Al’s already touched a bit on ‘unreleased’ recordings in recent threads (Ethics and Creative Archiving), but I’ve been pondering them from a slightly different angle. Sure it’s convenient and over-worked imagery, but the old ‘tip of the iceberg’ analogy still seems apropos. It’s also handy given the current sub-artic temperatures in this Twin Cities icebox I call home.
The impressive discography of William Parker compiled by Rick Lopez is a great example. I stopped by The Whole Shebang the other day & found that the bassist’s section of the site has been expanded into a gig-ography. Saved as a Word web page document with images and annotations intact the damn thing takes up 335-odd pages in ten point Times font. The vast majority of this material will never see commercial release (and perhaps rightfully so). Most of it will only be heard by a comparative handful of avid tape traders and those who orbit closely in Parker’s circles. What I’m wondering how this reality might compromise representative statements about his music. Granted there’s a certain consistency to his playing from gig to gig, but the sheer number of ‘unheard’ contexts seems to short circuit the validity of any sort of blanket statement regarding his output (even so it’s something people are doing all the time- either positively or negatively). Is there enough William Parker in the bins? Certain listeners familiar with the man’s work would probably answer with a resounding ‘yes.’
Bill Dixon is probably a better example. Ben Young’s Dixonia logs a library of sessions that currently sit on storage shelves. Dixon’s discography is pretty modest and more than a few critics have used it to dismiss or diminish his talents. There’s a similar situation with Sam Rivers. Lopez’s site documents a cache of private tapes numbering well into the triple digits. Stack this against his commercially released output as a leader which hovers somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 titles. Are these the definitive cream of Rivers’ crop? Does anyone else find this troubling?
I suppose it’s nothing new. Coltrane’s live performances from 1960-61 were supposedly a different bag than his work on albums of the same time frame (I’m thinking of Bill Cole’s analysis and the evidence on such sets as Live at the Village Vanguard 1961 and Pablo’s Live Trane). The same discrepancy might not hold for someone like Parker whose ratio of released recordings to private ones is about 1:2. It seems more likely for someone like Dixon or Rivers. Could the same be said for ‘eai’ folks like Keith Rowe and Gunter Müller? Is there similar bootleg network afoot for their work? Anyway, just a slowly melting sno-cone for thought.
i don't know for rowe, but i do know that gunter has a fair amount of live and studio recordings that never have and probably never will see daylight. amongst the latter is a recording with jim o'rourke that was supposed to follow up on "weighting" (still one of my favorite f4e) but never did. i've been bugging him to burn me a copy of this, but so far he hasn't...
Posted by: tomas at February 13, 2004 9:36 AMI think there might have been a few versions of that record, tomas, maybe entirely different, not sure exactly. I've never heard them either, I'd be curious to, I recall gunter was very happy with them....
Posted by: Jon Abbey at February 13, 2004 10:08 AMIn a way, there's already way too much of everything. It's all a matter of trying to pick and choose what you would most like to spend your time with. At least William Parker plays in a ton of different contexts, so you would get to hear a fairly broad spectrum of players if you were focused on his music almost exclusively, which you’d have to be if you wanted to catch up to that gig-ography. I have a slightly harder time understanding the folks who collect, to the exclusion of almost everything else, Rolling Stones or Pearl Jam bootlegs, or whatever (my grandmother collected Frank Sinatra records, but never listened to anything else), just focused on one band that basically only does one thing for a very long time. How to be spend the limited time there is for listening, or anything... reading, watching movies, travel, when confronted with the endless amount of interesting things out there is a daily struggle. I guess it's a good thing that there are people that into William Parker's music who try to document it as much as possible, but I'm glad it's not me.
Posted by: Jeff LeVine at February 15, 2004 9:43 AMWhat Jeff said.
It depends on the passion of the collector/listener. In the case of Parker, I have a surplus of mediocre recordings of his. He's a bassist who has two, maybe three modes of playing, and this has a lot to do with why I never picked up that Feel Trio box set (though I think I'd love to hear it for Cecil and Oxley).
I consider myself a huge Stones fan, at least from 1967-or-so to 1975. I could give a shit about a remastered version of TATTOO YOU or any BBC tapes that might be floating around with alt versions of "Under My Thumb". On the other hand, if I were to learn of a series of club tapes revolving around EXILE's writing and release, I think I'd want to hear every damned one of them. Why? Because the triad of EXILE/LET IT BLEED/STICKY FINGERS fascinates me.
Tomas: I hear you, re: Weighting.
Posted by: al at February 15, 2004 11:00 AM"Tomas: I hear you, re: Weighting."
al - is that some kind of riddle? korber doesn't get it...
Posted by: tomas at February 15, 2004 1:27 PMtomas, he just means he also really loves weighting.
Posted by: Jon Abbey at February 15, 2004 1:38 PMah, ok! thanks jon. btw (concerning your post on the EAI subject): i wish i could go more into details, but i'm hitting the limits of my english in that debate (i didn't understand quite a lot of nirav's and nate's contributions)...anyway, i don't care too much about terminology either way, so nevermind.
Posted by: tomas at February 15, 2004 2:15 PMno worries, tomas, I didn't understand most of nirav's last post either. :)
Posted by: Jon Abbey at February 15, 2004 2:29 PMI agree that there's generally too much out there as there is. If recordings are to be released only for documentary purposes, especially if they're live recordings that didn't cost much to produce, and won't make much back, it makes much more sense to put them on the 'net - either a constant stream of everthing you have available if you really want to level things out, or leave it there for people to pick and choose as they please.
A release of a recording always used to be an event from what I've heard (it's certainly not now, or at least not for very long), and I like the idea that commercially available releases should try to maintain that - the handmade covers of labels like twothousandand, absinth and My Giant Mum reflect that the releases are slightly more than just a way for people to hear music. Sam with the care that labels like Erstwhile and Matchless put into their releases - there's a reason for the record to come out, and a reason why that particular record came out and not something else.
If all your offering is an opportunity to hear music, then you should offer that as cheaply as possible, with the least resources you can - CDR and mp3 offers this.
Unless you're incredibly rich, or incredibly single minded, you're never going to own the entire output of more than a couple of the more prolific musicians, and most record shops are never going to be able to stock all of them (imagine a shop holding all of Evan Parker's and William Parker's releases, at the same time, in stock, for more than a week, wouldn't be any space for anything else). That filtering is going to occur anyway, so with so many media existing simultaneously at the moment, and being used for different purposes, it makes sense to rank your own releases by the permananence of the media depending on your own view of the recording.
Maybe.
Posted by: Nat at February 16, 2004 8:32 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................