AllenLowe

Unless I am missing something here (which is entirely possible) we have missed what I would consider to be the best label, ever, for American vernacular music, and that is Document. Unfortunately all they issue now are CDRs, but it is worth tracking down old copies. But nothing in my lifetime matches what they accomplished.

I can tell you that I have heard Document CDRs that, even of very old material, are clearly degraded by changing to MP3s at some point; there is an increased graininess. But you need to think about what these companies are doing - they are transferring all their CDs to CDRs and digital audio takes up a lot of storage space, so they actually have a good reason to convert to MP3, as it saves an enormous amount of storage for them, which equals cash saved.

I know that, but there is no way to confirm, on these label-issued CDRs, that they are using direct digital transfers - and I have heard some that I am certain were not done direct (though note that a direct digital conversion to and from an MP3 is still a digital copying of digital files, and still results in sonic loss).

I return any CDR that is sold to me as a CD - I also do this on Discogs, and have never lost a complaint, which is why I always use Paypal. And also, I disagree about digital transfers - they are not always equal to the original, as I have heard on more than one occasion, including those things which are commonly sold now as collections of "greatest" albums; this could be due to various factors, they may have gone through an analog stage and used poor conversion (this is not as common as it used to be, but I have heard it on more than one occasion). This might happen on an LP transfer, but there are other ways it could happen. As a matter of fact I have heard transfers that sound like MP3s, so I suspect to save disc space they often save their catalogs in this format. ALSO - and maybe even more important, there are a lot of cheapo crap CDRs around, and these will not last. Also, I will not pay $15-20 for a CDR that they are paying maybe 50 cents a piece for. It's corrupt. Two labels I will not buy anymore are Document and Acrobat, which do nothing but CDRs now (when I wrote to Acrobat to complain they said they would sue me, and I answered "why, for telling the truth?" That was the last I heard from them).

I will probably have some time next month and I plan on doing same, reworking some things from the Centennial box. Will report back.

OK so I just got this… And now I don't have access to my RVG copy of this which was redone by van Gelder, and I like this very much but I don't think the sound is any better than the RVG mastering. Wouldn't Rudy have used his original tapes to remaster? I do wonder why the hell he did at it 7.5 IPs but that's another matter. Also another strange thing to me is that it's still not really well EQ'd. I do wonder about mastering engineers and what they do and don't hear. But still it's great to have it all in one place.

no I don't keep up. I always found Hubbard to have absorbed the worst lessons of the post-Clifford Brown/Lee Morgan school. Obviously he was a great player but there is just no nuance in his tone.

do we really need another Hubbard project? The guy plays like a cold-fish. Give me Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Randy Sandke, Frank Lacy.

I liked the first group, was it big black? And I had one weird experience with him that I consider positive. I was thinking at one point of trying to record with him as engineer, and though it never happened he actually responded to an email. Just almost never happens these days.

Tyshawn is a brilliant musician and composer. I am glad he is doing well as he has seemed, in the past, to be a troubled soul, but he is teaching at U Penn, has all kinds of commissions, and, as we see, has just won the Pulitzer.

I actually wasn't suggesting it wss done by Resonance but more likely some engineer along the way who thought he was making an an acoustical improvement. Probably a rock guy.

I think it is rape ideation because it substitutes a male fantasy of women's submissiveness, as though they want it whether they know it or not.

wait, is this in process? I have never seen these. On the other hand, I want to add something about people who complain about the Centennial box. I have found that a lot of what people consider to be bad transfers in various Victor/BMG reissues is actually bad equalization. Years ago I shocked Larry Gushee by playing back some of the BMG Morton, re-eq'd, and though I have not had a chance to do it, I wonder if the Centennial box has the same issue, because I believe the transfers were done by Lasker. And even in 1999 it was possible to do these in great sound; digital conversion has improved, but with old recordings like these if they were carefully done you probably would not hear the difference. I am uncertain, but we often blame things like No Noise, which I can say was DEFINITELY not the problem. It was engineers who thought you could roll off the highs as a method of noise reduction. Of course not everyone is like me and wants to go to the trouble of restoring the restoration. But I will say that 80 percent of the reissues I hear, even when well done, are poorly set in the final eq stages and are correctable.

I never could get through it though its value is in the people he interviewed; I would prefer to see the raw research instead of his weird and perverted comments about women who wet themselves in excitement while watching the music (as soon as I saw this somewhere in the text I closed the book). I really think he was a smart a-hole; he once also said that women who saw Miles spread their legs while they were watching him play. This is past disgusting to a level of rape ideation.

I am pretty certain that what we hear on the live recording is added, post production reverb. It just has that sound. It actually sounds a lot like the studio reverb. Which tells me that it was the same dumb engineer. I am willing to bet the house on it, that this was not just natural room Sound.

Actually, there are reverb removal programs, though I have no idea how effective they are - note, also, that on those samples I can hear the reverb even on the live recordings, which means some dumbshit engineer thought this was a good idea.

I love Resonance and Zev but listening to those samples is very difficult - even on the live stuff someone has added horrible reverb; it also sounds terrible in the studio; I find it unlistenable, and the eq is awful.

and there's lots more where this came from -

Rough mix from from a session on April 15; I am on tenor, Ray Suhy on guitar. Nick Jozwiak on bass, Shadow Atlas on drums. Very listenable, though it is not final. Working title is Utah Smith I am extremely proud of this performance; when jazz players try to be funky (and I have taken some flak here for suggesting this) they usually fall short. Truthfully, they rarely truly understand the old music this is based on. In jazz we like to praise our "elders" without having actually listened to them very much. Utah Smith was an evangelical guitarist, a pioneer of the country/blues style of fusion. Ray Suhy is the best guitarist I have ever heard, can play any and everything. This will be part of a 4 cd set coming out in 2 volumes in early September. It is not too late to get a heavy discount on pre-sale. Just don't tell Justin IV (or is it VI?).

be aware that the Frog reissue has some of the best sound I have heard on materials of this vintage.

definitely Lester singing; I've had that on CD for a long time. Certified by Loren Schoenberg who knows more about Prez than anyone.

Phil Freeman is an absolute idiot. He knows nothing about music, regularly says bizarre things about "inside" jazz performance, and blocked me on Facebook for disagreeing with him. Honestly, I wouldn't spend 2 cents on anything he writes. He just knows nothing about jazz. I would wait for Ben Young's book. Or just listen to the music. read this, and see if you want to spend any money on a big written by this guy; he hasn't a clue about Bird or Bebop (which he things is a music-school thing) - and how can you trust the opinion of ANY contemporary jazz writer he says these kind of things about Bird, that he lacks grit, etc.: "Anyway, listening to this mostly makes me think about why Charlie Parker’s music has never had the impact on me that it has had on so many others. Like, I can hear that he’s a virtuoso player, and I acknowledge his influence — he changed the way players after him approached composition, improvisation, and even their tone on their instruments. But any time I read about Parker being called the greatest saxophonist ever, or whatever, I always think Sure, for one particular value of “great.” "His melodically and harmonically adventurous, chord-flipping style (which he famously described as “playing clean and looking for the pretty notes”) is one way to play jazz. But it’s not the only way, by any means. Personally, I have always been more drawn to players with more rawness and grit to to their sound. And I don’t just mean free jazz. A lot of what Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and others — even more mainstream players like Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson — did in the 1960s was following in the footsteps of players like Illinois Jacquet, Big Jay McNeely, Red Prysock, Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and others. And that kind of music has always had a greater appeal to me than the slippery instrumental one-upmanship (Thelonious Monk, easily the greatest composer the movement produced, said, “We’re going to create something they [meaning fellow musicians] can’t steal, because they can’t play it”) of bebop. I think Jimmy Lyons is a hugely important figure, because he was able to take bebop ideas and import them into “free” or “avant-garde” settings. (I put “avant-garde” in quotes there because bebop itself was 100% avant-garde music when it first developed, in the 1940s.) "Charlie Parker was playing publicly as early as the mid-1930s, but didn’t break out on record until 1945, because of a World War II-era recording ban, and he died in 1955. He was hugely influential and inspirational during the roughly ten-year period that he was a major figure, and bebop was a fascinating phenomenon. Almost punk in its speed and aggressiveness, but extraordinarily demanding on a technical level, it was kind of a music-school thing. It’s the kind of music you get when a bunch of young, talented men get together in a room, night after night, and start showing off for each other. “Listen to what I came up with!” “Oh, yeah? Well, how about this?” And on and on, at lightning speed. Which is exactly why it continues to appeal to many young jazz musicians. "The Massey Hall concert was kind of the period at the end of the bebop sentence, though. The style was no longer any kind of revolution by 1953; in fact, all of its key ideas had been established by 1948, and sometimes I feel like its true legacy might be the pervasive attitude among jazz musicians that it’s the audience’s fault if they don’t like what they’re hearing. It was yesterday’s future. Personally, I’d rather listen to a lot of other things by Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach, and I just…don’t listen to Charlie Parker very often, and Bud Powell even less. But if you’ve never heard this concert — and there’s no reason why you should have! It’s from 70 years ago! — Hot House: The Complete Jazz at Massey Hall Recordings is worth checking out at least once." And I will add that Bird was on record with McShann before 1945.

you have talked me into it - now I hope they will do Duke's 1920s stuff; or maybe they have. The 1920s remains my favorite, the band is especially deep and loose.

Sorry I tried to post a picture and can't get it to work, also cannot delete this thread. Apologies

shouldn't the title of this thread be: "To What Classical Music Are You Listening?"