Media
McConnell, Frank
A PERFECT MATCH CDs & JAZZ t this moment, I'm still brooding over my fiftieth birthday, and the resentment has been projected onto any technology to evolve after my personal psychic climacteric....
...the complete recordings of the Stan Getz Quintet with Jimmy Raney on guitar...
...Think about the curious phrase, "live performance": were it not for the technology of the recording studio, it would be a redundancy, and a pretty stupid one at that...
...And as such, it 22: 25 September 1992 has an especially intimate relationship to jazz—which, I know with increasingly ferocious clarity, is the only original, true, and indispensable art to have been produced by our perishing republic...
...The development of writing makes the concept, "oral poetry...
...But in jazz, it is a perfect match...
...It's as if jazz was meant for the recording process, and vice versa...
...But then—there's always a "but then," am I right?—there's the compact disc...
...And people who have call-waiting in their homes shall be cast into the outer darkness...
...Mosaic leases most of its offerings from the original copyright holders, so they are almost all limited editions...
...Somewhere between 1983 and 1985—in other words, overnight—the CD changed all that...
...And when, by '85, pop and rock CDs also started selling, "the LP," as Lourie elegantly puts it, "was dead in the water...
...So that the history of this quintessential American art is symbiotic with the history of the record industry...
...However, by the early eighties the record companies were becalmed...
...But even now, if you love the music beyond measure— and is there another way to love something?—there's nothing around quite like Mosaic...
...Look...
...I got my own CD player only in 1989, much against my will, at my wife's urging...
...The music is uniquely American—it's spontaneous, spirit-driven, and without a microphone, irrecoverable...
...Sonny Rollins playing, say, "Blue Skies" on two consecutive evenings is in fact two different things...
...First I found, browsing through the local store, a semi-complete collection of Bix Beiderbecke, and I'd never been able to get that on vinyl...
...What fascinates me, though, is not "sonic development": for years I got by digging Charlie Parker on a record player just a little more sophisticated than a rusty nail wired to a crystal set...
...Now, ten years later, when all the major companies have discovered the profit in CD reissues of their jazz archives, things are more competitive...
...But it's a junkie thing: one taste, then one more, and you're sold...
...Then I found a reissue of Movin' Out, the still stunning debut solo album of the godlike Sonny Rollins— he is to tenor saxophone what Joyce is to English—that I'd owned on vinyl twice, and twice loaned, and never gotten back...
...Until recently, you could only ask, "Have you seen Citizen KaneT Now—and a world of difference turns on the verb—you can ask, "Do you have Citizen KaneT The CD, likewise, is the preservation and transformation of its immediate forebear, the phonograph record...
...Long may they swing...
...But the CD reissue phenomenon is, by me, close enough to that impossible Eden...
...And phenomenon it is...
...the complete recordings of Art Blakey' s greatest Jazz Messengers, with Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan...
...The first jazz record, Barnyard Stomp, was released in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, seven white guys who had learned to play by hanging out with the African-American creators of the art in New Orleans...
...What fascinates me, and I'm going to try to say this without sounding like a French intellectual, is the fact that any truly significant development in information-technology renders its immediate ancestors archival...
...The word processor is the devil, and I will have no truck with it...
...The greatest jazz performances—which I insist are equal to the highest pitch of any art—are, if they are not recorded, stillborn sublimity or, in the wonderful phrase of Whitney Balliett (the ageless jazz critic of The New Yorker), "dinosaurs in the morning...
...Which brings me to Mosaic Records, a mail order house that deals in classic and out-of-print LPs and CDs from the immense library of recorded jazz, and that includes, in each set, rare photos, complete discographies and recording data, and intelligent essays on the music...
...With about two thousand real records that I'd been buying ever since 1954 (the Gerry Mulligan Tentette, and I still have it), why should I abandon my old friends for a 25 September 1992: 21 flashy sci-fi gimmick that used, for crying out loud, a laser...
...Even if people couldn't afford a show or a dinner out, they could always buy a record—cheap and repeatable leisure at home...
...In classical music, the recording studio is at best a minor servant...
...Like a guy talking: like the ever-lost conversation of Socrates or Pope or, alas!, Oscar Wilde...
...Jazz and classical buyers are always in the vanguard of sonic developments, " Lourie told me, and the immensely enhanced sound-values of the CD stimulated that connoisseur market almost at once...
...Charles Lourie, one of the two very good guys who run Mosaic Records—of which more in a while— observes that "until the late seventies the record companies felt omnipotent, recession proof...
...Printing makes the concept, "manuscript"—and makes possible the concept, "library...
...It's helping to preserve and exalt the single visitation of genius, jazz, that may, if worst comes to worst and many of us think it will, stand before some spectral court as justification for there having been an America at all...
...And at the other end of the spectrum, there is and can be only one real version of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys or Sergeant Pepper or Graceland...
...But it's not just that the technology and the art are virtually coeval...
...I don't expect to regain my youth: I've read Gilgamesh too carefully...
...Forget all that romantic guff about the smoke-filled bar late at night and razza razza: the music lives as recorded, or to invert McLuhan's famous dictum for once, the message is the medium...
...And since they set up shop in 1982, just at the beginning of the CD revolution, they managed to lease a lot of simply incredible stuff...
...And then I discovered that the folks who make CDs were reissuing all sorts of great and important jazz recordings that had, in the ancient marketing universe of the LP, simply disappeared from human ken...
...FRANK McCONNELL Commonweal...
...Voice mail is a tool of the devil...
...To name just a few of their—literally—priceless choices: the complete Black Lion recordings of Thelonius Monk...
...in rock since the early sixties, at least, it is a tyrant...
...I'm a speech-like player...like a guy talking," said Sonny brilliantly in a 1980 interview...
...Von Karajan's interpretation of Beethoven's Fifth is not Bernstein's or Solti's, but they are all, what the hell, Beethoven's Fifth...
Vol. 119 • September 1992 • No. 16
