innerspaceboy

My sincerest thanks!

As you can imagine, I immerse my whole self into drafting these journal entries, and at times it feels as if I'm firing off all my energies into a black hole. All the more reason that a response, particularly feedback as positive as yours, is deeply gratifying and most-appreciated.

I'm doing well - thank you for asking. I'm working from home 4/5 days a week and am passing the time with various research projects, independent archival work, and musical explorations. I apologize that I'm not as active around other major threads in the forum. I do hope that you're hanging in there and engaging in projects of your own to stay positive during this incredibly challenging year. Personally, I'm looking forward to the crisp air of autumn for the sense of vitality it brings.

The gift of anyone's time is precious to me so I'm grateful when anyone reads my journal and I especially appreciate that you took a moment to respond.

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innerspaceboy

It's a difficult balance, as I wholly believe that content creators deserve compensation, but I'm also a tremendous proponent of free culture, the Free Software Foundation, open culture, etc. And you're quite right - with the consolidation of mega-corporations holding the rights to more than 90% of media which will likely never fall into the public domain, copyright law is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Thanks so much for reading my write-up! It's great to know that there are those of like-mind in my reach.

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OccultHawk

We’ve lost twenty years of cool af hip hop samples, and wild mash-ups because copyright laws destroy free expression.

Just because you make a sound you own it? That’s ridiculous. No one should be able to own a series of sound vibrations.

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innerspaceboy

I've likely mentioned it before, but Kirby Ferguson produced a fantastic 4-part miniseries called Everything Is A Remix outlining the fundamentals of that argument.

Part 1 explores music (particularly classic rock borrowing heavily from the blues). Part 2 explores film (with a focus on George Lucas and Tarantino as mash-up artists). Part 3 covers inventions and modern computing. And the final segment explores the system, itself.

Ferguson produced an HD remastered version of all four segments combined into a 30-minute film on YouTube in 2015.



There is also a minisode examining shot-for-shot origins of cinematic inspirations for The Matrix.



If you haven't seen them before, he does a great job of covering The Three Key Steps to Creativity: Copy, Transform, and Combine and how no ideas are born in a vacuum.

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ribbons

You’re always so gracious and kind, ISB. It means more than you could know – even though you know everything! So glad to hear you’re OK. I’m doing well, working full time and then some. I love being home and working remotely, but it seems I’m much more “on call” at all hours this way. I know what you mean about looking forward to the crisp autumn air – it’s my favorite season, and I’m actually enjoying a mug of hot apple cider right now (although it’s not exactly cool outside this morning).

Thanks so much again for your lovely reply, which warmed my heart much better than this apple cider could.

ribbons

Have you read this, OH? (I suspect you probably have)

Plunderphonics - Essay

OccultHawk

No I haven’t. I’ll have to do that.

I googled to see who said “Good artists copy; great artists steal” but too many people stole it to know.

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innerspaceboy

Thanks, Ribbons!

On a related note, I have a copy of the excellent book, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music which collects various essays and music manifestos and which includes a piece titled, "Plunderphonia" by Chris Cutler.

I did some digging and tracked down a copy of the full essay without a paywall here.

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ribbons

Thanks so much for tracking down the "Plunderphonia" essay! Audio Culture is an amazing book - I actually have a used copy on my shelves, but unfortunately never managed to read the majority of the including "Plunderphonia" (I recall making a beeline for the Eno and Ornette Coleman-related stuff, then dropping off!). So it's a treat to have this digital copy at hand now. Thanks as well for posting the Everything Is A Remix, which I'm definitely looking forward to watching.

innerspaceboy

Building a Survey of Jazz: A Brief Summary of the Larger Jazz-Related Collections in My Library



I have a decent starter-collection of jazz vinyl, focusing primarily on Miles Davis' catalog including the 6LP Miles at the Fillmore box set, as well as a selection of the better quality big band box sets on wax. But I've been working on building the digital portion of my jazz collection, the larger box sets of which total 1,626 albums. These highlights help me add a sense of order to the 22,000 jazz recordings in my digital library.

To date, my focus has been on essential classics, vocal jazz standards, the crooners, tin pan alley, jazz pop (1920-1960), highlights of avant-garde jazz, the big bands, swing, a bit of ECM, future jazz (in the electronic realm), film noir scores, gypsy jazz / jazz manouche, and their related subgenres. I've been in the mood to explore The Great American Songbook, (jazz vocal standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ellington, etc), so I started doing some research.

I'm no jazz expert, but some preliminary Google searches, list-generators, and review surveys provided me with sufficient information to begin building a respectable personal library. One intriguing release offered for sale on Toronto's JazzFM website was an astonishingly large 500 CD box set called, The World's Greatest Jazz Collection. Of course, due to licensing restrictions, the set lacks some of the classic milestone recordings which come to mind when such a title is raised, but the sound quality and sheer volume of the collection warranted its addition to my library.

The 500-CD World's Greatest Jazz Collection comprises five 100-disc sub sets:

• 100-CD Bebop Story box set
  
• 100-CD The Big Bands box set
  
• 100-CD Classic Jazz box set
  
• 100-CD Modern Jazz box set
  
• 100-CD Swing Time box set

Next I tackled building discographic archives of key figures in the history of classic and modern jazz. Larger jazz artist discographies in my archive include but are not limited to the following:

• 156-CD Thelonious Monk discography
  
• 135-CD Keith Jarrett discography
  
• 100-CD RateYourMusic.com's Top 100 Future Jazz LPs
  
• 98-CD Miles Davis discography
  
• 78-CD Jimmy Smith discography
  
• 75-CD Sun Ra discography
  
• 61-CD Ornette Coleman discography
  
• 52-CD Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers discography
  
• 43-CD Herbie Hancock discography
  
• 43-CD Jimmy McGriff discography
  
• 40-CD Duke Ellington discography
  
• 35-CD Charles Mingus discography
  
• 30-CD John Coltrane discography
  
• 22-CD Dave Brubeck discography
  
• 16-CD Future Sounds of Jazz box set

as well as the 16-CD Diana Krall discography. (My late father was a fan and sparked my interest in her catalog when I was starting college.)

And as I've discussed in former features, I worked hard to build analog and digital archives of the finest big band collections ever issued to the public. Some of these were exclusively available from mail order subscription services on vinyl and later on compact disc, but thankfully, archivists around the world have painstakingly digitized the vinyl-exclusive volumes and produced complete digital libraries of these sets at professional archival quality.

In my Big Band Archive I have:

• 30-LP box set of Time Life: The Big Bands
  
• 27-CD Ken Burns Jazz Series and Jazz: The Story of America’s Music (22-CD + 5CD)
  
• 11-LP box set of The Great Band Era
  
• 10-volume Benny Goodman Collection
  
• 7-volume The Big Bands box set
  
• 4-CD Smithsonian Big Band Jazz archive
  
• 2-disc Glenn Miller Gold Collection
  
• 1-CD The Glenn Miller Orchestra Collection

Other smaller and more precisely-focused jazz collections in my library include:

• 8 CDs from the Jazz Moods series
  
• 6 of the essential albums by The Bill Evans Trio
  
• 6-CD Gypsy Jazz / Jazz Manouche box set
  
• 5-CD 100 Hits American Songbook box set which includes one hundred standards recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis Jr, and more.
  
• 5-CD Film Noir jazz series collection
  
• 3-CD Complete Recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
  
• and the single-disc Complete Recordings of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong

My collection is leagues away from exhaustive or complete in the vast scope of the world of jazz - an insurmountable task for certain, but I've done my best to construct a modest library showcasing the key subgenres I enjoy most. These will provide me with years of listening enjoyment on lazy Sundays and on my afternoon drives queued up in the car from my personal media server.

In an effort to determine the best recordings to sample first, I began compiling various “best-of” lists. Rateyourmusic user erikfish found 22 "top jazz albums of all time" lists in books, magazines and web sites and combined them into one meta-list here. And TheJazzResource.com compiled a similar list of the Top 25 Jazz Albums of All Time. Spinditty published a feature on Ten Coltrane Albums Every Jazz Fan Should Own and NPR put together a similar roster called The Cocktail Party Guide To John Coltrane. I also assembled some of my own lists including Modal Jazz Essentials, Recordings of the First Great Quintet (Davis and Trane in ‘56), as well as 17 Essential Hard Bop Recordings courtesy of critic Scott Yanow and a Top Ten Essentials list of Thelonious Monk LPs.

I would love to hear your recommendations for your favorite titles from the collections mentioned above which deserve priority listening, or your suggestions for other collections which would complement my current library. If I've any glaring omissions, please let me know! I'm always eager to learn.

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