Verve Acoustic Sounds Series Reissues

The cheapest VG+/VG+ grade US original of Karma on Discogs is $125, if you want NM/NM then you are up to €250, so folk will certainly pay good money for this stuff.

 

Agreed. I’d love a good vinyl copy of Meditations. I’ve got that one on CD and in fairness it does sound superb.

 

I suspect it is a huge mistake to think of the later periods of Impulse free and spiritual jazz to be as confusing or inaccessible to young ears the way it was to many of our generation. This music has now been fully absorbed into so many genres over the past decades in just the same way Stockhausen, Cage, Riley, Reich, Glass etc have been in everything from film music to club culture. If one views the recent rebirth of jazz by young musicians, e.g. the current scenes in London, New York etc, they are clearly hugely influenced by Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, late-period Coltrane, Albert Ayler etc. This stuff runs through it just as strongly as the ‘70s soul-jazz/funk groove thing (electric Miles, CTI, George Duke etc). I’m sure there is a market for this stuff now. Anyone who likes Shabaka Hutchings, Makaya McCraven, Kamasi Washington etc will feel right at home with Sanders, Alice, electric Miles etc. I’m convinced this stuff is ‘now’ in the same way my generation mined the Velvet Underground, Stockhausen, early Krautrock etc for inspiration.

 

I have a feeling he is testing the water. Mingus Black Saint And The Sinner Lady was a success, as was A Love Supreme, which despite its legendary status is hardly easy-listening. Karma and Journey continue this trajectory, as does the Roy Haynes. I think they’ll do all right and hopefully open the door to some Archie Shepp, more Sanders and later Coltrane. Another thing to factor is if Chad is really blinkered to audiophile market only he’ll surely hit the wall by endlessly reissuing the same albums that have already been done many times on audiophile labels previously. As an example I have zero interest in the Billie Holiday as I have the Classic Records cut he’s reusing the metalwork from. It sold pretty well so many others will have it too.

If Chad was to stick Fire Music, Thembi, Black Unity, Meditations or Interstellar Space out he’d clean-up all the audiophile interest in those titles as (to my knowledge) they have never been done at this level before in this marketplace. A lot of this stuff also dates from the period in the run-up to the oil crisis too so US vinyl quality (which was never the best) was dropping, so it should be pretty easy to beat the already crazy rare and expensive original copies. The Japanese jazz fans got this stuff so there are nice Japanese copies floating around (most of my late-period Coltrane vinyl is Japanese), but they are still rare and expensive now, and you have to import it. There’s a market for this music, even from audiophiles (and we are all a subset), I’m convinced of that.

PS Sun Ra is an obvious choice too. I bet a nice copy of Space Is The Place would sell really well.

 

As a bit of a thread diversion it is interesting seeing Chad go through his collection of Alto Analogue reissues. It does reveal a little more about his taste which looks to extend way into classical. He did nod approvingly at the early Archie Shepp on Alto though.

PS I’ve got one Alto he hasn’t, Jimmy Witherspoon’s Blue Spoon! Rest of mine are the two on Impulse, the John Lee Hooker and Coltrane’s Afro Blue, I actually found the latter sealed in the wild for a tenner, the rest I bought new at the time. These are very good sounding records IMO.