LATEST ADDITIONS

Avant-garde trumpeter Jaimie Branch has a lot on her mind; racism, love, compassion and the state of our union. Tackling these issues is not an easy task, especially for someone who plays instrumental music. On FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise, her second album—recorded live over a few nights at London’s Total Refreshment Center—the New York based musician delivers a passionate, searing set of tunes.

A lawsuit. A specific club night. Films that you’ll never see. A stray cat. Extremely rare posters and promo items that probably ended up in landfill. An unrealized menstrual abacus egg timer. Several buildings.

Mentioned above are Factory Communications catalog items that frustrate completists; they’re unobtainable. Sure, you can get pieces of the buildings, or a picture of the cat, or track down people with (drug-influenced) memories of the party. But if you weren’t there, you really weren’t there and can’t go back. Only remnants of the Manchester label’s catalog oddities remain.

In January 1961, Riverside Records sent the great, but sadly uncelebrated recording engineer, David Jones (also known as Dave Jones and David B. Jones) to New Orleans to record Black traditional jazz musicians for a projected series of albums to be called “New Orleans—The Living Legends”. Jones is little remembered today and remains a shadowy figure, despite recording five months later, also for Riverside, the all-time audiophile classic Bill Evans LPs, Sunday At The Vanguard and Waltz For Debby. Jones did not follow the career path that made other recording engineers who were his contemporaries, latter day icons. He never recorded rock or pop music, limiting himself to on-location recordings for small independent labels of ethnic and classical music, and occasionally jazz. The personal recording style that he created and mastered strove to capture the natural sound of instruments in a room from a slightly distant, contemplative perspective and eschewed whizzbangery and artificial flash. It’s a subtle style that does not immediately impress and one that has undoubtedly limited his reputation.