Opinions sought: Acrobat Records

[GA Russell]

Acrobat is a UK label which sells public domain material.

Has anyone here picked up anything they've put out?  How is the sound quality?  As good as Jasmine's?

I have my eye on an Orioles release:  https://www.oldies.com/product-view/61806M.html

Thanks!

[Brad]

I haven’t picked it up but their Booker Ervin release was very well received and the liner notes were written by Simon Spillett. 

[felser]

I have a fair amount of Jazz and Blues material from them.  Very thorough presentations, and sound is OK (though not spectacular).

[GA Russell]

Thanks Brad and John!

[sidewinder]

I have one CD from them which skips no matter how many replacement copies I get of it. It’s the ‘Live at the Bell’ (Maidenhead) with Dick Morissey, Red Price and Ray Warleigh. Good, rare music and fine Spillett essay but - frustrating ! It is a long CD so may be a quirk of the player.

Their Tubby Hayes rare gig material CDs are fascinating and - for me - indispensable. Again, superb Simon S. essays to round off the package. Sound is often very patchybut considering the circumstances, entirely acceptable.

[Big Beat Steve]

5 hours ago, felser said:

I have a fair amount of Jazz and Blues material from them.  Very thorough presentations, and sound is OK (though not spectacular).

Same impressions here. Sound is quite OK for me, and they go in their reissues where most of the others do not dare or care to tread so I have often found reissues with them that fill gaps in my collection (R&B, mostly).

Presentation is very nice and experts in this field (Dave Penny, Philip J Tricker, Opal Louis Nations etc) have been involved in most cases.
One word of caution, though: I have a number of label compilations by them (Melodisc, Atlas, Derby, Macy's etc.) that have GREAT stuff for MY tastes but as this music comes from rare and obscure 78s where often only fairly worn copies were available as source material the sound is what it is - pops, crackles and hisses included. I really cannot judge how much more cleaning up could have been done there without sacrificing some of the range and flattening the sound but these limitations (that exist with reissues on certain other labels too - early post-war indie source material often seems to be harder to clean up than even 20s acoustially recorded tracks, it seems) should be taken into account. I for one do NOT mind too much about such shortcomings at all (and make no excuses about it) but if you're a stickler for highest of hi fidelity then do steer clear.

[mikeweil]

Just bought their Charlie Barnet double CD - a good representative selection, good sound, if not spectatcular, as someone above pointed out. Commentary is good and knowledgeable.

I had contact with them regarding the Cal Tjader live recordings from the Club Macumba. They had withdrawn the release as they couldn't identify several tunes, which of course was no problem for me. Tjader biographer Duncan S. Reid and yours truly provided them with the necessary information to release the music. My impresssion is they take their business seriously. 

They have more previously unissued live material in the can. 

Edited December 9, 2018 by mikeweil

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I always figured they were just another bootleg label with better liner notes. Now I'm a bit curious. Do they get clearances and pay the artists' estates when they issue these live dates? I don't think unauthorized live recordings default to the public domain, do they? Also, if the artists was under contract with a label during the time of the recording, don't they need to get permission from them as well?

[paul secor]

1 hour ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I always figured they were just another bootleg label with better liner notes.

That's my take on that label.

[mjzee]

I have two: Earl Bostic and Don Byas.  Some tracks sound good, others come from substandard sources.  On the Don Byas, they mistakenly repeat a track: on disc one, "Out Of Nowhere" is both track 12 and 21 - exact same performance.  I wasn't impressed.

[Dan Gould]

I like their series of A-B Sides of all singles from various bluesmen.  But I don't go out of my way to, you know, pay for it.

But thinking about it, its probably a good idea to support a PD label like this one which at least provides substantive liners for most if not all of their offerings.  I'd pay them sooner than I'd pay old 12 Classic Albums company.

[Big Beat Steve]

 

2 hours ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I always figured they were just another bootleg label with better liner notes.

As for studio recordings (which as far as I know account for the bulk of their reissues), the applicable European laws about recordings falling into the public domain are and remain (at least as of now) not retroactively applicable. I.e. whatever was first issued sometime before some date in 1962 (when the new 50-year law was passed in 2012) REMAINS in the public domain and exempt from royalties due. If it's in the public domain in Europe and complies with the laws of the country/continent where the label is located it is not a bootleg. Making the items for sale in the US where the laws may be different is something to take up with the resellers in the US, not with the label.

 

Edited December 9, 2018 by Big Beat Steve

[AllenLowe]

the ones I have seen in the last few years are all CDRs - when I wrote them an email to protest this they warned me not to say anything in public or they might take legal action!

this is really slimy; I won't pay regular CD prices for a CDR.

Edited December 10, 2018 by AllenLowe

[Big Beat Steve]

7 hours ago, AllenLowe said:

this is really slimy; I won't pay regular CD prices for a CDR.

 

 

This sounds seedy indeed. However, I just checked the 8 or 9 Acrobats I have and while ONE (which wasnt the most recent one I've bought) looks doubtful the others do look like the real thing with the release no. in the fine print on the back too - just ike other regular CDs bought in recent years.

[sidewinder]

Have to say that when I phoned them up for a replacement CD they were very helpful and checked on the issue with the CD skipping with their production side (‘no fault found’). So no qualms from me.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

14 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

 

As for studio recordings (which as far as I know account for the bulk of their reissues), the applicable European laws about recordings falling into the public domain are and remain (at least as of now) not retroactively applicable. I.e. whatever was first issued sometime before some date in 1962 (when the new 50-year law was passed in 2012) REMAINS in the public domain and exempt from royalties due. If it's in the public domain in Europe and complies with the laws of the country/continent where the label is located it is not a bootleg. Making the items for sale in the US where the laws may be different is something to take up with the resellers in the US, not with the label.

 

I understand this. But for dates like the Cal Tjader referenced above, which was never issued, it is an unauthorized release unless they negotiate with the estate and label of the artist. If they are doing this, like other legitimate labels do, then they are fine. This is what I am questioning here, not the EU PD rules.

[romualdo]

On 10/12/2018 at 10:58 AM, AllenLowe said:

the ones I have seen in the last few years are all CDRs - when I wrote them an email to protest this they warned me not to say anything in public or they might take legal action!

this is really slimy; I won't pay regular CD prices for a CDR.

Genuine consumer complaint = legal action - WTF???

Same experience as Allen ie earlier released were legit CDs (Joe Morris Orchestra) & all recent purchases (2013 till now) have been CDrs (Tubby Hayes multi sets & recent Joe Harriott double)

[felser]

Dumb question (one of my specialties), what would be the difference between a CD and a CD-R for me the consumer?  I understand the difference in how they are created.

[Dave Garrett]

Longevity. CD-Rs have a dye layer that is modifiable, which makes it more susceptible to degradation than a "regular" CD pressed from a glass master. There are all sorts of competing claims out there from manufacturers who cite accelerated aging tests to "prove" that their brand will last for X number of years,  but in general it seems that CD-Rs made from higher-quality materials (like the ones with a gold substrate and more stable phthalocyanine dyes) are the ones that can compete with pressed CDs in terms of how long the data remains readable. 

From a use standpoint, I'd think there would be very little difference as long as the discs remain playable. Of course, the problem is when you're purchasing music on a CD-R, you often don't know if the vendor/publisher/replicator used good-quality blanks, or the cheapest ones available, which is why many people avoid them whenever possible. 

A few links of interest:

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dvd-r_rw_longevity.html

http://www.mam-a.com/phthalocyanine

https://www.mediasupply.com/dye-layer.html

[king ubu]

Yup, selling CD-Rs "undercover" is really a shame. And indeed I have that Tubby Hayes set as well (not sure there was a second one after that). Their booklets also are good-quality home-made prints, the paper is not what you usually get.

I stopped buying their product.

Not sure if this is different with R&B reissues the do, but I guess numbers of sold units and storage costs just don't add up.

[Big Beat Steve]

Honestly, I cannot see anyting wrong with the quality (paper and contents) of their booklets among those CDs I have from Acrobat when compared to other comparable reissue labels, particularly from the UK. Admittedly they all are early post-war R&B and one straddles the fence towards swing. And like I said above, only one of them (one of the label compilations) appears like the CD is actually a CD-R. 
I checked once again this morning but apparently I do not have any of the jazz reissues mentined in this thread but as for sales figures, I really wouldn't say that Peppy Prince, for example, is likely to outsell Tubby Hayes. So I'd doubt the jazz reissues are more prone to CD-R-ing because they sell that poorly.
 

[Kevin Bresnahan]

9 hours ago, felser said:

Dumb question (one of my specialties), what would be the difference between a CD and a CD-R for me the consumer?  I understand the difference in how they are created.

While I've never had any of the CD-Rs that I burned myself go bad, I have had 3 commercially purchased CD-Rs stop playing on me. I was unable to extract the audio via Exact Audio Copy on the first one. The other two (live and learn) were backed up to my hard drive the minute I saw that they were CD-Rs. I stopped buying new VSOP releases because they're using CD-Rs now and I make sure that any used OJC I buy today isn't one of their later CD-R issues. I've even seen several Venus Jazz CD-Rs in the used bins. At first I thought that someone ripped off the record store but it was clearly produced by Venus or the seller had a very good printer capable of printing onto a CD surface.

[paul secor]

If a label such as Acrobat is releasing material that they pay nothing to record and (probably) pay nothing to the artists or their estates, to me there's no reason (other than greediness) why they are issuing CDRs rather than real CDs.

[felser]

26 minutes ago, paul secor said:

If a label such as Acrobat is releasing material that they pay nothing to record and (probably) pay nothing to the artists or their estates, to me there's no reason (other than greediness) why they are issuing CDRs rather than real CDs.

Maybe to keep their selling price low, but still present really good liner notes, etc.  

[JSngry]

If the liner notes are the selling point, why sell the music at all? The Ervin essay was indeed excellent, but it's been posted online, right? Taht's where I read it. And all the records have already come out in all kinds of ways. So is the strategy here to use the essay to sell me an online essay that I've already read?