Recent Acquisitions (October 2011)

Back from my much-needed extended holiday way down south, as close to the Sahara as one can get short of floating in the water just a few miles offshore. Twenty-five to thirty-something degrees Celsius each and every day, nary a cloud. Great places to see, a breathtaking landscape and lots of insiders’ tips in my back pocket.

Recent Acquisitions

“Recent Acquisitions” has been something I’ve had around for quite a while on this site, in one form or another. And looking back on past posts or drafts that never came to fruition, there’s one single aspect that stands out immediately. The shopping sprees of the past are long gone. It could be that I have reached a saturation point somewhat, although I do doubt that. It’s just that I have so much to listen to that whenever I stumble over more “Want-Need-Will Have” items, I’m reluctant to shell out the dough, mostly because my bad conscience (left shoulder, far right) parades those CDs in front of my inner eye that I haven’t really listened to intensively yet. Continue Reading →

The Music of “The Lord of the Rings”

To veer off the beaten path again for a brief moment, I would like to draw your attention to a site I literally “tripped” over the other day, “The Music of ‘The Lord of the Rings’“.

This website, oddly enough hosted on a student sub-domain, although copyrighted and supposedly licensed (which I somehow doubt, myself being the eternal cynic and all), gives you a detailed insight into the conception and composition of the entire score which did, if you recall, garner two Academy Awards and got quite a bit of praise from critics around the globe. Many people would consider this to be Howard Shore’s masterpiece. Continue Reading →

Judas Priest: Single Cuts – The Complete CBS / Columbia UK Singles Collection

Around August 25, 20011, Judas Priest and Sony will release their complete UK CBS / Columbia singles, for the first time ever. The “Single Cuts” box set holds 20 CDs in all and contains 52 tracks spanning their entire CBS/Columbia career, from “Diamonds and Rust” (1977) to “Night Crawler” (1992). “Presented in a deluxe, numbered box, Single Cuts boasts a massive 52 tracks across 20 CDs, featuring original singles artwork, vinyl replica discs plus booklet including sleeve notes and photos.” Continue Reading →

John Coltrane: “Fearless Leader” and “Interplay”

It’s been quite a while since I started a series entitled Trials and Tribulations. In that series, I wrote about things that can drive us collectors up the wall …and down again. At the time I only hinted at it, but right now I’m planning on expanding on one of the issues I mostly left out at the time: The Trials and Tribulations of label policy. It’s a can of worms I didn’t really want to touch then and it’s a can – when opened – that infuriates me time and again, economic sensibility or not. I come at it from a stance uninhibited by economic concerns; one that focuses on keeping music alive as opposed to keeping profits up. Call me delusional, but it’s the way I tick.

To cut to the chase right away, whenever you mention the Concord Music Group on any jazz board, chances are that people will start cussing relatively fast, despite some of the exemplary work they have produced.. The problem was and is that Concord purchased Fantasy Inc. (the owners, for example, of the prestigious Original Jazz Classics reprint series series, Galaxy, Debut Records, Riverside, Milestone, Prestige, Pablo, and just about everything else under the sun that many collectors were/are salivating for) … and proceeded to shut down that company’s Berkley California warehouse where lots of that Fantasy OJC stock was shelved, fired the Fantasy vault workers, shut down their mastering studio and shipped the tapes off to the infamous Iron Mountain storage facility. Continue Reading →

Recent Acquisitions

End of the year, which starts in Germany mid-summer with the sale of Christmas cookies at major supermarkets (go figure), is usually a busy shopping time. I don’t know why that is, but every year I seem to find bargain prices all over the place at a time when things should actually be full price to pull as much money out of customers’ pockets pre-Christmas time as possible.

On top of that I’ve taken to pre-ordering items which are often not delivered until weeks or often months later. I’ve noticed that for some rare material pre-ordering prices are usually substantially lower than one week after release and with material I have on my list that I really want to have, I usually don’t wait.

Additionally, if you hunt around second-hand online sites as much as I do, you know there are times when things on your wish list pop up all at once whereas at other times nothing happens for months. These recent three months have been like that: a lot of items from my wish list showed up, one by one and within a short period of time, and I bought more than I usually do. Continue Reading →

Fleetwood Mac: The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions

As you know by now, I tend to review things here that I like. Some of you might even argue that I go overboard at times, recommending music I’ve grown to love with a truckload full of emotionally charged adjectives and adverbs. Be that as it may: I’m about to do it again.

So, sit back, pour yourself a good stiff drink … and read on.

I’ve gone on record before saying that the early Fleetwod Mac had perhaps the best two working guitarists in the business at the time (and certainly in hindsight as well; even more so, really) and, after having listened to “The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions” for I don’t know how many times these past weeks and months, I will now go on record saying that in my book the pairing-up of Peter Green and Danny is perhaps the most successful one musically that I’ve enjoyed for several decades and that Danny Kirwan, despite his more than sad career later on, was/is perhaps the best guitarist I’ve ever heard. Continue Reading →

Les Trésors du Jazz

OK,OK, I’ll admit it. I just dislike compilations, usually. Yes, sometimes a single artist’s best-of compilation is all you could possibly want of one single artist’s output (and even twelve to fifteen tunes are eleven too many), and yes, every once in a while a compilation of different tunes from some period in music or showcasing a style one is interested in might be a good place to start.

Usually though, I dislike them because they attempt to do my job for me. As a collector, I almost always disagree with the editorial selection and I’ve all too often discovered that many of the tunes included I already had floating around my collection. On top of that, when it comes to jazz, I’ve gotten so tired of the recent flood of remix compilations of classic tunes and the policy of some major labels that limit the output for any of their artists to a steady stream of market-”safe” reissue compilations (just try to find some decent Cal Tjader reissues from Verve and all you’ll really find are, yes, compilations) that I decided to unsubscribe from, for example, Verve’s and Blue Note’s newsletters that lately have been trying nothing more but pimp the crap out of those useless things.

Then you have those “theme” thingies, you know, “Jazz for Lovers”, “Bar Jazz”, Jazz for the Bathroom”, “Jazz Standards that Absolutely NOBODY Wants to Hear Anymore”, and whatever else those labels can come up with. Dreck. Nothing but dreck. Continue Reading →

Chris Rea: “Blue Guitars”

I have to admit that I have never held a project in my hands like this one. I do have boxed sets collecting an artist’s entire output that can’t match this one, I have label compilations that don’t reach the number of tunes on this collection and I have some lavishly-produced boxes that somehow don’t impress as much as this one does.

Hell, the entire background to this boxed set is about as unique as they come. Continue Reading →