For German readers: some thoughts and notes and quotes on the music I'm listening - to be found
on my new blog:
ubus-notizen.blogspot.com

Also check out the great new, independent magazine get happy!?, reporting on music, movies and more:
gethappymag.de

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Bill Dixon...

...would have been 85 years old today.
And just today, I received my copy of the new CAM box collecting all his Soul Note albums.

Read Ben Ratliff's NYTimes obit, Ben Young's official obit, and Clifford Allen's post about Dixon's funeral and check out his other blog entries on Dixon (hopefully more are going to come).

Me, I hope to be able to post some of Dixon's music in the coming days or weeks, but real life interferes again these days - just too busy to spend time here.
For starters, I recommend you check out this Verona 1980 concert.

4 comments:

lc said...

thanks for the tip, ubu (and thanks by the way for the Noah Howard's latest goodies).
as someone who owns almost all of Bill Dixon's releases on SOUL NOTE (which I absolutely do recommend, no question, especially now at that so very low price), I'm a bit disappointed that they were unable to include any unreleased version from any of those recording sessions (the same goes for the George Russell and the Cecil Taylor boxes).
is the remastering incentive enough for us, already convinced people that most of the SOUL NOTE/BLACK SAINT catalogue ('can't wait for some Julius Hemphill boxset) is indispensable?
does the boxset come up with a booklet documenting the recording sessions?

ubu said...

No booklet, just most basic packaging: cardboard sleeves in which the CDs are housed, if the LP backcover has displayed all the relevant info, you'll have that one the rear, if not, they do a most basic backcover providing the necessary info... nothing else.
The cheap packaging certainly is what allows them to sell these boxes cheaply - and I'm certainly not complaining about that!
There's no booklet, so the lithographies and all the texts from the original releases are absent, alas (I'd love to get some scans in addition to this new box, as I've never seen any of the original releases... not sure about vinyl issues, but it seems the CDs hat lengthy notes and displayed some of Dixon's lithos fairly often.

As for the remastering... an endless topic... I heard good things about these new versions, but myself, I don't have a lot that I can compare as I've not owned many Soul Note and Black Saint CDs so far.
I guess though with the basic info/packaging, me, I'd rather stick to the older issues if I had them - but everyone has to find out about that himself.

Clifford Allen said...

If someone at CAM actually cared about doing things "right" and perhaps contacted the Dixon estate, we'd have a much more definitive box of material on our hands soon. But they wanted to do it cheap and chintzy, so that's what we get.

I've got all the original CDs/LPs and they are indeed beautiful visually, aurally (save Thoughts, which has a few problems), and the notes are wonderful.

Thanks for the shout-out, ubu.

ubu said...

Clifford - that's too bad indeed!
But the rationale behind these CAM-boxes is to get the stuff out there again and do that at attractive prices - might be the soundest strategy in these days of CD sales vanishing... but of course I hear you! I'd have loved an LP-sized box with a large and fat booklet and tons of additional music and I'd have been willing to shelf out lots of $$ for such a thing, too... but then CAM never did such a thing anyway...