Out of Print?

stubla

dennis wrote:

stu's gems are his playing... that guy sounds amazing! i had the pleasure of playing a few tunes with him at the Q. quite the player... and the rest of the london gang ; equally impressive!

Thanks Dennis! That means alot to me coming from you;we all had a great time meeting and playing with you! You should come and live here mate!
Regarding my 'gems' i don't have much that you don't all already have!
I have mixed feelings about this out of print business!!(i'm sure i'm not alone)
Its fantastic to have so much rare stuff available BUT it can take some of the 'mystery' and excitement out of collecting,(particularly if you've spent years trawling the 2nd hand record shops in london and Paris!!)
I'll never forget the day i found Tchan-Tchous "Guitar party" for £1.25 in a crappy 2nd hand record shop in Soho
Baro Ferret ,Henri Crolla and TchanTchou et al were then just exotic,mysterious names to me and,in its own way,the mystery added to the 'poetry' of this music;the web has taken that away sadly.
Jon Larsen should really get the credit for starting the release of rare stuff;i was so stunned when i heard those Baro and Matelot cds for the 1st time.
On balance however the web IS an amazing resource for collectors
Stu

sockeye

Stu & others,

I hear what you guys are saying and I understand.

Let me know what you all think. If this ftp archive isn't felt to be a positive thing on balance I will take it down or limit to less hard-to-find stuff. (Although records like Tchan-Tchou's are well out of the box already -- they can be found quite easily on peer-peer systems like Soulseek.)

I understand the mystery and allure of this stuff for the collector, as well as its potential value for barter -- my feeling is, in the end it's much more than merely a rare collectible: it's music & people should hear it.

Kcox

I'm not a collector, so forgive me if I am showing ignorance and a lack of empathy here, but for those who really enjoy the hunt why not just refuse to download the stuff? Downloading a set of mp3s and finding that rare record are two different kinds of experiences, like Stu says, so why not simply choose the one you prefer? We're not burning books or snapping records in two here... these things are out of print so the actual physical objects themselves will continue to be rare.

Clearly a lot of people put a lot of work into finding these things and I for one appreciate their work back when it was necessary, but times have changed. Some of the protests make me think of Douglas Adams's book "The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul" where the god Thor tells everyone he meets that he has counted all the specks of sand on one particular beach but when people ask him how many there are he refuses to tell them because the whole reason he counted them in the first place is to be the only one who knows. That is what I consider to be an aristocratic ideal, and I don't much like such things but obviously there are all sorts of cults out there that like to stave off the uninitiated.

My point (assuming I have one): if you did it for the love of the music then why don't you want as many other people to hear it as possible? If you did it instead to be a member of the aristocracy who "knows" then why not be satisfied with being one of the few who "owns" instead? Isn't that just/nearly as good?

Sorry if that sounds judgemental, I don't mean to step on anyone's toes. Maybe it's just that I don't understand the whole (or several?) collecting ideal(s?).

Best,
Thanks to the musicians for the great playing,
Thanks to the dedicated for sharing the tunes,

Kevin

pallopenna

I more or less agree with Kevin. I think this is a fantastic way for those of us, like myself, who are not collectors to be exposed to great music that is generally unavailable. I completely understood Ted's original point about uploading collectable material from a second-hand source; that is, uploading a copy of an lp/cd that someone had been sent previously. That makes sense to me. What seems to make less sense is the idea that, if you own an out of print record, you might not want to upload it because the original might be collectable.

Why does this make less sense to me? Because you're uploading mp3s (or the equivalent), which from an audio perspective are hardly a match for the real thing. From the vantage point of bartering, I would be willing to bet (a very small amount) that other collectors won't see a diminished value in the real thing, just because someone has shared some mp3 files. I'm not a collector, but I do own some origninal Charlie Parker sides, which I cherish, but it hasn't prevented me from owning the same recordings in several different formats as well. Nor would I want to keep others from owning copies of them (assuming they were commecially unavailable), because what's cool about the originals is that, well, they're the original thing, with all the attendant evocations that brings.

Collecting is fun, and can be pretty charged with the mystery of it all, I agree. But the point of this is to expose people to music, and I think the non-collectors amoung us are tremendously appreciative of the opportunity just to hear this stuff. I'm thrilled about it, frankly. But if there is a desire to keep others from hearing this music because it's collectable and rare, then I think we're now talking about in-group / out-group pyschology, and it's hard to see that as being about the music; that appears to be about self-perception and the desire to be amoung the cognizenti.

Which is ironic (to me) because I think that there are several people on this board who genuinely are cognizenti and I have really valued reading what they have to say as I've tried to learn more about the history of the style. I think that having more people exposed to more recordings only enhances the stature of the knowledgeable; it certainly doesn't diminish it.

In then end, I think it's right that you should only upload material that you have in the original (or have the appropriate permissions otherwise). On the whole, this is a really truly positive development: it exposes many more people to lots of great material, and that can only help the development of all of us who are trying to learn.

-Paul

Josh Hegg

Kevin,

Well said.

My thoughts on the matter

I am not a collector of original recordings either. But I am a musician and want to share everything available to allow others to learn from the greats that have come before us. How can we study if we don't share what we have. From a learning standpoint I view it as a sin to not pass on what we have to benefit the growth of musicians. America has lost a sense of melody. We must study our roots to know what has been done in that past in order to learn what we have lost over time. Winton Marsalis said it best when talking to a group of students about jazz "they were clapping on 1 and 3! And they were Americans too! It's our music and we don't even know it"

Cheers,
Josh

scot

Most of the people in North America who have libraries of jazz manouche don’t care about the vinyls. I certainly don’t and never did. The content is the important thing, after all. So few records in this genre were sold in North America that they just aren't here to be found. Vinyl isn’t the issue.

Personally I think that getting something of value for no effort diminishes or destroys it’s value. When you buy a CD you have to make a choice – do I want this bad enough to fork over the dough? Then you have to do it. You decide and then you act. It’s usually a fair exchange. If you ask someone for a CD and they give it to you, that’s also a fair exchange. But expecting to get the CD for free isn’t a fair exchange.

A lot of time, money and effort went into tracking down, digitizing and organizing these old recordings. I don’t think the folks who want everything for free right now have a clue just how much work it was. To imagine base motive for it – so you can belong to some elite group! - is insulting. A lot of the work was done when there was zero interest in this music in North America.

I know for a fact that some of my sources, if they believed that I was throwing the things they sent me out onto the internet, free for anyone to take at their leisure – they would stop answering my letters and that would be the end of that. The exchange of old documents – barter - is how these libraries are assembled. The free and unlimited distribution of these old recordings will destroy that system.

That’s my two cents.

Best
Scot

pallopenna

I don't recall the offer being made to make these recordings available for a fee. They were made available for free. That wasn't my choice as a consumer. Of course I realize that effort went into organizing this material. If you want to share it, share it. If not, don't. For my part, I will not download anymore. This doesn't appear to be what I thought it was at first. If requested I will either pay for what I've downloaded so far, or destroy the copies I made. Very helpful.

-Paul

dennis

barengero, i made a dvd of ritary's concert at DFNE, email me if u d like a copy...

i dont remember offhand what they played on sunday night... but a typical setlist of obscure tunes for ritary back then was

"dinello" by bireli lagrene
"paquito" by ninine garcia
"chouka" by Herve Gaguenetti

nowadays, they do a lot of funk tunes and some george benson as well!! ritary is a real musician who always wants to learn... hehehe he also started using a charlie banacos chord that i showed him:

e 7
b 5
g 7
d 7
a
e

it can be used over a number of chords... i showed it to him over a C... i also showed him some frank gambale licks hehehehe

anyway when he comes here in 2 weeks, we will be recording a method book to be published by djangboooks.... having been heavily involved in music education for the past few years (and i also own about a 100 guitar instructional videos in all styles! .. ah the hotlicks and REH days) , i can guarantee you that this will be a really good method book, everything stochelo's book should've been and then some!

scot

As many people here could tell you, Paul, I have sent out hundreds of CDs over the years and never asked for any kind of quid pro quo, much less money. It's not about money, it's never been about money. There's a system in place for exchanging/sharing these old recordings, and now isn't the right time to discard that system, because the job isn't finished yet. MHO, of course.

Best
Scot

sockeye

The reason why he is so willing to let that ultimately rare item go is because he can't find what he wants anyplace but from me, he wants it so he has to work with me to get it and what I want is that rare boot. If that Joseph EP was so easy to get ahold of, why would he bother to put that boot on the table? It's easy. He wouldn't and I would never be able to get it and no one would get to hear it.

I would argue that there's a corollary here. If that Joseph EP was so easy to get hold of, he wouldn't need to hold his bootleg ransom in order to get a copy of the Joseph EP. Why would he want to keep others from hearing it, except that it has gained extrinsic value because of its worth in the trading system?

So in this sense, maintaining the scarcity of one item artificially inflates the worth of all the other scarce items in the trading system. And inversely, increasing the availability of recordings decreases the worth of other scarce recordings to be used for barter, which should actually expedite their availability. Exactly the same way printing money causes money already in circulation to be worth less.

I don't think it's the natural inclination of music lovers to refrain from sharing with one another. If the bootleg holder in Ted's example doesn't want to put his boot on the table, it's because he thinks he can get something for it. If he can get that something (a copy of the Joseph EP & whatever else he wants) easily, freely, without putting anything on the table, the value of copies of his boot has now diminished to close to zero. So why not put it on the table? There's no reason not to.

I present the argument above mainly because I think it's interesting in an academic sense, not because I think Ted & Scot & others should be in any sense duty bound to open up their collections to instant digital distribution. That decision is certainly none of my business. I do know that an extraordinary amount of work went into these collections, including trans-Atlantic journeys and learning foreign languages.

In fact, if you guys (Ted & Scot) would like you can send me privately a list of recordings you collected that you'd rather see not get out, and I will do my best to make sure they stay off my server.

Last think I want to do is generate bad blood or diminish people's ability to add to the known universe of rare recordings. If it seems like things are headed that way, I will take the server down.

thanks,

John