jazzyjeff

some of our L.A. (&/or Nashville) comprades can comment on the scenes there but i've met quite a few of these douchebags over the years (also in Austin during SUXSW) & uh... i hope Cuscuna chose his bedfellows well. even Bruce Lundvall he ain't & ... have ya'll noticed-- MUCH to her credit-- Norah is gittin' & listenin' weird? a credit to Tejas lineage after all tho' some will say it was always thus. POONulltimate c Didn't Pierson sign Brad Meldau, Joshua Redman and Mark Turner? JJ

Clifford basically has it correct. The definition does not include acoustic jazz, which has a completely different lineage

Well, sure--Blue Note for one, to make a case quite close to home. Where did most of the posters on this board come from? Of course you buy for the music, but I don't think you can deny that a # of the people who post here certainly "trust" the Blue Note label of yore. And Mosaic, IMO, has very much built upon that sort of identity/brand/label loyalty. I agree w/most of what you're saying and don't think that ultimately this is a big deal, but I would certainly define Mosaic as a "label"--even if they do only reissues. A label in the sense of a record/business company purveying a certain brand of music. And yeah, Blue Note recorded a diversity of artists, but there are a lot of folks on this board unhappy with the current incarnation of the label for the direction they're taking and the artists they're signing. Like I said, no big deal to me, as long as they keep putting out the classic stuff... and yeah, the timeframe inevitably stretches and has to... I mean, hell, the Tony Williams set covers recordings made after Mosaic was launched. But that doesn't have much to do with what gets defined as worthy jazz... we have yet to see a "sweet-music" band set from Mosaic, even though they do lots of early jazz. There's a lot of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s that I'd like to see Mosaic get around to putting out, but none of it emanating from the "contemporary" purview.

Why Contemporary Jazz? Why would an incredibly respected company like Mosaic Records, who built their reputation on Big Band, Traditional, and Modern Jazz get into the business of Contemporary Jazz. First of all, it’s difficult to address this topic without accepting the fact that whatever term is used to define ANY genre of music is always going to be cause for some confusion and/or controversy. For example, many people (including Mosaic Records on our website) refer to post-swing jazz as Modern Jazz, whereas the term modern means relating or belonging to the present period in history or of the latest or most advanced kind. Considering many of these recordings were made over sixty years ago, its hard to make a rational justification for the term, isnt it? What we are calling Contemporary Jazz is basically music that historically and stylistically followed Miles Davis Bitches Brew and/or the Soul Jazz movement of the 1960s. This includes everything from aggressive jazz-rock fusion to what is currently played on the Smooth Jazz radio format. As it states on the Mosaic website, the artists we choose are selected for their place in the history of American music. Music, above all, is what determines if an artist belongs on Mosaic. You won't necessarily find us going for the big commercial names. But, neither will you find us discriminating against them. Hence, the inclusion of artists who stand as important figures in the music of choice. The point being, Mosaic Contemporary provides the discriminating music fan with guidelines to which recordings by which artists are worth your attention in each subgenre.