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..!)
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