Spanish Time Life Edition Blue Note?

[chris]

I saw some CDs for sale that are listed as Blue Note releases but also "Spanish Time Life Edition" -- anything special/different/bad about these? What are they?

[Big Wheel]

These are some classic Blue Note CDs recently released in Spain. Supposedly, they were only licensed to Time/Life for distribution in Spain and Blue Note's lawyers quickly ordered them yanked off store shelves when they found out they were being exported to the US. Some can still be found, though. The good things about them are that they are pretty cheap--often they're being sold for even less than midprice--and that many of the albums have been OOP domestically for years (Grachan Moncur's "Evolution" being one example). The bad thing about them is that the cover art is yucky--all of them are strangely blue-tinted, for some reason. I think the sound is generally taken straight from the previous McMaster issues, but I've never actually bought one so I'm not sure of that.

[SEK]

The two that I have are TOCJs.

[Claude]

chris, please check this earlier (and long) discussion:

Spanish Blue Note Series

[JSngry]

I picked up LET ME TELL YOU 'BOUT IT from this series and am diggin' the shazznitzle out of it, even if there are times when Bill Swindell 's intonation calls into question Lion's legendary reputation for insistence on "clean" ensemble work in order for a date to be released.

It doesn't bother me, mind you, the cat's may be in tune only half the time, but his groove is on all the time, and that's my first consideration. But you hear some of the other BN things that got rejected for supposedly "sloppy" ensemble work, and then you hear this, and...

But aside from that, HELL YEAH!