ArtSalt

I've been encoding my CD collection to FLAC on the Bluesound Vault 2 since last December and I am nearly there with the exception of most Mosaic box sets that I need to edit the artist and song titles as the metadata for these sets do not exist in the ether. The one exception is Louis Armstrong and the All Stars Colombia and RCA Victor Live Recordings which ripped like a dream. Last night I decided to go for it and purchased the Miles Davis Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection in sample rate 96/24 and FLAC format from HD Tracks. I am quite intrigued and looking forward to giving this a serious audition this evening with a couple of G&T's in hand. The ease at which you can search for artists and explore the music before you buy seems to me a very compelling argument to start purchasing music from these services. You miss out on the booklets and physical packaging, but it feels like getting close to the essence of the music, stripped away from artifact. Okay, the breadth of the selections are still not fully there in terms of completeness of catalogues e.g. Blue Note, but eventually this will likely be addressed. I know a lot of people have made a further jump into online streaming services and no longer buy music for keeps. It does seem to me the tide of online digital music sourcing cannot be held back.

According to The Telegraph, Dylan is ignoring his Nobel Prize: By Charlotte Runcie: The Swedish Academy committee that awards the Nobel Prize has apparently still been unable to contact Bob Dylan about his receipt of the honour. On Thursday, Dylan gave a concert in Las Vegas and didn’t mention the fact that he had just won the world’s most prestigious literary award. He didn’t acknowledge it on Friday when he performed in Coachella, either. But what happens if Dylan continues to screen the academy's calls? Jean-Paul Sartre is the only known winner of the literature prize to have declined the award voluntarily; he had written a letter to the committee in 1964 asking not to be considered at all, but these were the days before email, and the letter arrived when they had already decided to give it to him that year. "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner," he complained at the time. "A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form." It was rumoured, though never confirmed, that he later asked for the prize money anyway. Other writers have declined it because they feared persecution. The Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not travel to Stockholm for his ceremony in 1970, because he was concerned that the Soviet Union would not allow him to return afterwards. The committee refused Solzhenitsyn’s request for a public ceremony at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow, so he initially turned down the prize, but formally accepted it in 1974 after he was exiled by the Soviet regime. Nobel snubs generally go the other way: famously lauded writers who have found themselves ignored by the committee include Vladimir Nabokov, JRR Tolkien, WH Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. But although Sartre may have refused the prize, the Nobel committee still listed him as the winner. "The fact that he has declined this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award,” they said at the time. In other words, while it is possible to refuse to accept the prize money (currently a cheque for $900,000), it isn't possible to refuse the title. According to the statutes of the Nobel foundation, Nobel prizes cannot ever be returned or rescinded. Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, emphasised the fact that Dylan has won it whether he acknowledges it or not: "If he doesn't want to come [to the prize ceremony], he won't come,” she said. “It will be a big party in any case and the honour belongs to him." So, Bob Dylan can ignore the academy all he likes, but the award is still listed in his name. Whether or not he makes an appearance at the ceremony, and at which we will be invited to give a lecture, he will always be known as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature.

That's a right-orooni bourbon arooni hellzappopin' alreeeet! He seems to have been neglected on the reissue front for a sometime, looking forward to this!

Now they've opened the doors to pop rock singers, who'll be next? Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Tom Russell, Pete Townsend, Shane MacGowan.... Dylan did write a novel, well "prose poetry" with Tarantula. From our perspective now, the rock pop world as the most dominant cultural force of the late 20 the century has faded into novelty acts and a few big stadium rock bands. It has gone the same way as the big bands. It is no longer at the vanguard of popular culture. The idealism of the 60s was already having the proverbial taken out of it by the arrival of punk. Does Dylan seem important or relevant these days, as an artistic force of nature? No, but what rock pop singer song writer can, the world has moved on and the self centered baby boomer absorption in rock music that has been exposed for what it always was: an evolutionary dead end. Entertainment, as a cultural force it is spent.

Yes and no.....there is overlap of course, artists such as Noel Coward. Here's The Spectator's opinion on Dylan's Nobel Prize by Guy Dammann: Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature. And quite right too. But many people seem discomfited by the news, as if the award might represent a token gesture by the Swedish Academy. It doesn’t. The award is serious and we should take it seriously. The protests seem to fall into two camps. The first camp argues that Dylan is a musician, not a poet, and that therefore the award, while being made to a great artist, is a category mistake. The second camp grants that Dylan can be considered a poet, but that his poetry does not merit being ranked alongside that of Yeats, Eliot, Pasternak, Brodsky, Tranströmer and others. The first argument does not identify a category error so much as exemplify one. For the categorical separation of music and poetry is itself a mistake; a catastrophe, even, and so misguided that only a complete suspension of our critical faculties can allow us to support it. Granted, our ideas of poetry and music have during the course of history come apart. But how have poets and musicians responded to this absurdity? By trying to bring the two back together. The greatest poets have sought to make their poetry as musical as possible, not by setting them to music necessarily, but by bringing out the musical qualities of language. It is language’s music, after all, which makes poetry poetry. In turn, the greatest musicians have sought to make their music as poetic as possible, by enriching it with images and ideas which their compositional ingenuity has spun into gleaming jewels which light up our world and stretch our ability to feel it. But without poetry, music is just facile play. The singer-songwriter, then, is modernity’s absurdly convoluted name for the poet. That the term is one of implied praise shows the low esteem in which we hold ‘mere’ singers and cynical, profit-driven songwriters. But these shifting values distract us from the fact that Homer and Hesiod were singer-songwriters no less than Virgil, Chaucer, Wagner, Michael Tippett, Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse and Laura Mvula. What of the second camp, who argue that Dylan’s literary qualities fall short of the quality represented by the Nobel committee’s pantheon of modern writing? To make this argument one must appeal to an established notion of literary quality, a task which our benighted age has made nigh-on impossible unless you conceal your working. Here, though, is a notion of literary quality with which we can evaluate the art of the poet: Poems exist to draw our inner gaze. They hold this gaze and direct it either onto a mirror – in which we see images of ourselves and the world around us – or through a window, which allows us to see beyond our world into what is still only becoming a part of it. The task of the poet, in other words, is to teach us to see things, things that are already there, or things that are becoming, and to give these things a weight which resides in the music of the words chosen to point to them. The things poetry helps us to see can’t be seen without the poet’s help, so we must have the words and their music to hand when we look at them. What, then, does Bob Dylan teach us to see? Dylan, perhaps better than anyone, raises a smudged and shaking mirror to the shallowness and lack of intellectual ambition which have come to stand as our age’s foremost images of excellence. In Dylan’s singer-songwriting we can apprehend with hideous clarity the easy self-satisfaction of the protestor who thinks constructive engagement is for losers and phonies. Above all, Dylan expresses our epoch’s celebration of the protraction of adolescence; a glorified refusal to be understood, because no one understands the real me. So much modern art exists to perpetuate and celebrate our facile self-regard, but Dylan’s music oozes it. Its whole texture is shot through with its insufferable smugness, from its inexplicable contentment with a handful of inanely doodled rhymes and empty riddles, to the performer’s blatant refusal even to sing it properly. His cracked vocal timbre, and habit of singing against the stress and flow of his own verses, so beloved of his millions of fans, articulates with breath-taking clarity the spirt of the adolescent’s stubborn refusal to realise his confused view of the world, and his place in it, is not a mark of genius but a waste of everybody else’s time. Hence the injured tone of much of Dylan’s songs, and his performances of them. His music is the sound of everything being everybody else’s fault, the music of the drop-out. And nowhere in this great poet’s oeuvre is Dylan’s basic spirit more visible than in the great masterpiece which opens Highway 61 Revisited. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, perhaps the only song in which Dylan bothers to articulate a few consonants, is pure, vitriolic schadenfreude. It is a song dedicated, in other words, to an emotion whose universally shameful status is revealed by the fact that only the Germans were brave enough to provide a name for it. The song sneers at its victim’s reversed fortunes but our uncritical, lazy sneering-along with it has prevented us from seeing that the song has come to applaud precisely what it denigrates. A rolling stone may gather no moss, but rolling stones were precisely what the sixties were bent on celebrating, and are what we so slavishly persist today in celebrating about them. We love Dylan because we want, like him, to be a rolling stone. But the Ancient Greeks had another word for the rolling stone. That word is ‘idiot’. An idiot, according to the Ancient Greeks, is someone who stands aside from the political and cultural spheres, who cuts themselves off from critical participation in the world. The Nobel Prize for literature, at long last, has been awarded to a complete idiot. As an image of excellence, nothing could be more fitting. A Western culture which has for decades prized idiocy above all other moral and aesthetic qualities and accomplishments has finally come clean. How does it feel, ah how does it feel? Long have we asked. Now we can answer. It feels, as idiots should, stupid.

1995 as I remember was just about the peak and then the decline of Acid Jazz in the UK, also a golden era of compilations on Verve and the DJ Gilles Peterson. Plenty of this stuff getting played by me. I was big into the pit bull latin jazz of Snowboy, a very English take it on the genre. Charlie Hunter's Ready Set....Shango! and Wynton Marsalis was still untainted and on a good roll I think until the millennium. Really liked Monty Alexander's Yard Suite eventually saw him live in around 2005. Later Sex Mob I thought was brilliant with the Bond music album and their take on Prince covers. Lots of jazz bands now seem similar to me, there's a definite style: The Bad Plus and The Go Go Penguins, lots of good music out there still, Blue Note is interesting again, some of it. The resurrection of Okeh and I quite like the party music of The Hot Sardines.

A song lyric is designed to be listened to in context with the music and often when this is taken away, the meaning and power is lost. The poem is heard or read in silence and can stand alone without music. Some poetry functions on the page only. The construction is generally different with song lyrics having choruses, bridges and hooks which are noticeably absent in most poetry. Can a song lyric function as poetry and poetry as a song lyric, well yes, but I am talking in general and I am not saying one is a higher art form than the other, just different. One good technique to really pick-up the difference is to buy the complete lyrics of your favourite rock artist, say Lou Reed's Pass Thru The Fire and decide to spend an evening contemplating this weighty tome as poetry. You will soon wander and realise that without the music there isn't as much there as you expected.

I am afraid I fall into the I like Dylan, but only when his songs are being sung by someone else. I did buy those two recent Sinatra albums of his and I couldn't get into them, maybe in time. His voice is like a bad 78 shellec and a night on corn whiskey gone all melancholic. I suppose Tom Waits could be accused of the same, but his night goes into a china town in search of adventure. You can generally tell a song from poetry, they are not the same discipline. Although there have been some good attempts to putting William Blake's poetry to song by Jah Wobble Tyger and Hugh Cornwell Youth And Age. And Ute Lemper did that album of Bukowksi poetry, which I haven't listened to yet, but I am fan of them both.

Thanks for that, really enjoyed it.

I've excluded music from pre-1940, well kind of as regards Benny Goodman, as being not part of the 12" album 33.1/3 universe. I've been digging plenty of pre-1940 jazz lately too that would alter my top 5 of what I am listening to now. Edit: And maybe too The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, I think their modern take on 1920s jazz of Mr Ferry's oeuvre and other stuff is really quite grand and interesting.

Affirmative! And so far they are indeed, the proverbial!

My excuse is that I've just upgraded to the Grado's SR325e's and I'm breaking them in!

Way too difficult, but I can tell you what's been getting some serious regular repeating listening recently, in no order: Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple Benny Goodman - Benny Goodman Story Terence Blanchard - Breathless Jason Moran - All Rise Steve Bernstein and Henry Butler - Viper's Drag The Bryan Ferry Orchestra - The Jazz Age

As it happens, I am listening to the RVG CD of Lee Morgan's The Cooker and it sounds quite wonderful on my headphones. Not too narrow or artificially mono'd or bright at all. There's a lot of factors that come into place: what the Japanese did with the first RVG's, the original source tape or lack there of and then the reverse Emperor New Clothes syndrome that came into the mainstream that made it sonically unacceptable to enjoy and appreciate the RVG CDs.

I'm not so sure, but the FLAC files should at least be the same as the CD, should it not?

There's also DSD with sample rates of 2.8MHz. One sampling rate format too far methinks? Slightly off topic: I've been engaged in encoding my CD collection to FLAC these last nine months and from my subjective listening, CD's converted to FLAC sound much better than the original CDs. You know how sometimes you can get that glassy brittleness when playing a CD, that all goes as there must be distortion from the laser reading or in the physical playing of the CD. Once it's read twice and stored, you've got an ideal digital file from the CD. I've not come across any academic articles on the above phenonmena, but I assume the digital hifi heads on here are aware of it? From my perspective, as a consumer, I have no doubt that digital music formats have now made the necessary jump up from the first generation MP3's to surpass CD and vinyl. The war is over, if you want it!

I think we've reached peak vinyl revival, likely as most of the revivalists are now running out of storage space and realising that records are not the ideal for indexing and storing and the need to employ a qualified librarian to manage one's collection is somewhat expensive. I have noticed that the remaining record shops near me have been bereft of customers recently.

A tad light on the horn playing, but a good entry point into the music of Chet.

Pretty much in agreement with most of the albums mentioned previously. I quite like the Paul Winter Sextet's Jazz Meets The Bossa Nova from 1962 which was recorded after a tour of Brazil. Also really like Tom Jobim's Urubu from 1976 which mixes bossa with MPB and classical. Couldn't take to Dave Brubeck's Bossa Nova USA. There's also a rather splendid hidden gem from the UK's Jack Parnell & His Orchestra Braziliana from 1977 which is wonderfully recorded.

Elitist, hell yes! All art is elitist. Who wants to be part of the herd?

It was aesthetically pleasing though and that was the message. It was Chet Baker through the prism of Bruce Weber's advertising style. I liked it at the time, I like it now, but the message should be taken at face value. Behind the music and the projections of Weber, there was only the squalid dealings of a junkie. The film captures some of this when Chet tells Weber basically that there is nothing to be found in his obsession with Baker.

I think "hissophobia" is healthy. Case in point the Mosaic Dial set.

This ripping business is hard work - 3 months later and I am just about ready to move into the S's with Lalo Schifren. I've still got a lot of Mosaic box sets to do as well. I don't know, once I am satisfied that the back-ups are robust and secure, then maybe, I might sell the physical box sets. But then would I be committing a crime? I dunno, but the music would be getting out to others who will appreciate jazz. So why not. Still, as Crisp states you then have the ultimate back-up. Hmmm......

I've always thought that the 1955-1956 extended tour of Europe with the death of Richard Twardzik would make an ideal subject for a film on Chet Baker's life. You get all the good stuff: the potential and youthful elan, modern jazz culture in mainland Europe at the time, his first mature recordings and then the tragedy and fall into the abyss.

I've flirted between formats and a couple years ago, I had my vinyl fetish in full swing and nothing else was good enough. But all formats have a certain quality and at the height of my recent vinyl audiophile stage, I was consumed with a thought: How could we all have been seduced by the condensed glassy sound of the CD like some modern Emperor's New Clothes fairy tale? Well, the reality many of those first generation CD's, mastered direct from the source tapes sounded extremely good, the rot set-in a little bit later. Back in the 80s I remember that 12" extended singles sounded extremely good - The Style Council when they were bringing out new releases everything 3 months or so sounded extremely excellent, Heaven 17 too. And of course, we've seen premium audiophile Blue Note re-releases now on two 12" at 45rpm. Now, I am pretty much a convert to FLAC. I've been ripping CD's since Christmas and play through a NAIM system with a Bluesound hardrive and ripper. I am up to, this evening Gerry Mulligan in the M's. Also downloaded a lot of rock music from the 70s to the 2000s and it's reinvigorated by appreciation of this music. It all sounds much better than the original CD's and vinyl.