David Ayers

Been spending time with two contrasting recordings recently and wondered who else people here might follow. So on Spotify I have been rediscovering Pure Fantasy by Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia. I bought the original LP and no longer have it. It made it to CD as Nightwatch, as I discovered only recently. Jazz-rock with a lot of interesting flavors. https://open.spotify.com/album/5niyGUY07Vn5nKu5ozYP9K?si=nfAfIJruTnCf5GLMyWAegw&dl_branch=1 Much more recent and in a contrasting vein, I've been listening to Sarah Gail Brand 's Deep Trouble with Paul Rogers and Mark Sanders, which I got from Bandcamp. Such a beautiful, clean and subtle trombonist, fantastic group, and a lovely close recording even though it is recorded live. https://sarahgailbrand.bandcamp.com/album/deep-trouble Outside the very well-known female vocalists, who else do people here recommend?

Assuming that they can sell CDs at all, which judging by this reissue program they can, it seems like a good idea to pull out these two titles. I hope that we can avoid another “is it legit?“ debate…

KOB is like an infection. I own multiple copies and I don’t even care for it. I’ve got quite a lot of duplicate Miles even though I’ve generally never been that interested in him - apart from one track (!). Also, I don’t sell vinyl of things I ‘replace’ on CD. That’s not real duplication. Also, CD box sets usually break up individual albums so I don’t see that as duplication - whichever you buy first. I think I’ve got just one identical duplicate - for some reason I’ve got two copies of the original Three for Shepp. I wonder why that last one never saw much CD release?

In the UK at least. according to europadisc.co.uk

666 is already on its way to Mordor

some wannabe who never made it?

👍

On a related note, I noticed one of the local vinyl stores had a sale bin - £10 a pop. Hardly a give-away compared to the um old days...

Thank you.

I accessed this via phone. Some duplicated links. Some dead links both internally and externally. I couldn’t find the OOP set discographies at all. I can’t easily imagine anyone spending much time on this site. Mosaic has just four products for sale. Once you know what they are and have decided whether or not to buy, would you really keep going back to e.g. scroll down the page of Jazz Greats or check whether a dead link is now working? Is that how any of us approach any other website? The only plus is a significant reduction in international shipping costs. Even on that, I wonder why they couldn’t have done that ages ago - it certainly affected sales. That would have been much more customer focussed than the spammy emails.

Yes - on Spotify

I think what I’m saying is that I’m used to deciding for myself how and whether to deal with this kind of thing, and that everyone can decide for themselves. Re. counter-cultural idiosyncrasies, I remember when I was growing up that Thor Heyerdahl and Erich von Däniken were common talking-points and seemed not easily distinguishable.

I’m long familiar with these topics (as a professional scholar) re. e.g. Pound et al. I’m not going to set out my stall on that here. Anyone can decide whether and how to engage with any artist based on feeling about their opinion. In the case of EP, maybe some are disappointed that their assumptions about the leftist nature of this sub-genre are not confirmed. Not only does it not surprise me, but it is of a piece with a strain of autodidacticism found in other artists of that generation (think ley lines, Wilhelm Reich, LSD, Ron Hubbard, etc. etc.). So - yeah. EP’s my neighbor, so I’m not going to bale on him.

Kofsky mentions the Shepp/Baraka leafleting in his Black Nationalism/John Coltrane book, and I have always known it, but I don’t know where you’d look for full information.

He is said to have joined in with Jones/Baraka in his anti Semitic period. They are reported as doing anti-Semitic street agitation together.

I guess EP has always had this side. His label is named after “Psi phenomena”. Discourses of hate and/or violence are one thing (Shepp? Gayle?); paranoid conspiracy theories without those things are a bit less harmful.

I wonder how new classical vinyl can sell at such a premium.

Is something going on with new classical vinyl. The one at this link was the cheapest I could find. https://www.propermusic.com/cc72840-shostakovich-tchaikovsky-violin-concertos.html

Mosaic has done a small number of original releases, in fact. On licensed reissues, I suspect that the license is sold for a fixed sum and not on a royalty basis.

PostNL is slooooow....

So is this the Eleventh Commandment or the First Amendment to the Ten? Asking for a friend. “Thou may rip but if thou seeest Billy/Duke/Pops (insert name here) round or near thine ownmost gaff or within a few clicks bung him threefold of tenners and be on thine way mutely and meekly.” And by the way somebody should have explained the morality of the limited edition to Mosaic a long time ago...

Sad but true. Don’t get me started. Exception for Downbeat. Anything reviewed there I don’t need to hear. Except for the ‘sad’ part. Late to that particular party. Though I believe they have won prizes for the most meaningless uses of the words ‘tonal’ and ‘Stockhausen’.

He said he was going to get tested for Covid last year and we haven’t heard from him since.

My reading of the law is that £135 is the threshold. Below that the websites are supposed to collect the VAT on behalf of HMG. The big ones do - Amazon, eBay - but others escape for now and I’m guessing will continue to do so if they are located outside the UK. We’ll see.

I...