Apparently the definitions of "remastered" and "original" are very elastic in the biz: lots of people involved in reissuing this stuff neither know nor care what these terms mean. There are no set standards, no transparency, so...The article suggests that a lot of the mastertapes had indeed been lost and careful proper digital copies had been made for only a fraction of them, particularly to preserve those that were in poor or deteriorating shape.
It really begs the question what all these "remastered from the original analog tapes" reissues are based on. They can only be using the digital copy or copies of the mastertapes several times removed. From my understanding, for hi-rez digital media, it is necessary to go back to the mastertapes to specifically master this stuff.
I inquired Speakers Corner (who always use orig. analog masters when available) some years ago about their John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman release that suddenly wasn't to be found anywhere anymore and got a reply something about them no longer having the rights to the release - now I understand why.
Apparently the definitions of "remastered" and "original" are very elastic in the biz: lots of people involved in reissuing this stuff neither know nor care what these terms mean. There are no set standards, no transparency, so...
I inquired Speakers Corner (who always use orig. analog masters when available) some years ago about their John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman release that suddenly wasn't to be found anywhere anymore and got a reply something about them no longer having the rights to the release - now I understand why.
A predictably long and fast-growing thread over on Steve Hoffman’s site. The suggestion being that pretty much the full Impulse and Chess catalogues have been lost along with mountains of other stuff. Clearly a tragedy from a historic perspective, these are high-points in human culture, though hopefully most of the music still exists digitally or on copy-masters elsewhere in the world.
It is also interesting to note just how many very high-price audiophile vinyl cuts of Impulse jazz titles and things like Muddy Waters Folk Singer have appeared since 2008. Hmmm....
PS Thinking about it I was getting confused saying I’d heard about this previously. I was certainly aware there was a fire ages ago that had lost a lot of Atlantic masters, this being why say Coltrane’s Atlantic albums in stereo don’t sound as good as they should as they are from copy masters. Also massive amounts of unreleased Ornette Colman material was lost in that fire. As such I’m getting the two events confused. Hopefully we are better prepared for this one and have good high-res digital for most of it. I still want to see a bloody list! What was in the Impulse archives that hasn’t been heard?
Almost more hurtful is that anything that did survive, but is misfiled for any reason is also effectively lost. This is a real tragedy.
I can see this happening all over again when more and more people ditch their CD's and Vinyl, we'll be relying on streaming services to stay in business and 'when' they collapse the servers will all just get scrapped and all the music will be lost.
You should dip into the SHF if you get a chance. There's a lot of debate about what was actually lost (possibly not as much of more modern stuff as first feared); but also more info about IM. Apparently it's practically impossible for the owner of the masters to get them out once they're in there. If you have the exact info on how it's filed, you get a copy of whatever is in the box you ask for. You apparently can't even get in to check the box, or the box next to it, assuming that they've been filed together! As I said earlier, a lot of that stuff has effectively gone as well.That can surely be undone? I’d expect any surviving tapes to still be in their original boxes, and ones that aren’t could be identified by playing them. It wouldn’t be easy, but I don’t see it would be impossible given the importance of much of the material. Losing the back-catalogue of Impulse or even just Coltrane is the equivalent of losing the bloody pyramids or Stonehenge, it is some of humanity’s greatest achievements.