Music Matters--Why No Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, etc.?

To Joe Harley,

I greatly appreciate your efforts to create what seem like they will be definitive editions of the highlights of the Blue Note Catalog. It is obvious how much you care from your posts here.

However, I've looked over your list of titles once again, with sadness. I wonder if there is any chance you could add some more progressive titles to the Dolphy? My first pick would be Unit Structures, then Ornette at the Golden Circle, then Tony Williams, Sam Rivers, Don Cherry...

Perhaps--perhaps--with your audiophile-oriented distribution you would not be able to move these titles. But I think you would. The burgeoning vinyl market is being driven by younger listeners who are coming out of experimental backgrounds--post-punk, techno, weird indie rock, and they don't have a jones for Hank Mobley. Maybe you should talk to Music Direct, Elusive Disc, and Acoustic Sounds about this. They sell a lot of adventurous titles on vinyl to people who would buy Cecil Taylor before Lee Morgan.

I understand that there is a fear about releasing music that was denigrated for so long, but I don't think the facts bear out this fear. The most "out" sets Mosaic did--the Cecil Taylor Candids and the Sam Rivers and the Don Cherry--seemed to sell through more quickly than their average set. My memory of the first Blue Note Connoisseur series in 1995 as well was that the Cherry and Ornette titles on vinyl disappeared fast, while I was able to pick up Freddie Redd and Tina Brooks and John Gilmore and Kenny Dorham, among others, five years after release. And yet those are the very titles you are doing again. (Fine records all and deserving of the deluxe treatment--I'm just saying I think the demand is actually higher for Symphony for Improvisers than for Shades of Redd).

If anything, the market has turned towards the more progressive titles in the last 14 years (since the Connoisseur series began)--and for those adventurous listeners vinyl is a religion. They are stuck buying Scorpio represses, those terrible sounding Jazz Actuel reissues, grey market stuff--but they buy it on vinyl anyway. They are buying Albert Ayler on Revenant and plenty of other issues that aren't cheap. They love getting top quality product.

Perhaps you could make the Dolphy one of your earlier releases, in order to gauge the response. Maybe if there is a good response it might embolden you to put more progressive stuff on the release schedule.

Again, I appreciate the work you are doing. I'd love your thoughts on all of this.

 

very interesting post, i'd be very interested to see what kind of reply(s) you receive. to me those are the blue notes to own, along with the monk and herbie nichols and a few random other things.

 

Extraordinarily light on Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Andrew Hill, and Larry Young leader-dates too -- if I recall. (Last time I checked, there were exactly zero leader-dates in this series by these artists.) And but one Joe Henderson date (his first, most conservative one at that).

These are CORE Blue Note dates -- not trivial one-offs.


With regards to this series (or these series, I should say), the term 'milquetoast' comes to mind.

 

Let me add Bobby Hutcherson to the list.

It seems though that they plan to release one Larry Young record, "Into Somethin" and several dates by Hubbard and Henderson. So it is not so bad. However the list is definitely rather conservative.

 

Acoustic Sounds is doing Page One, by the way. Cisco just did Takin' Off. And MM are doing Into Something, Inner Urge, Let Freedom Ring, and Here to Stay, but yes, they are light on the artists you name, IMO.

However, I don't want to criticize the titles they did choose. They are very very good records, some great. I just want to see some of the ones I think are really great get the full treatment.

 

I think the selection is understandable, given the target audience (audiophiles).

The OJC 45rpm series also contained several titles which are great recordings from a technical point of view but would not be among the OJC top 100 from a musical perspective (Coleman Hawkins, Gene Ammons, etc).

 

I really hope some Andrew Hill makes it into the next batch. I can't believe there were no Hampton Hawes titles in the Fantasy series .

 

yeah, forgot to mention andrew hill. another essential blue note artist.

 

Maybe after these 60 or so do well it will be expanded? As far as I am concerned it can go on with no end.

Also, they men in charge of this reissue series have stated that from time to time the 60 or so on the list may change depending on the circumstances. So maybe a few of these titles will be added?

 

I was actually thinking about this very issue in the car this morning driving to work...listening to the Andrew Hill Mosaic Select of previously unreleased 1960s/70s Blue Note material. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

I don't think it would probably make too much sense for Music Matters to add many Hill, Rivers, Hutcherson, etc titles to their "main" series, from a business standpoint (maybe 1 or 2 but I doubt we'll ever see a bunch).

HOWEVER - maybe that might not rule out some other vinyl series, pitched at a slightly different demographic. Maybe an "avant garde" series or something, probably a much smaller number of titles and perhaps jointly marketed with Mosaic or something...maybe even some limited run joint Music Matters/Mosaic vinyl boxes...I don't know, just thinking out loud...

 

I hink that's a cool idea Tony .

You guys have to give this dude a chance to catch up to this more advanced stuff though. My brain would explode if I tried it now lol.

 

But I don't think is possible to sell 1000 copies of Albert Ayler LPs for $50 each. It's already difficult to sell 1000 $15 CD copies of most free/avantgarde jazz reissues.

 

you're probably right, though andrew hill or sam rivers (at least on blue note) are an order of magnitude less "out" than almost anything ayler did.

i don't mean this as a slam at anyone, but it's just amazing to me that people still find this music difficult 40+ years later.

 

I didn't say they would sell 1000 Aylers--I was just proving a market for expensive free jazz items--like a $100 box set of Ayler.

And I do think they would sell 1000 copies of Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures on vinyl sooner than many of the other titles they have chosen.

 

Maybe track lenghth is the problem? It would be difficult to fit all of 'Conquistador' (for instance) at 45RPM, and fans might balk at fading the tracks out and in again half-way through.

 

I think you have a point there. But judging from my reading of this audiophile forum over the years, the majority of the audience wants those hard bop albums. That is, unless the CT fans are a silent majority.

 

very silent

there was a reason that jazz became less and less popular and it wasn't only the rise of Rock & Roll

 

there has always been plenty of easy to understand jazz available for the less musically adventurous.

 

And the reason was...?

Jazz hasn't been a 'popular' music (With the singular exception of Miles Davis) since the advent of bebop, even though classical musicians classify it as such.

Criticizing an art form because it doesn't reach a large audience is anti-intellectual, IMO, if that's what you're doing. If being more popular is better, then people here should stop all the Britney Spears and Kenny G. bashing and recognize two of the greatest musical artists of our time in their respective genres.

 

popular in its' own genre

 

So how come the Ornette and Cherry Connoisseurs sold through faster than the hard bop, and how come the Taylor, Cherry, and Rivers Mosaics sold faster than most Mosaic sets?

Jazz lost popularity because it cut off its nose to spite its face. Coltrane was selling hundreds of thousands of records in the mid-60s with Love Supreme and the more out stuff, but the players couldn't get dates or albums. No one in the industry had the money and will to promote the New Thing except for Impulse, which seemed to be the one jazz label flourishing in the late 60s--and what were they selling? They were even able to sell that stuff on vinyl reissues in the 90s.

 

How do you know the Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and Sam Rivers Mosaics sold faster than most Mosaic sets? Some sets became unavailable (long) before they sold out, because the lease ran out. From their website: "With the exception of our Benedetti/Parker set, we lease all of our recordings from other record companies. The leases vary in detail, but in every case there's a cap on either the number of units we are allowed to manufacture or the number of years we're allowed to offer the set for sale." (the italics are mine)

 

Hmmm. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

The critical acceptance of the music is indisputable. Just read any of the mainstream texts like The New Grove Encyclopedia of Jazz. I have a copy of the NEA's Jazz in the Schools curriculum, produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Their CD includes tracks by Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, and Dave Douglas as representative of contemporary jazz alongside Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Stan Getz, Wynton Marsalis, Betty Carter, and Weather Report among others.

 

Hey man, like that's your opinion.

I never said anything about jazz losing its popularity outside of what happened in the transition from the big band era to bebop after WWII.

I have no idea what you mean by 'cutting off its nose to spite its face'. Do you mean that record companies refused to satisfy a market that they knew existed? My guess is that Coltrane's 'more out stuff', which represented about 15% of his catalog (just a raw estimate here), sold fewer copies than his earlier work. If you want to make a case for your statement, that's fine. Cite some sales figures.

Bottom line is, and you can ask any jazz musician, the music with the notable exception of Miles Davis had no substantial commericial base to lose. At least as far as the most advanced practitioners were concerned.

 

Excellent point. The Cecil Taylor, Herbie Nichols, and Charles Mingus box sets were limited to 7500 copies. Not a lot. And you would expect more demand for the Mingus, I suppose.

We can't say what information the poster who's making those statements has access to. One thing I would guess is that the audience for the avant garde sessions may be more dedicated to seeking out the recordings, which could explain why they sold out quickly.