Record Collectors Research Articles

Breaking boundaries in festival programming

In Germany, the modern jazz festival programmer descended from earlier multifaceted roles established during the interwar and war periods as cultivated by both German and international jazz critics, record collectors, and impresarios. While impresarios historically occupied multiple roles as fans, critics, and producers; they often inhabited the quintessential cosmopolitan role of (white) male jazz critic and discoverer of Black musical creativity. This article examines the impact of the legacy of this archetype in the German context, with the case study of JazzFest Berlin. In particular, we trace the particular contours of Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s (1922–2000) embodied enactment of masculinity within the postwar German jazz festival world, beginning with the seminal founder of the JazzFest Berlin. Drawing on feminist initiatives of the first American women jazz organizers, we compare this female-centric legacy with the particular style and ideologies created by Berliner Jazztage programmer Nadin Deventer, the first female programmer of this historic festival, who brings an innovative and socially engaged approach, in part by staging less constrained gender expectations. Through interviews and an examination of publications, programme reviews, and more, we reveal how the figure of the jazz impresario has been disrupted by increased attention to the roles of professional women programmers who consciously embrace diverse competencies and seek greater recognition of the intersectional barriers for women, women of colour, and foreigners within the German jazz scene.

Historical Records: Reissuing as Curatorial Practice in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

AbstractReissues of recordings are commonplace, yet rarely examined by scholars. This article considers how reissuing is a creative act akin to museum curation. Through this lens, reissuers emerge as crucial interpretive figures, making decisions that affect how music and music history are understood by listeners. I take as a case study the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), one of the most canonic and widely praised reissues. Created by record collector and avant-garde artist Harry Smith and distributed by Folkways, the Anthology comprises eighty-four commercially released recordings made between 1926 and 1932, accompanied by an idiosyncratic set of liner notes. At the time, folk music was beset by various mythologies, notably an idealization of racial purity and an antithetical stance toward commercialism and modernity. When reissuing the material, Smith carefully selected, sequenced, and annotated the recordings in ways that unsettled these mythologies. In 1994, the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on compact disc. Drawing on archival documents from the Smithsonian, I demonstrate how their decisions reframed the Anthology in various ways to fit their goals and concerns. Through marketing, reproduction, cover design, and the soliciting and editing of additional notes, the Smithsonian elevated Smith as a racially progressive auteur while navigating commercial concerns and historical preservation. In particular, the editing of notes avoided controversial statements during an era of politically contentious museum exhibitions. Nevertheless in doing so, the very myths that Smith unsettled in his reissuing were replaced by an idealized race-blindness, anti-commercialism, and historicism.

Rutherford Chang. The Record Collector as Artist-Curator

Record collectors judge their acquisitions by condition and rarity. Artist Rutherford Chang undermines such norms by seeking as many copies as possible, in whatever state, of one of the best-selling albums of all time: The Beatles (1968), or “the White Album.” After 50+ years, many of the 3 million numbered albums have become worn due to handling but also because of writing and drawing. Since 2013, the artist has accumulated over 3,200 copies—most that are chafed, scribbled upon, stained, or moldy. This article examines Chang’s project and its interrogation of fan appreciation and practices of consumption; the affects of aging and patina; the notion of collaborative creativity; and the role of the artist-curator. In amassing such a diverse array, We Buy White Albums highlights the variability of a mass-produced commodity while demonstrating the effectiveness of an artist-curatorial methodology to raise issues about the life and care of record albums.

The Social Life of Jewish Music Records from 1948 Czechoslovakia by Hazzan Josef Weiss

This article traces transnational “life” trajectories of two rare Jewish religious music records from 1948 Communist Czechoslovakia and of their main performer Josef Weiss (ca. 1912, Veľké Kapušany – 1985 Netanya), who was a hazzan (cantor) in synagogues in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Jerusalem, Ramat Gan, Manchester, and New York, but has remained mostly unknown to music history. It shows how these two 78-rpm records stand at the core of Weiss’s grandson’s family / music / memory project, which has revealed and pre­pared to reissue 52 audio recordings to preserve his grandfather’s legacy. While following these and other digitized and technologically modified recordings of Weiss on their recent path between the Czech Republic, Israel, Hungary, and the US, the article sheds light on how this case fits into the broader framework of the social life of things and the context of musical remembrance. Already put to use during the life-cycle rituals of Weiss’s children and grandchildren, as well as in a museum exhibition – this family project constructs a fragment of a Jewish sonic past for the present needs of its actors, while being entangled with the current practice of Jewish memory institutions, as well as with the activities of private record collectors and of one ethnomusicologist (myself).

Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History

Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History

Phonography Culture

Phonography Culture

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Pengenalan Karakter Optis untuk Pencatatan Meter Air dengan Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network

Clean water service providers in Indonesia are still recording water meters as water usage data with manual recording by record collector. Alternative solutions for recording water meters from previous research use the Internet of Things (IoT) or image recognition that is processed on a server. The solutions rely on the Internet which is unsuitable with Indonesia’s condition. This study proposes a water meter reading system that can work on mobile devices without using the Internet. The system works by utilizing optical character recognition (OCR) using the Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) method. LSTM-RNN is a classification method in artificial neural network which has feedback. The results show that the water meter reading system could work without using an Internet connection. The average time it takes to perform the reading process is 2285ms even on Android device with low specification. The overall reading accuracy is 86%. Single value reading accuracy, when the digit meter displays only 1 number, is 97%, while the accuracy of double value reading, when the digit meter displays 2 numbers, is 18%.

New Media Review

New Media Review Carlos E. Peña RIPM Jazz Periodicals. [Baltimore, MD]: RIPM Consortium, [2019–]. https://ripmjazz.org/ (Accessed 20 September 2019). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection. Annual institutional subscription, based on FTE: $1260–$3523 for unlimited simultaneous users.] Since the announcement of RIPM Jazz Periodicals as a work-in-progress, as early as the 2015 IAML/IMS meeting in New York, music librarians and researchers have eagerly anticipated this next step for the esteemed "R-projects" (i.e., RIPM, RILM, RISM, RIdIM). Available as of May 2019, this searchable, full-text collection of over 100 American jazz journals and magazines will almost certainly not disappoint those who have been awaiting their chance to dig into it. RIPM Jazz has fundamental differences from its older siblings, but it maintains the high standard of quality that has come to be expected from RIPM, a standard that inspires excitement for the future of RIPM Jazz. content The mission of RIPM Jazz Periodicals (RJP), to preserve and provide access to hard-to-find jazz periodical literature, should come as no surprise to readers of this journal and anyone familiar with the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals with Full Text 1760–1966 (RIPM FT) database (initially reviewed by Stephen L. Mantz under the title "RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals (Full-Text)" in Notes 66, no. 4 [June 2010]: 836–9). As advertised, RJP contains the full text of 105 journals covering the period from 1914–2006. A closer look reveals two journals with content between 1914–1918 including Christensen's Ragtime Review, which is also available in the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals with Full Text (this is the only overlap between RIPM FT and RJP). After 1918, the earliest publication in RJP is Metronome, beginning in 1932 when it shifted focus to jazz. Looking at coverage of the ensuing decades, I counted the number of different publication titles for each year in RJP. Although this is an imperfect measurement due to variation in periodicity and page count among journals, counting the number of unique titles in a particular year gives a sense of the variety of results and perspectives to expect when performing various searches in RJP. It suggests that coverage in RJP peaks in the mid-1940s, with 16 different publications representing 1944 and 18 for 1945 and 1946. Another high point occurs about a decade later, with 16 and 15 titles representing 1956 and 1957, respectively. A complete inventory showing the number of unique titles per year can be seen in figure 1. For many readers, a primary consideration will be coverage of Down Beat. RIPM has done us all a huge favor by including the full text of the first 30 years of this title (1934–1963). Many will wish for even more coverage, and RIPM hopes to add more volumes in future updates. Another major selling point is the inclusion of Cadence from its beginning in 1976 through 2000. Cadence's many in-depth interviews and oral histories stand as one of the towering [End Page 486] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Number of unique titles by year in RIPM Jazz Periodicals achievements of jazz periodical literature; hopefully all the print years of Cadence can be included eventually. In terms of sheer issue quantity, the only publications to rival these two are Metronome (with coverage through its final issue in 1961) and Mississippi Rag (a few 21st-century volumes of which are the only thing allowing RJP to advertise coverage to 2006). The less prolific periodicals run the gamut from trade publications like Tempo (about 90 issues spanning 1933–1940) and record company organs (including Capitol and RCA) to tiny independent "rags" consisting of a few typewritten pages such as Floy Floy (a single, four-page issue from 1938) and The Jass Beat (one six-page issue from 1950). Included are publications of jazz-enthusiast clubs (The Second Line, 1950–63; Jazz Notes, 1957–65), record collectors (The Needle, 1944–45; Music Memories, 1961–65), discographers (Record Research, 1955–77; Disc'ribe, 1980–82; 78 Quarterly, 12 volumes between 1967–2002), and various chronicles of local urban jazz...

Outside, Inside

Outside, Inside Brian Clifton (bio) On my brain the sound of our neighbors' childrenyelling for their mother to watch. I said things like, In timewhat you feed will love you.My tumor fed while John's body limpedaway from mine only aftera moment of its unbearable weight. * In the dark, the words brave and, sometimes,grave. I watched him drag his body across the rug— to see staticencase him. As if highlighted,those words bloomed * in my brain as it replayed the day's conversations. The property manager said things like, Do not slip money under our door and Give it to medirectly. Such a grave mistake, I thought. My tumor a grave within my brain. Now, you're being dramatic. Like a child, * he said and closed the door.Outside, our neighbors' dogs rushed back to their porch where they pretended nothing had happened [End Page 1] between us. I swallowed a pill and then another; I waited for them to rattle around inside me. For weeks,as I waited, I imaginedmy doctor roaming * through my skull. John was still when I askedif we should crawl out the window and down the block. And his stillness pulled me back to bed,though it wasn't ours. Our mouths riffed on what made us feel as though we needed to be in two places at once. * On my brain: stars, bruises,John's hand deep inside a wall. The small twitches in his forearm caused his fingers to pull at the right wires. I measured the distance between silland bedframe in body parts—palm, thigh. I turned from the window, my body on fire. [End Page 2] Brian Clifton Brian Clifton co-edits Bear Review. He is a PhD. candidate at the University of North Texas. His work can be found in Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. He is an avid record collector and curator of curiosities. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Material History: Record Collecting in the Digital Age

The rekindling popularity of the vinyl record and record collecting provide a counternarrative to the ideals of technological progress and supersession, signalling the paradoxical return of a physical music format in the digital realm where "the fetish of newness is at its most aggressive" (Tischleder and Wasserman 7). In this way, the vinyl record provides a disruptive lens through which to question media history as "a history of obsolescence, where new media displace and redefine older media" and explore how "obsolescence resists becoming obsolete" (Tischleder and Wasserman 2). Magaudda (29) argues that the dematerialisation of music media has reconfigured the role of materiality in media practices and has seen physical formats such as the vinyl record "bite back" as mediators of distinct listening practices and unique material relationships to music. Against the background of on-demand streaming services and retro nostalgia in the digital age (Hogarty), record collecting may be dismissed as a resistant and obsolete collecting practice. However, as this article will explore, record collecting can be characterised as a highly social practice, providing a means to communicate identity and taste, maintain a sense of the past, and orient the social life and personal history of the collector. This article reports on the results of ethnographic research investigating the record collections of some young millennial music fans to locate the position and significance of vinyl records in their social lives as a legacy media format. To do this, I examine three key capacities of vinyl record collections in evoking autobiographical memories, maintaining personal histories and anchoring a sense of the past. The significance of personal record collections and collecting practices was investigated in a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of self-identified record collectors. The sentiments of the collector in describing their collecting can be found to reveal their acquisitions as transactions within the spheres of commodity culture and the gift economy, articulating the renewed appeal of vinyl records in the digital age. This perspective of the social meanings and media practices surrounding vinyl records in the digital age highlight the formats significance in understanding the complex trajectories of media history.

Record collections as musical archives: Gender, record collecting, and whose music is heard

In this article the authors extend the concept of the museum and its collecting practices to record collections, and position record collections as musical archives that are representative of our popular music heritage. They recognize the role of material culture and museums in fostering social memory while also noting the absence of second-wave feminism in museum representation. Research on the archival turn in feminism suggests some intersections between material culture literature and some feminist thought and practices, but such overlap requires further examination. The authors suggest that masculine dominance of record collecting has implications for representing whose music heritage and tastes are being preserved. The literature on collecting has traditionally defined masculine actors as collectors while positioning feminine actors as consumers. This article looks at record collecting in detail and argues that a feminist critique of archiving in record collecting provides valuable insights into gender and power relations. Ethnographic research of record collectors conducted in 2006 and 2010–2013 shows that women do collect, but their collecting practices are overlooked due to the type of objects or genres being collected, and where they do exhibit the same qualities of masculine collectors, they are seen as anomalies and often downplay the value of their collections. Furthermore, gender bias is perpetuated when personal collections become the basis of musical canons and are institutionalized through reissue labels or museum collections. This maintains the masculine hegemony seen in music cultures more generally and has implications for creating and building an inclusive musical heritage.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations by Greil Marcus

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations. By Greil Marcus. (William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, 2013.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. [164 p. ISBN 9780674187085. $19.95.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index.Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is an adaptation of the series of William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard that Greil Marcus delivered in 2013. The compact volume consists of three chapters, each an examination of a different song from American folk music. He focuses on a single performance of each piece, but puts them in the context of other interpretations of the work. Marcus acts as storyteller more than a lecturer. Each of the three impressionistic chapters leisurely unwinds. The introduction to each section is so extended that Marcus induces the reader into wondering he is going and what his point is. Marcus finally makes his purpose explicit a full twenty-four pages into the book: am looking at three commonplace, seemingly authorless songs as bedrock, founding documents of American (p. 24).Marcus sets the scene for the first chapter, Inflection, in the 1960s folk revival with the backdrop of the Cold War. In 1963, John Henry Faulk was the onceblacklisted host of the television program Folk Songs and More Folk Songs! He narrates the story of American history as told through folk song, with an undercurrent of rebellion against the contemporaneous anticommunist impingement of freedom. Faulk leads to Bob Dylan's performance of Ballad of Hollis Brown. Marcus describes many facets of the Dylan presentation, including the accompanying visuals and in the lyrics he places his vocal emphasis. He also looks at the song more broadly. Dylan borrowed the melody from Pretty Polly, an old murder ballad, and turned it into a murder ballad of his own about a desperate South Dakota farmer who shoots his destitute family, then himself. Marcus offers a brief history of murder ballads, and describes how the work sounds like something from earlier in our country's history than a current composition. He focuses on the version released on Dylan's third album, the 1964 The Times They Are A-Changin', but also examines the subtle variations in other performances by Dylan.Next, Marcus turns his attention to 1930's Last Kind Words Blues by Geeshie Wiley. The song was one of only six ever recorded by Wiley under her own name or with her musical partner L.V. Thomas, both guitarists and singers. The main theme for the chapter, Disappearance and Forgetting, is about tracking the mysterious origins and paths of the song and the musicians. For decades, it was a source of intrigue for blues enthusiasts because it was tied to questions about the source of the blues, and because the single was a prized rarity for record collectors. Marcus quotes a 1961 interview with Thomas that had long been unpublished, she recalls a time before the blues existed, implying that she witnessed the birth. The lyrics are that of a folk-lyric song where phrases, lines, couplets, or whole verses migrate from tune to tune, from blacks to whites and back again, without regard for subject or locale (p. 69). Wiley and Thomas's guitar work bears traces of other early blues songs, leading to questions of whether they originated or echoed those first sounds. The song's ambiguous point of view leads to an ambiguous meaning, and the mystery is compounded by the few details available about the songs' creators. The track was recorded for Paramount Records, and the chapter includes a concise description of the operations of the label, leading readers to the more extensive coverage in the endnotes, making this book a handy supplement for those libraries fortunate enough to own the recently-issued Paramount Records box sets.Finally, Marcus offers a meditation on Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground as recorded by song-catcher Bascom Lamar Lunsford. …

More Important than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography by Bruce D. Epperson (review)

JAZZ, BLUES, AND COUNTRY More Important than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography. By Bruce D. Epperson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. [xvi, 284 p. ISBN 9780226067537 (hardcover), $45; ISBN 9780226067674 (e-book), various.] Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.Bruce Epperson's More Important than the Music may be read as a companion to Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye's classic two-part article Comprehensive of Jazz, Blues, and Gospel (Notes 51, nos. 2-3 [1994-95]: 501-47; 865-91). Kernfeld and Rye first used as exemplars the jazz discographies by Brian Rust, Jorgen Jepsen, and Erik Raben; the blues discographies by Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, Mike Leadbitter, and Neil Slaven; and the gospel music discography by Cedric J. Hayes and Robert Laughton. In their second part, they compared the competing jazz metadiscographies by Walter Bruyninckx and Tom Lord. For the most part, Kernfeld and Rye took analytical ahistorical views of the works they selected, although they did include as an immediate precedent The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music by David A. Carey, Albert J. McCarthy, and Ralph Venables ([Fordingbridge, Hampshire, Eng.; London: Delphic; Cassell, 1949-1957], 6 volumes, A-L only). Their Comprehensive Discographies article reaffirmed jazz discography's relevance to music librarianship, for which the Music Library Association (MLA) conferred its 1996 Richard S. Hill Award for the best cle on librarianship or article of a music-bibliographic nature. Epperson takes a complementary approach by looking at the careers of the leading discographers and how they developed their standards and practices. His resulting narrative is expansive, probing, and quite funny, too. He confirms some suspicions long held by veteran jazz record collectors and he also gives some much-needed historical background to younger music librarians.In the first chapter, Epperson introduces as historical figures Rust, Bruyninckx, and Lord, whom he maintains as narrative characters throughout the rest of the book. He also discusses the concepts of discography (for individual artists, historical periods, and jazz styles) and meta-discography (for every jazz record ever made). The next three chapters relate the growth of jazz discography from collectors' checklists of records to the initial conceptions of a jazz meta-discography, as seen in the pioneering publications of Charles Delaunay (his editions of Hot Discography and New Hot Discography, 1936-1952), Orin Blackstone (Index to Jazz [Fairfax, VA: Record Changer; Gullickson, 1945-1948, 4 volumes]), and Brian Rust (various). In chapter 5, how a meta-discography has become a near (but not quite) attainable goal is described by means of a double-portrait of Bruyninckx and Lord (whose efforts I will discuss further below). Two chapters about specialized discographies, including those on individual musicians, and others about individual recording firms, broaden the presentation and sustain the history through the 2000s. An avid collector of discographies, Epperson mentions many compilers and works not included in the Kernfeld and Rye Comprehensive Discographies article. More than paying dues to the the pioneers, Epperson may help today's librarians who are wondering whether to keep their copies of Delaunay and Blackstone. He explains to the jazz novice how Brian Rust's three major works, Jazz Records, 1897-1942 (five editions, 1961-1983), The Complete Entertainment Discography, from the Mid-1890s to 1942 (with Allen G. Debus [New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973]), and The American Dance Band Discography 1917-1942 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975) are tary to each and hence all three should be acquired and retained. He explains why one should not expect to see any more volumes of Erik Raben's accomplished but uncompleted Jazz Records 1942-1980 ([Copenhagen: Stainless/ Wintermoon; JazzMedia, 1989-2007], 7 volumes and 1 CD-ROM, A-G only). …

“Watch Out For The Sharks”: Gender, Technology, and Commerce in the American Song-Poem Industry

AbstractSince the early 1900s, song-poem entrepreneurs, often referred to as “song sharks,” have fueled a diffuse and largely hidden American industry that produces music to accompany the poems and lyrics of amateur writers. These entrepreneurs have long been demonized in the popular media for preying on the naiveté of their clientele. Yet despite charges of exploitation, this musical equivalent of the vanity press has survived for over a century. Although the vast majority of song-poets and their song-poems have remained in obscurity, in the 1990s, song-poems developed a cult following among record collectors; as “anonymous collaborations,” these recordings highlighted tensions between poignant personal expression and impersonal commercial rendering that appealed to listeners with a penchant for the obscure. This article draws on advertisements, sheet music, media coverage, and personal interviews to piece together a history of the song-poem industry, with particular focus on the gendered dimensions of the practice, the role of technology in the production process, and the multiplicity of meanings embedded in song-poems for both song-poets and collectors.

The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship

Seasick Steve's appearance on BBC breakfast television in 2009 and the acceptance within the public domain of a white man as a traditional blues musician also points to the possibility that, while some stereotypes remain, others, such as the fact that real bluesmen are black and from the Deep South, may have faded. Seasick Steve, Stockholm, 2009, courtesy of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Presenter: It's blues music that evokes a kind of hobo lifestyle, and people talk about your background in that way. Tell us a bit about where you were before you got to where you are. Seasick Steve: Well, you know, that's like another problem I have. People think they found me under a bridge a few years ago, but I raised five boys, you know, I had normal jobs, I had thirty-five years . . . But when I was a young fella, I had to leave home when I was thirteen, and I did some pretty rough living and wandering around. We used to ride trains or hitchhike and follow migrant work around the farm work. But, you know, that ended many years ago, and I just sort of had to be, tried to be, a regular fella. Seasick Steve's appearance on BBC breakfast television in 2009 to promote his aptly titled album, Man From Another Time, was an uncanny reminder of the post-war blues revival, when aging and forgotten African American blues singers, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, and Son House, were rediscovered and presented to mainstream white audiences. The interview revealed how images and stereotypes conjured up during the blues revival of the mid-twentieth century—the bluesman as wandering hobo or anti-conformist rebel—are still with us in the twenty-first, a perception of blues musicians which, as the singer demonstrates in his response, needs to be repeatedly refuted. The acceptance within the public domain of a white man as a traditional blues musician, however, also points to the possibility that while some stereotypes remain, others, such as the fact that real bluesmen are black and from the Deep South, may have faded. In recent years, a number of writers have sought to deconstruct old stereotypes about the blues. Jeff Titon, Elijah Wald, Marybeth Hamilton, Patricia Schroeder, and Karl Hagstrom Miller have challenged depictions of the blues as an authentic folk music with roots firmly within working-class African American culture, most often presented at odds with modernity and consumer capitalism. This has taken the shape of dismantling the myth of the bluesman, revered as a rebel that renounced the worldly benefits of commercial success for his music. In essence, these revisionist writers have emphasized the irreconcilable variance between the blues as it really was and that which white middle-class enthusiasts and record collectors of the Sixties invented and wanted to see. This chosen view has resulted in obscure singers from the South, such as Son House, Skip James, and Robert Johnson, being idolized as archetypal blues heroes, at the expense of musicians like Leroy Carr and the Mississippi Sheiks, who were both more widely known among African American audiences and commercially successful during the Race Records era of the interwar years. However, while revisionists have highlighted the socio-cultural distances between commentators and the music, they have often limited their efforts by presenting the invention of the blues—that is, the rediscovery of the blues during the 1960s revival—as predominantly an American story. This has either neglected or downplayed the fact that the blues reached audiences far beyond the geographical borders of North America. The blues is American music with origins within African American culture of the South, but its story has not been limited by these national or cultural boundaries. Thus, to fully understand the nature of blues historiography and the way the blues has been invented since the revival, it is necessary to acknowledge that from the middle of the last century the blues was consumed, performed, and interpreted within a transatlantic context.

Pink Floyd: Between Syd and the Dark Side (review)

Pink Floyd: Between Syd and the Dark Side. DVD. Narrated by Thomas Arnold. [San Antonio, TX]: Silver & Gold Productions, 2010. SGDVD039. $16.95. There's no doubt that the period of Pink Floyd's greatest commercial success coincided with the creative output expressed in the series of concept albums ranging from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) to The Final Cut (1983) and including the ambitious multimedia project The Wall (1979). How - ever, it was the phase immediately prior to this success that is of most interest from a historical and structural standpoint. In terms of both style and form one can trace the gradual elaboration of compositional strategies which increasingly favored more prolonged structures as opposed to the single song, while in cultural terms this evolution was closely linked to the late sixties London scene, where experimentation involving art and popular music, avantgarde and counter-culture found a fertile ground for dialogue and confrontation. This is precisely the season featured in Pink Floyd: Between Syd and the Dark Side, the re-issue of a documentary film produced by Chrome - dreams in 2006 entitled Meddle: A Classic Album Under Review. It offers a critical overview of the early part of the group's activity, from the recordings marked by presence of the guitarist and singer Syd Barrett-with his flamboyant but fragile personality-through to Meddle (1971), both a culmination and the starting point for a new phase in their career. This album is in fact the main focus, taking up about half of the DVD's duration, with each piece being examined in detail. The group's artistic development over these years is narrated by means of a fastmoving collage made up from different sources: contemporary documents and films, extracts from films the group collaborated on, such as Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, The Committee, Zabriskie Point, Live at Pompeii, computer graphic animations of record covers and booklets, and specially made interviews with figures from the period as well as journalists and music critics from the leading magazines (The Wire, New Musical Express, Mojo, Record Collector and others). All this disparate material is woven into a lively audiovisual assemblage that will undoubtedly appeal both to fans who want a better understanding of the group's early output and to teachers, journalists and students interested in an overview covering not only Pink Floyd but also the whole scene in which their ideas were able to sprout and blossom. …

Period-instrument performances of choral works, 1794-1846

I begin with two quiz questions: first, name an opera written between Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805) and Rossini’s William Tell (1829); second, name an oratorio written between Haydn’s The Seasons (1801) and Mendelssohn’s St. Paul (1836). In a musicological edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, these might be the million-pound questions—tantalizing but not out of reach for the regular concert-goer, record collector or professional musician. If you got The Barber of Seville for the opera, congratulate yourself. But what about the oratorio question? Difficult though these teasers are (and irrelevant, the scholar of 19th-century music might justifiably claim) they evince material realities about the performing and recorded repertory of choral music from this period. As much as the genres of opera and oratorio flourished in the first 30 or so years of the 19th century, today the works by such unfamiliar names as Mayr, Spohr, Ries, Schneider and...

I don't sound like nobody: remaking music in 1950s America

In J. Zak III's highly original study, phonograph records are not just the medium for disseminating songs but musical works unto themselves. Fashioned from a mix of copyright law, recording studios and techniques, the talent of musicians and disc jockeys, the ingenuity and avarice of producers, and the appetites of record buyers, the all-powerful marketplace Zak describes is an unruly zone where music of, by, and for the people is made and anointed.---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: HistoryWrestling clarity from the exuberant chaos of early rock 'n' roll, Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody redefines our understanding of the record in the shaping of the postWorld War II soundscape. Zak tracks the story which extends from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra through Elvis and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and Bob Dylan with excursions into dozens of lesser known, but crucial, players in a game with few established rules. crucial addition to the bookshelf.---Craig Werner, author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of AmericaI Don't Sound Like Nobody is a superb account of the transformation of American popular music in the 1950s. Zak insightfully explores what recording actually means in terms of the process of making and consuming music. His discussion of the legal, aesthetic, and industrial ramifications of changes in the recording process over the course of the 1950s will make popular music scholars and record collectors reconsider what they think they know about the period.---Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville, U.S.A.: Story of Stax RecordsInformative, original, and entertaining. Through a narrative that is not only enlightening but also compelling, I Don't Sound Like Nobody probes the sources and mechanisms of change within post-war American popular music, shedding a cultural and historical light on the convergence of musical idioms that created '50s rock and roll.---Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop ScoreFrom the birth of the record industry through the legacy of Presley, the development of rock and roll, and the Beatles 'stunning arrival on the world's stage, ' Zak takes us on a journey of exceptional scholarship. breadth of coverage and deep examination of recordings and repertoire reveal the author's reverence and sensitivity to the many dimensions and origins of this complex musical soundscape.---William Moylan, author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix: Art of RecordingThe 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, I don't sound like nobody, a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans---all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.Written in engaging, accessible prose, Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll. Albin J. Zak III is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist. Jacket design by Paula NewcombJacket photograph (c) Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Consumer tribes: membership, consumption and building loyalty

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend the emergent consumer tribe literature to facilitate a more complete understanding of the antecedents and roles implicit within consumer tribal membership. Principally a conceptual paper, this study focuses upon how a more complete understanding of consumer roles can be leveraged to create sustainable loyalty.Design/methodology/approach – This study comprised an examination of the tribe's social behaviour, membership roles and influence on individual consumption. The research was approached interpretively with a case study design investigating a tribe of vinyl record collectors in a New Zealand context.Findings – Key findings include the confirmation of Kozinets' antecedents of tribal membership and the four roles of tribal members previously conceptualised by Cova and Cova. The tribe was found to have a core set of values that moderated any individual differences. A hierarchy, managed through the distribution of “cultural capital”, was found to exist among...