my favorites of Paul's huge catalogue change all the time. and I can't decide if I prefer the 'older' or 'newer' work by him. both are great.
the recent solo disc of 40's era film music on a french label is fantastic. He plays these tunes that have become standards (Laura, Someday My Prince Will Come, It Might As Well Be Spring, etc). the disc says "Jazz'n'emotion" on lt, but that may be the series.
Beautiful reworking of standards.... also new and good is NOT ONE NOT TWO with Peacock/Motian and ZEN PALACE with Swallow/Motian.
Paul, like Lee Konitz, is always partial to his newer work. So keep that in mind when reading interviews or speaking to him etc.
the 80s: MEMOIRS, FRAGMENTS, ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND, IN THE EVENINGS OUT THERE. The album QUARTET on ECM is one of the essential free albums (w Motain/Frisell/Surman).
The 70s: There is a great record that's worth trackng down, but it's not on disc. It's a record by SCORPIO (Bley/Holland/Altschul)... JAPAN SUITE with Altschul and Gary Peacock is great... AXIS (solo) and QUIET SONG (with Giuffre/Connors) are beauiful records too.
Of the 60s stuff, TURNING POINT and BLOOD are my two favorites. His records for Savoy (however they are packaged) are nice too.
Basically, it's tough to go wrong with a Paul Bley record (however, you may find that, after A TON of these it may be enough for you).
>it's difficult for me to get too high-n-mighty on this point since i do fairly
>regularly scour the used bins, which does a musician no more good >than taping a record.
Except that for used records (books/videos/whatever) the musician or at least copyright holder has in fact already been paid (or in the case of resold promotional items, deliberately forgone payment).
>process. but "deliberately forgone payment"? it's one thing if a >record label
>sends out promos, the recipient listens to it, decides it's not for >them, and
What I was referring to is that promo copies sent out by major labels are still considered property of the labels (thus the markings on many of them) so that they don't pay royalties on something they haven't actually sold. Probably "deliberately" wasn't the right word since it implies intentions or even knowledge on the part of the musicians but the point I was trying to make is that these musicians have by their choice become part of a process where they won't be paid for these promos. (Whether in fact they even realize this doesn't matter.) Since the whole discussion was about taping albums, just wanted to point out the difference between buying a used CD and copying it for a friend.
On a more general note, the politics behind promos is something rarely discussed. Like most writers, I get lots of them (less so this year since I'm just now finishing an unplanned break from reviewing) and am often surprised at how much effort and money goes into these. In several cases I've requested that promos NOT be sent but still get them on the reasoning, sometimes stated upfront, that the publicist thinks I might still like it given a chance. (And yes I have on occasion actually returned a few if it was an indie label.) I read somewhere that record industry publicists consider a 10 percent return on mail-outs (ie one review for every ten promos sent) to be a huge success. This seems like an enormous waste the majors apparently don't care (witness the traffic in so-called back-door goods where employees are given literally boxes of new releases which generally end up at used CD stores) and the indies often feel like they need to do this to compete in whatever marke!
!
t they're in. Don't know that I have much point to this since without promos I certainly would be doing very little music writing (actually I'm far more annoyed that so much of the music press follows the label emphasis and focuses almost exclusively on new releases).
