around somewhere. The Yale Library collection (as detailed in these pages last year) contains more than 750 recordings, so obviously it'll be in there... right? No, apparently not. - And when I checked the list of my tape collection, it's not there either. Now, what's going on here? There is a live recording of well-established provenance, with confirmed date, venue, occasion and personnel, which became available in one place only thirty-five years after it was recorded, and it's never been available anywhere else? That borders on the preposterous, yet that is seemingly what we're dealing with... anyway, regardless, if anybody does happen to have a copy of this recording, could they please let me know..? That would be awfully well appreciated :)

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Just briefly going back to that video clip linked up above: it is, unfortunately, one of several such to have attracted identical "trolling" comments from a Youtuber using the handle rinahall, who seems to have some sort of personal grudge against the maestro (people in such situations always claim to have arrived at their extreme positions after doing "some research" - as here - but invariably give themselves away, by going way too far with their supposed conclusions: "instrumental technique is close to zero"; is that right?! LMFAO). Bobby's answer is about the best I've seen; in other places, some people have attempted to argue, and I was tempted to do so myself when I first came across this nonsense last year, but what on earth is the point? The best course of action is surely to ignore it altogether... still, it did get me thinking: is this in any way, shape or form related to whatever (ostensibly) caused Jason G. to close Restructures when he did**? I never did really find out what B. was supposed to have said or done, but whatever it was, it has not led to a mass cancellation of him by the musical community... far from it, if the events in Darmstadt last year are anything to go by... nevertheless, it clearly pissed some people off at the time, and I did vaguely wonder whether "rinahall" might be one of them. Then again... who the hell cares?

* Muhal sat in with the group on multiple occasions around this time, both before and after Holland and Altschul left. One such occasion would appear to have been a short residency in Minneapolis, a few months after the Carnegie Hall concert - although on the later occasion, no new material was presented. (I have long since "firmed up" my tentative conclusions about that bootleg recording.)

** I have said before that JG must have had some other, more personal reason(s) for acting as he did, and just used the "storm in a teacup" as a pretext for it. I still think that's the most likely explanation, but (of course) only he knows for sure...