gerade gefunden, hier erzählt coleman, wie das bmg lief:
What happened with me is I chose to go on an 18-month sabbatical around 2000. I wouldn’t say I was reborn, but when I came out of it, I had some different ideas. I took a break from performing and recording, but not music. That alone shocked BMG, my label at the time, but when I returned, my ideas shocked them even more. I went to BMG with the idea of making a record and giving it away for free. It took me a long time to convince the guys in the so-called jazz department that the paradigm is changing. I told them we have to get with a new program because things are going to be different and you can’t copy-protect everything. You can’t beat these people, so it’s better to join them. Buying music has always been a young person’s game. Old people, relatively speaking, buy very little music. So, if you want to get with what’s happening today, you have to get with this young crowd who are buying video games. So, eventually I convinced the BMG guys I worked with and they took those ideas to their superiors who said “You’re crazy. Get rid of this guy.” So, that ended my 10-year relationship with BMG after being with them from 1990 to 2000.
Around that time, I was going to do a concert in the south of France, record it myself, and give it away. That was my plan. The head of the jazz department at BMG liked me and what I was doing and thought it was very important. He had a fantasy in that the reason he brought me to his department is because he thought he was like Coltrane’s producer on the Impulse! label. He liked the idea of sneaking Coltrane into the studio in the middle of the night, even when the bigwigs were like “Don’t record this guy no more. He’s killing us.” So, he was that kind of guy going against his superiors and hiring this renegade person. He told me later on he thought I was his Coltrane. I said “I ain’t Coltrane. You’re tripping.” And so he was sad that this relationship was ending and wanted the story to go on. So, he contacted this other guy at Label Bleu, a smaller French label which wasn’t as beholden to a big organization. He said “Steve Coleman is about to go out on his own and you should grab him before he does that, but know he’s got some pretty weird ideas.” So, the guy from Label Bleu contacted me.
We were on tour, and the cat contacted me on my cell phone on the train and said “Can I meet to talk with you before you do what you’re trying to do?” I said “How are you going to meet with me? We’re touring and moving around.” He jumped on a train at one spot and our meeting was between that spot and where we were going. It was like an Orient Express type of thing. So, we had a meeting on the train car and by the time we got off the train, we had a deal. He listened to all my stuff and I told him how I was going to give away stuff on my website, make this free record, and how the record industry was changing, and he said “We’re with you. We can make it work. Come with us and we’ll work with you.” I was like “Really?” [laughs] I was in shock. That’s been my relationship. I know they didn’t have good distribution in the States, but what I was more interested in was that they were going to support these ideas. We worked out a really great deal that worked for me. It wasn’t great financially, because the budgets were smaller. Now, Label Bleu is going through the blues like every other label is. We have one official record in the can with them, but they’re having problems with distributors, so its status is uncertain.
Looking back, I had a lot of problems with BMG. Even though I put out records with them, I was fighting all the way. The whole reason I went with BMG France was that I wanted to do a record in Cuba and the BMG label in the U.S. said “No. We can’t do anything in Cuba. We can’t support that.” So, I had to go outside the U.S. to deal with that just because of stupid politics that I have nothing to do with. There was also always somebody at BMG in America trying to get me to make a record with TLC or Destiny’s Child or something like that. It was constantly happening. The R&B division would come up to me and say “We feel like you have some kind of sensibility and it would be great if you would do a record with such and such.” I said “Great for you. Not for me.” I was moving in an esoteric direction and it didn’t make much sense to them. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I did the Genesis record. They probably heard it and said “What the hell?” It’s a large group thing with all this Kabbalistic stuff, and it wasn’t quite Coltrane’s Ascension, but it may have sounded like it to them.
Ascension to Light, your last BMG record, didn’t come out in the U.S. at all. I guess the writing was on the wall at that point.
That didn’t come out here because it was caught on the tail end of the relationship. It was a casualty of the executive wars, so it didn’t make it. It was released when all this stuff I told you about went down. So they gave it a minimal release and went through the motions. They didn’t really release it. They just sat it on the side.
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