A Lark Ascending

There was far more jazz released in mainland Europe than the UK in the 70s/80s. My LP copies of 'A Love Supreme' and 'Africa/Brass' plus several Miles discs from the mid-60s were imports. I remember going to the FNAC store in Brussels in the mid-80s and being stunned by the availability of records I'd only seen as sleeves in coffee table books. Bought the Miles Blackhawk 2 LP there (and 'The Shape of Jazz to Come' in Berlin - again, never seen (at that time, I'm sure it had a release in the early 60s) in the English provinces, though I imagine there were import copies in Mole, Rays and HMV Oxford Street from time to time). So maybe the sea of plenty owed more to a wider release policy - mainland Europe has always been more welcoming to jazz than the UK (ask the UK's musicians!!!!). In 1997 I drove to Austria and South Germany. I recall the most amazing first floor CD shop in Munich, almost hidden from view. A huge floor of jazz and classical where I could easily have spent vast sums. Even more extraordinary were a couple of supermarkets...yes supermarkets...out of town in Vienna where I picked up newly released Kenny Garrett, Bill Frisell and Tomasz Stanko discs. As for the riches you mention in London, well yes, there were some very good shops. But London is atypical of Britain as a whole. I'd only get up there once or twice a year at most. Out in the provinces things were much more sparse. I have to stress that I'm talking with regard to shops selling new releases. I've never haunted second-hand record (or book) shops - being a history teacher I hate old, used things!!!!! I think there are still second hand record shops operating here - it's the ones selling new things that have all but vanished.

My experience in record shops of pretty limited interaction - everyone is burrowing away looking for their own choice of CDs, no different than people hunting down their provisions in a supermarket. Yes, I've known shops where I've got to know the owner and had a nice chat - but it's hardly the norm for most buyers. You are also forgetting that by purchasing online rather han trawling the record stores we might be reducing isolation and increasing social interaction. The time liberated from hunting for records can be used reconnecting with family and friends. I don't spend a fraction of the time searching for CDs online than I used to spend on a trip to town on a purchasing hunt.

I agree with MG - I don't think I'm anywhere close to being done with exploring. Even in what might initially seem like the small world of jazz there's still lots of leads unexplored. The 'That Devilin' Tune' discs demonstrate wondrous worlds I've hardly touched. Then there's the endless arrival of new music (which I appreciate is not to everyones taste). And then there's all that stuff beyond jazz. I find those journeys much easier to set off on under the new web-based approaches than they were in the days when I bought from record stores. The breadth of my listening was greatly enhanced by web-based buying c. 2000. Downloading is only opening more possibilities. It's hard to move away from a way of life that has given us so much pleasure. But anyone seriously interested in continuing to explore music beyond the immediately popular is going to be forced into the new model very quickly. But I'm sure most of us who lived for some time in the days of record shops will leave them behind with some sadness. Why not use both stores and online sources? Well, I did in the early 00's. But in the UK the stores have all but disappeared. The main ones that up until a couple of years back carried some things of interest (HMV, Virgin [now Zavvi]) now focus purely on the big selling records. There are a handful of specialist shops - mainly classical - which I would use but the nearest is a two hour drive away. The only dedicated jazz shop I know outside London is a good five hours away in Bath (which also has two good classical shops). The nearest cities to me - Nottingham and Sheffield - no longer have shops that carry anything beyond the obvious in the jazz/folk/world/classical area. There are a few independents left but they are almost exclusively pop/rock based. I don't think the UK ever had stores with the sort of jazz selection that I recall seeing in Paris, Brussels, Munich or Berlin....let alone New York! But in the 70s/80s even relatively small towns often had a record shop that had an interesting selection (dictated by what was in print in the UK). I recall buying a lot of jazz from Syd Booth's in Mansfield, a town that didn't even have a book shop! And in the late 80s/early 90s when the megastores stared opening as CDs took off they often started with substantial jazz sections (I recall a new HMV in Leicester that had endless wonders for a year or so). But that has all scaled right back. I just see it as an age that has now passed. The irony is that there is more music available more readily than ever before in my life.

I agree with MG - I don't think I'm anywhere close to being done with exploring. Even in what might initially seem like the small world of jazz there's still lots of leads unexplored. The 'That Devilin' Tune' discs demonstrate wondrous worlds I've hardly touched. Then there's the endless arrival of new music (which I appreciate is not to everyones taste). And then there's all that stuff beyond jazz. I find those journeys much easier to set off on under the new web-based approaches than they were in the days when I bought from record stores. The breadth of my listening was greatly enhanced by web-based buying c. 2000. Downloading is only opening more possibilities. It's hard to move away from a way of life that has given us so much pleasure. But anyone seriously interested in continuing to explore music beyond the immediately popular is going to be forced into the new model very quickly. But I'm sure most of us who lived for some time in the days of record shops will leave them behind with some sadness.

Should be interesting. Back in the late 70s/early 80s when I was first getting to know jazz I regularly made the treck to Mole (King's Cross Station was my route back to the frozen north Midlands). I picked up import copies of things like 'Miles Smiles' and 'My Funny Valentine' there at a time when only a fraction of the Miles catalogue was domestically available in the UK. Hard to imagine now!

It all depends how many people want an 'on demand' printed CD rather than a download. I suspect the numbers will be few and will decrease as time goes on and as downloading becomes increasingly accepted. The 2009 Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music (and whatever you think of it as a guide, it's hardly renowned for embracing the faddish) has a couple of pages at the front covering downloading and reassuring readers that downloading will not stop their chickens laying eggs or their cows giving milk. I'm pretty convinced that any 'on demand service' will be a transitional stage whilst those suspicious of downloads are gradually won over. The future lies in high quality downloads with high quality album art available as a pdf or something similar. For those who can see beyond the scare stories the future is already here. What's not to like about this from a small scale company that revolves around a single group?: http://www.gimell.com/recording-The-Tallis...lliam-Byrd.aspx Still has a CD option - but I wonder for how long. Maybe the one thing that might keep the physical CD alive is the need to have something to sell at gigs. But even then it would be pretty easy to sell a card with credit to buy the download when online from the home store. Would solve the musician's problem of having to bring boxes of CDs to gigs.

Ha! They were clearly following the example of BBC Radio 3! Surprised they didn't have restricted opening hours on the jazz section, limited to late at night! However much we may regret the passing of a way of delivering recordings that has been part of our lives for a long time, I'd say the new model is far more conducive to diversity and specialist interest.

I loved the 35 years I spent trawling round record shops on a Saturday. I did find a few knowledgeable and helpful people working in them - but more often than not they had little specific knowledge. But I don't bemoan the demise of record shop as it has become in the UK. More a DVD shop with a couple of racks of mixed 'specialist music'. There are a handful of more specialised shops left in the UK (mainly classical) - and I read recently that the chap at Rays has been let go by Foyles. I'm not sure if that means the shop too. The upside of the revolution for me (apart from the instant availability and cost savings of the new model) is that I no longer spend ages getting to town centres and then spending money on parking, cups of overpriced coffee and impulse buys. I have more time to listen, read, garden etc - and am spending far less money whilst buying much the same amount of music. If I'm typical of the once avid music shopper, then it's no wonder the record stores are dying. While I can agree with some of the sentiments of the linked article I hate the way it is written - it becomes not so much a consideration of the issue of the end of the record shop as a puff piece for the website. How many records we've reviewed (and how many I've written), how wonderful we are. I'm probably very old and very British but I come from a world where it is for others to tell you how good you are. I've noticed this bragadoccio on other sites too. Might work for selling cornflakes (Kellogg's are the best) but grates in what purports to be a serious article.

I know, no need to act like a schoolteacher. But he is a schoolteacher. Any more smart comments like that and I'll be ringing your parents.

Whilst respecting that there as a great deal of genuine analysis and debate going on in discussions about different versions, you also find a fair bit of posturing. 'Karajan? How can you possibly prefer Karajan to the sublime Klemperer version?' Heads into angels dancing on heads of pins country very quickly. Though I suspect it keeps the classical record industry afloat, endlessly issuing new Beethoven cycles, reissuing old Beethoven cycles or resurrecting historic Beethoven cycles that have never been heard on disc before. The good thing, however, for the ordinary record buyer is that there is such a glut of the standard repetoire on disc that it can now be had very cheaply. I bought a 'Ring' cycle in the early 90s - couldn't afford the ones that got the most stars but even the one I got cost an arm and a leg. Today you can get a Ring cycle for thruppence.

Thread title says 'from the likes of Columbia...'.

Yes, that's interesting. When I was buying classical records, there were only two pieces of which I had two versions. The Rodrigo guitar concerto, of which I greatly preferred the Narciso Yepes version to the Bream, and the Bloch violin concerto, and liked the Menuhin version a lot more than the Hyman Bress version on Supraphon. But I couldn't tell which was actually BETTER, just that the ones I preferred felt better to me. But it didn't make me a fan of HMV or Decca. Hm, my wife's got the Yepes somewhere. Think I'll dig it out if I can. MG I agree completely. I rarely buy more than one version of a classical work. Where I have (especially when moving to CD and going for a more modern version), I frequently end up seeking out the one I first heard. Very hard to hear past what I first heard as the way the music should sound. Totally subjective of course. I can understand how the perspective will be very different to a musician working from a score. I buy more than enough records as it is without getting sucked into 'comparing Furtwangler with Norrington with Ozawa' syndome (I might turn into David Mellor*!!!!!!). I'd rather go in search of a piece or compoer I've never heard before. [* "Since leaving politics, David Mellor has become a highly successful broadcaster and journalist. An avid record collector (his CD collection is estimated to be 30,000 plus)..."...and you thought we needed addiction therapy!]

With most music, painting, literature etc it then requires the brain to disrupt those patterns and defy the expectations set up by them. If jazz is about anything its about the notes landing where you don't always expect them. There's a line in Humphrey Lyttleton's 'Best of Jazz' where he talks of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith instinctively avoiding symmetry. I think you get that to varying degrees in most 'artforms' but I'd say it's one of the distinguishing qualities of jazz...and a reason why smooth jazz is so unsatisfying to the seasoned jazz listener.

I'm not wanting to start up the Euro/US copyright wars again, but in the new Jazzwise I notice Discovery records have slated for Jan 2009: Ellington - Black Brown and Beige Ella - Ellington Songbook Miles - Porgy and Bess Miles - Milestones Cannonball - Somethin' Else Sun Ra - Jazz in Silhouette. and a number of other famous recordings from '57-'58.

I'm not sure that's true - I think you do find brand loyalty in classical music. Especially to smaller companies which operate in a specific field. A label like Lyrita does have a dedicated following of people who will take a chance on an unknown name on the label because of the experience of the quality and nature of the other Lyrita records they've heard. Maybe if Lyrita recordings had broken onto the dance floor (Acid-English-Cowpat?) it would be as well known as Blue Note!!!! I'm often drawn to Hyperion recordings, for example, by the house style of the packaging. Which is as distinctive as Blue Note. The pdfs at Hyperion allow that element of the whole package to be passed on along with the music. The one big difference between classical music and jazz is that (for copyright lifetime at least) Kind of Blue only appears on Columbia; whereas Mahler 6 turns up all over the place (though not Karajan or Bernstein's Mahler 6).

Very true. The information can be had by googling round a bit, but its good to have it all printable. I've used Chandos, Naxos and Gimell a lot this year for classical music downloads and they provide high definition covers and pdfs of all documentation (most of which, frankly, I don't use). I downloaded a couple of Hyperion discs today from iTunes. Although there's no cover or notes there, the Hyperion site has a high definition copy of the cover plus a pdf of the liner details, notes, any libretto etc. Example: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/notes/67599-B.pdf I get the impression that there are people in the classical companies who both love the music and can see the future in downloading in a quality way. With jazz it seems that either the people in charge don't care about their assets that much or, where they do, have not clicked on to the potential of downloading as a quality route for distributing music.

I often see Julian and Phil Robson slugging it out on the central reservation by junction 25!

Short review from the Scotsman - sorry, tried to link but would not work: Cohen and Baron you know. Siegel plays tenor, bass clarinet and clarinet and is a member of the wonderful Partisans (mentioned earlier in this thread). He is also that rare beast, a jazz musician from Nottingham. Think the world of Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard.

I did cross country every week for a year - but it was approved skiving. We'd run out the school grounds and as soon as a hedge was hiding us have a nice 90 minute walk and chat in the countryside, sometimes stopping at my house where my mum gave us refreshments! We were happy. The PE staff were happy bucause they did not know what to do with us - with the weedy ones looking after themselves they could focus on those who could kick a ball straight. God knows what the risk assessment form would look like today for that approach.

This thread reminded me to get the June Christy! This record is not a Christmas disc but it does end with a gorgeous version of 'In the Bleak Midwinter' that emerges out of a mist of Impressionistic improvising: My favourite Xmas song; and just vote top of the Xmas carol pops in a poll od Britain's choirmasters. This 2CD is marvellous too, the perfect antidote to Cliff, Noddy and Roy:

I doubt if the 'print CD on demand' idea has much economic viability. Making a catalogue available permanently for download does - and some smaller companies are already doing this in classical music. Chandos - which has a very large catalogue - now has everything, including OOP material - available. I suspect the move by Camjazz to put its music (and its recently acquired Black Saint/Soul Note acquisitions) up on e-music is a similar move. I imagine the bigger companies are still playing the capitalist market game. Withholding music unlikely to make big sales now to wait for a day when a return of interest might generate bigger profits. At some point they will realise that this is not an option as illegal files of that catalogue circulate. Blue Note has much of its catalogue in digital form - its up there on iTunes. It remains to be seen if they pull those downloads when they delete the physical copies. An interesting indication of how awake they are to the massive change in the way music is being disseminated. If they'd any sense they'd also licence producing physical copies to an interested other party to produce limited runs or on-demand copies (as they do for vinyl release) to satisfy those who are not yet comfortable with downloads or downloading. Though I doubt if that solution would sustain itself for long.

Handel : Messiah Bach: Christmas Oratorio Always play these at Xmas. There's some marvellous Xmas folk music - good old gnarled finger in the ear stuff. And I finally tracked down a download of a disc of Swedish Xmas folk music after many rears by a band called Triptyk. I always buy a few Xmas discs each year. This year I've gone for: Ella and Kenny B work for me too. I love Nat King Cole doing Xmas too.

I've had this since it came out - not for Shearing (who I find a bit to bright and breezy for my taste) but for Louis Stewart. The first three discs are wonderful - a mixture of standards and tunes that were contemporary at the time (e.g. C. Corea things). Disc 4 is in a + orchestration setting. Not so fond of that one.

I don't think they'll exist five years from now...except for the equivalent of those companies who put out runs of vinyl for those who prefer that medium. I've gone over to (legal) downloads in 2008, only buying CDs if I can't find a download source.

That was me too. No wonder we ended up listening to Henry Cow records!