Art Pepper Select

[BruceH]

While the music is great, as is the refurbished sound, I'm pissed all over again at the way the late Pete Welding pisses all over Jack Sheldon in the liner notes (reprinted from a 198Os compilation of this material): "simply outclassed by Pepper ... his solos have a meandering discursive quality,  and too often he indulges in gratuitous effects ... overindulgence in the spurious" etc. (How much "indulgence in spurious" would be OK?) This point of view toward Sheldon is not exclusive to Welding -- Martin Williams once took a whack at Jack -- but it's dumb IMO, based on a failure to grasp what a witty, often deliberately bordering on the whacky, very hip player Sheldon was (and I'm sure still is).

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Sometimes liner note writers get it very, very wrong. I recall an old Curtis Fuller album (a Savoy I believe) in which the original liner-writer puts down Benny Golson's playing, which struck me as unintentionally hilarious. Too bad the Selects don't come with some NEW liners, but then they wouldn't be Selects, I suppose.

[brownie]

Next question: the US remasters from the late eighties: are they the same used for the contemporary Japan remasters, or not?

Seems like - regardless of this last question - I'll rather pick up the Freshsound and keep the old US CDs than replacing those with the Select.

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I would say the US remasters were the same material as the Japanese ones (Ron McMaster did the digital transfers on those) but I never bothered to get those. I had enough of those Omega (Onyx vinyl then Japanese BN, then Mosaic Select) reissues until that Fresh Sound CD which keeps me happy!

[medjuck]

I've got Vol One of the original cd release and remember really hating the liner notes for taking those gratuitous swipes at Sheldon. I've been fond of Sheldon's playing since I first heard him on a Hi-Los (Hi-Lo's?) record. But I'm always made uncomfortable by liner notes that tell you how bad the music is (eg. the Complete Studio Lester Young on Verve). It's especially weird with Mosaics since their catalogues are so overly effusive about the music. I suspect that if they'd used Richard Sudhalter's notes for the Columbia Small Group Swing Sessions as their advertising material they wouldn't sell many copies. Though I have to admit I'm not thrilled by all the music in that set, he seems to have been in a pretty bad mood when he wrote the notes and spends almost as much time in personal attacks on John Hammond and Illinois Jacquet as he does on the music.