Somebody up there doesn't like me

[howard male]

I had completed my 100 word review of Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate's 'In the Heart of the Moon' weeks ago. The evening before it's due to go to press I get a call from the editor saying he wants to make it the lead album review and he therefore needs another 80 words. No problem. I settle down to fleshing out what I've done with a few incidental details such as a few words on the subtle contributions by Ry Cooder and Cachaito Lopez. Happy with the result I email it to the Ed. He emails back:

'And was Ry Cooder really supplying watery keyboard touches? Not watery slide guitar touches?'

I was sure he was - despite the fact he's famous as a slide guitarist - but suddenly I'm no longer sure. I don't want to get such an important detail wrong, so I go to find the CD. It's no where to be seen.

I phone my brother-in-law in Cambridge to see if I left it there at the weekend. He even drives to my mothers house - it doesn't seem to be in Cambridge. I check all the typed notes that came with the CD - no mention of what Ry plays. I go to the world circuit website - not even any mention of the album there at all yet! I go back to my CD shelves, slowly and methodically running my eyes over every spine. I can't believe that of all my CDs, this should be the one to completely vanish!

It's past office hours so I can't phone the record label. As a last resort I email Charlie - no reply. I give up, and scrap that section of the review and start from scratch. Two days later it has still hasn't turned up. It's clearly vanished into a parallel universe where it's smugly sitting on top of a huge mountain of odd socks and barely used biros.

[RobHall]

So Howard are these your words used in a half-page ad in the current issue of "Songlines"? -

"'The music opens like a box of treasures treating the listener to some of the finest improvised music it is ever likely to hear: playing of almost supernatural invention.' The Independent"

[howard male]

No actually they weren't. That must be from the daily paper. My review will be in this coming Sunday. But I did find it inexplicably thrilling when an ad in Mojo last month quoted a favourite line from my Anga Diaz review -

'Echu Mingua is both intensely nostalgic and uncompromisingly modern. Both joyful and cool.'

...and they didn't even print my name! Simple things please simple
minds.

[Charlie]

Although I have a reasonably effective filing system for my records (vinyl & CD), I shudder to think of the hours and probably days of my life spent looking for the one I need right now, the only one I can't find.

Occasionally I shame-facedly write to the applicable PR person and beg a replacement.

Sometimes the lost item never returns, sometimes it inexplicably turns up weeks later, exactly where I thought it should have been.

And yes, Howard, Ry is credited with keyboards, not guitars.

Better get used to not being named in the ads - the copy-writers generally prefer to put the name of the paper, which they believe carries more authority than that of the journalist. They are probably right.

[howard male]

Charlie wrote

Better get used to not being named in the ads - the copy-writers generally prefer to put the name of the paper

I wasn't expecting (or even imagining in a million years) to have my name instead of the newspaper's, just - as well as. Only someone as esteemed as your good self can expect that kind of treatment Charlie!

Still no sign of that CD...

[Penman2]

Although I have a reasonably effective filing system for my records (vinyl & CD), I shudder to think of the hours and probably days of my life spent looking for the one I need right now, the only one I can't find.

How is it organised, Charlie and/or Howard ?

I've been planning to organise mine for years, but don't know whether or not to split into music categories, whether to tackle order alphabetically, but then by artist or album name or record label, then artist ?

Since it is so large, it has to be spread over a number of different places in the house (and in long-term storage), so what do you do when you remove an album for 'current enjoyment' - leave a card where it was originally filed, so that you know it isn't 'lost' but 'mislaid' next time you search for it there ?

I've never been able to work out a satisfactory system, so chaos reigns (but I still have fair success in finding albums when I want to).

[howard male]

Well, for one thing The Penman, if record collections were land-masses, I'm sure mine would be the Isle of White to Charlie's African Continent. So I wouldn't be confronted with the kinds of problems that obviously face you, and probably face Charlie, when it comes to organisation.

I've just had a brutal cull, consigning a whole bunch of dull 80's and early 90's R&B stuff that I purchases in my 'wilderness years'- when I'd become bored with rock and hadn't become fully immersed in world music - into storage. I used a very simple criterion - if I'd not played it in ten years I wasn't going to be playing it any time soon.

Everything elsewhere remains in a kind of organised chaos which occasionally gets tweaked into a slightly less chaotic state. But if push comes to shove, all the world stuff's together, and then within that genre, divided into countries.

All my seventies stuff such as Costello, Bolan, Bowie, Clash, Television, Lou Reed, Talking Heads etc, shares another corner, which kind of bleeds into my vintage soul and blues stuff, and then below that is my reggae enclave. Head past the sofa and you'll hit my blaxploitation ghetto, and then just on the other side of the chimney breast, my punk tower-block.

But all these CD neighbourhoods are supremely jealous of the plush Boxed Sets which have the honour of standing upright, along side the larger art books, looking down on the multicultural neighbourhoods below, from a high-rise bookcase.

So now you know!

[Penman2]

Howard, I understand your dilemma, but I have had such a wide range of musical tastes (and I enjoy the "fusions" between categories) for so long that splitting into genres would be quite a headache.

My 'organisation' (a misnomer, if ever there were one) tends to be - by default - date of purchase. When a pile of recent purchases gets too cumbersome, it has to be found a home: whether bookcase, drawers or box.

When it succeeds, it is only when I can vaguely remember when I bought an album, so have a rough idea of the geographical location of, say, 6 months of purchases. Fortunately, poverty has dired up the rate of purchase, so storage is becoming less of an issue.

Then it is just down to the hard graft of sorting through them, accompanied by expleteives when I suddenly realise that I had forgotten that I already owned that album and just know that there is a more recent duplicate somewhere......

Even thinking about it brings me out in a sweat - there has to be a sensible answer somewhere.

[NormanD]

Here's a short, but relevant article from Saturday's Guardian about the obsessive nature of record collectors: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features ... 74,00.html

How insulting! Such crass generalisations! We're not like that at all.....are we?

Norman

[howard male]

Norman wrote -

We're not like that at all.....are we?

Well I'm not Norman! This article could take this discussion in a totally different direction - do we have vinyl snobs contributing to this forum? Can they honestly discern any difference between vinyl and CD apart from the fact that the latter is snap, crackle and pop free?

But before we go there, I'd like to say that perhaps the Guardian is right and musicians aren't collectors in the same way non-musicians are. For about ten years whilst I was working on music almost full-time I probably only bought 6 albums a year. But last year it was more like one a week.

For one thing, when you're spending all day hunched over a porta studio, and the evening being bounced around in the back of a Ford Transit, you don't have the time or the inclination to search stuff out, and for another - and I'm sure most bands feel this - no one is doing anything as radical and exciting as you are, so other bands music just irritates.

In the mid eighties I probably survived on a wholesome but restricted diet of Tom Waits, Thomas Mapfumo, 'The Indestructible Beat of Soweto', and Nina Simone. Nina and Tom I discovered through tatty 50p albums found on Brixton market, bought on impulse at the same time as a quarter of a pound of mushrooms and a pound of onions. 'Soweto' was bought because it looked groovy and different, and I thought it was going to be in the same ballpark as Mapfumo. And Mapfumo, because I needed to relive a revelatory performance in Battersea park.

So this was not only a very tiny collection, it was also almost an arbitrary collection. Often bought on instinct (nice cover) or because I'd heard of, rather than heard, the artist.

[Penman2]

This article could take this discussion in a totally different direction - do we have vinyl snobs contributing to this forum? Can they honestly discern any difference between vinyl and CD apart from the fact that the latter is snap, crackle and pop free?

Well, I've always preferred CDs, but then I did have to exchange John Martyn's 'One World' 12 times to try to find a reasonable vinyl copy- even then 'Small Hours' sounded more like a firework display.


A few years ago there was one of those usual flaming bust-ups on the Jazz Usenet forum about vinyl being 'superior' to CD. It went on and on and...then one of the engineers who had spent years re-mastering Miles Davis' Columbia albums came along and said that, having heard all the master tapes, the CD reproduction was far closer to their sound than any vinyl version: sudden end of debate.

Does anyone know the details of John Peel's daughter's ex-boyfriend, BTW ?

[howard male]

I love moments like that. They always remind me of the Woody Allen movie where Woody is standing in a cinema queue and settles an argument in his favour by introducing the director to the arguer, who then explains exactly what the meaning of the film was.

I'm not convinced by the vinyl snob's argument either. My theory is that what people get attached to is a particular sound, regardless of whether it is 'better' or not. I used to love the warm, fat sound of my Dad's 1970's coffin-proportioned stereogram. But I know, objectively speaking, it was woolly and totally without definition at the top-end. T. Rex have never sounded better since!

[Guest]

I'm not convinced by the vinyl snob's argument either. My theory is that what people get attached to is a particular sound, regardless of whether it is 'better' or not.

Possibly. But I'm convinced there are perfectly objective issues at work as well. For instance sax players like Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges with their instantly recognisable 'human' sound (sorry I realise that's not a very 'objective' sounding criterion, but it's the best word I can come up with) , come across infinitely better on vinyl. No-one yet has failed to pick out the difference when I play them the vinyl version of the Art Tatum/Ben Webster quartet and then the CD version. And it's always the vinyl version that's preferred.

[Ted]

I'd always thought that Ornette Coleman's Live at the Golden Circle sounded loads better on vinyl than CD and was delighted to read in the Penguin guide to Jazz Cds (or some similarly anal document) that someone else agreed with me.

Incidentally, my partner Maxine is a professional librarian and is prepared to help some of you sad men catalogue and order your collections for £40 an hour plus travelling expenses :) Although after many years of on-off arguments about how to organise the tunes we have got nowhere with this one. Piles of CDs, double-shelved books and tottering towers of 45s are all we have managed to come up with.

Cheers
TW

[Penman2]

There are times when vinyl is superior - undoubtedly; but not sufficiently to claim 'superiority'.

I've come across a couple of examples where the CD mastering was clearly at fault because the CD sounded so much fainter and thinner in sound than the version I had on vinyl (almost 'tinny' in the case of a Weather Report album).

I'm pretty certain that this is the reason generally where vinyl appears to have a better sound: probably the master tapes are no longer available or the engineers do not have the experience (or time or budget) to produce a quality CD version.

The test would be whether any recent (ie. CD era) recordings sound better on vinyl. I've never heard anyone say so, probably because all the time, money and effort goes into the CD version.

Any recording engineer care to comment ?