gypsy-tail-wind
Was BYG angeht, ich erinnere mich an eine Stelle in einem Interview mit Noah Howard – zu einer Story umgearbeitet, die PDFs aus dem Wire-Archiv sind ätzend, man kann keinen Text kopieren und den oberlausigen Text, den man direkt im Archiv unterhalb der Scans lesen kann, kann man auch nicht kopieren. Doch es gab davon dann noch das O-Ton-Interview-Transkript von Phil Freeman, die relevante Passage daraus ist diese:What about when you went to Paris in 1969-1970? You worked with a few other people then.
Everybody had emigrated to Paris. I used quite a few French musicians also. But being away from home, everybody sort of bonded together. When they were in the studios, they all worked with people that they knew. Whereas I went off into a real strange thing, because when I got there there was Kenny Clarke and Art Taylor, who had been longtime residents. They had been there almost ten years before I arrived. The first person I got together with was Art Taylor. I called him for a session, because we used to all hang out together. So I said, ‚Look, I got this session tomorrow morning. You wanna hit it? We’ll go in, we’ll rehearse for five hours, then we’ll tell ‚em to turn on the machines and we’ll do it.‘ I wrote the music out, and we just did it. That was the Uhura thing that just came out on Verve. It’s got Frank’s name, but that’s my session. I did two sessions, Uhura and Space Dimension. I wrote all the songs. I also did One For John with Frank, with me, Frank, Bobby and Muhammad. Then in one of my crazy moments, I did Black Gipsy with Shepp. Beautiful, mad, mad session. It was really great, it was fun. The violin and the poets – Julio Finn and these guys from Chicago. Great stuff.Why didn’t you record for BYG as a leader yourself? Was it because you could see that they were crooked?
That was the problem. I brought Frank, Bobby and Muhammad to Europe. We were supposed to do, there was supposed to be a Paris jazz festival. But the kids were rioting in the streets. So the governmental authorities moved the thing to the Belgian/French border, to a little village called Amougies – a farm, really, like Woodstock. Thirty thousand people, I’ll never forget that. But the problem was, BYG – I negotiated with them that we’d come in, play the festival and do two record deals, one for me and one for Frank. So they did the Frank thing first, and they didn’t pay him.Und dann noch der Grund, weshalb Howard da anders tickte als die anderen:
So you prefer licensing albums to signing with labels?
Licensing is better than selling it for life and not getting the money, right? My people in New Orleans were business people. I grew up understanding how you do business and have fun. You can do both, and be creative. It’s not contradictory. Now, it’s becoming more and more a reality. At that time, I think I was a little bit ahead of the game.Quelle:
The Wire 263, January 2006 / Unedited transcript by Phil Freeman
http://www.thewire.co.uk/web/unpublished/noah_howard.html (Datum habe ich nicht notiert, aber das Word-Dok ist vom Juli 2013 – gut möglich, dass es nach Howards Tod im September 2010 mal online gestellt wurde und ich es dann kopierte/sicherte)
PS: mit „came out on Verve“ meint Howard das Reissue aus der Free America Series von Universal (klick)
vielen dank für’s raussuchen! das wird ja alles aus französischer sicht eher verschwiegen bzw. klingt dort wie eine agenten-story:
August 1969. Paris Orly airport. The final step on a great journey for most of the young free jazz lovers who’d filled up on music in Algiers. Jacques Bisceglia came to the Pan-African festival and took advantage of the occasion to make a date. See you in Paris? No! The party’s not quite over yet! Limousines were waiting to take everybody to the Prince of Wales Hotel. ‘We had negotiated the rates to death, but it worked and the guys were amazed! It wasn’t the kind of consideration they would get in the States’ says Karakos amused, never short of crisp details. All night long they would be signing contracts – sometimes painfully. Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago even pulled out his knife saying ‘that’s my lawyer!’. Archie Shepp would hold onto some bitterness all his life, feeling cheated…Most of this ‘new thing’ (i.e. free jazz) would be recorded during August. Some would stay in Paris, such as the Art Ensemble, Alan Silva, and Archie Shepp, appearing again…
Many of them made one, sometimes several, recordings under their own names, all of them taking part in numerous sessions which took place at the Saravah studios, on Passage des Abbesses, then – when space ran out – at the Davout studios, in Porte de Bagnolet. Archie Shepp would create a few magic records – Yasmina, A Black Woman, and Blasé with the eternal Jeanne Lee…but this wasn’t the only landmark moment in this series.
One session followed another with intensity. In dark glasses and suffering from many sleepless nights, everyone was all over the place. The feeling of a state of emergency emerged, with tempo in turmoil. At the beginning of October the records dropped. With their multi-coloured cover and double gatefold, they perfectly illustrated the ambitions of the label: ‘To put the latest contemporary jazz back in the spotlight of pop culture.’ Almost immediately, Melody Maker devoted a full page to the story. For years later the shock waves would resonate in the rock scene – Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth never hid his references, just like the label Numero Group, from Chicago. No doubt about it, the free jazz agitators of the BYG Actuel series have long since become music legends. And though these firebrands set fire to the Paris underground, they always maintained an echo of the sacred fire that had fuelled the Pan-African Festival in Algiers
jacques denis, von hier.
die drei labelbetreiber von byg haben sich ja später gegenseitig mit klagen überzogen.
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