The Golden Age of Free Music

There is SO MUCH great music available for free on the internet -- almost any album I can remember and look up.

I've gotta believe some day this bonanza will be shut down and we'll go back to prowling brick&mortar stores for the rare find. Right now though I'm in pig heaven.

We had free music when I was young. It was called AM radio.

For instance.

Couple days ago I ran across a Gerry Niewood CD in a local CD store I hadn't been to in a while (hadn't realized they'd moved. Thought there were OOB). Niewood died early (plane crash) and his stuff is kinda rare so I was pleased to find this.

But it made me remember another Niewood album I used to have on LP. Checking online, it's never been issued on CD. Checking further online I found someone had posted the tracks from the album, nicely dubbed & cleaned up, on YouTube. Downloaded the audio portions and burned myself a CD-R. Happy times.

But this album was on A&M Horizon, a short-lived sub-label devoted to jazz which eventually morphed into the Artists House label, another short-lived label. Almost none of the orphans on either label ever made it to CD. Looking over the list, there were SEVERAL I had fond memories of (Jim Hall, Red Mitchell, Paul Desmond). So I went looking for them.

Sure enough, almost every one was available online.

These are golden times.

On September 29, 2005 I made a CD-R for a friend of mine called "Novelty Songs of the 1920s, 1930s & 1940s."  It included such gems as "Inka Dinka Doo," "I Found A Million Dollar Baby," "Your Feet's Too Big," "What Do I Care What Somebody Said," "C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-I-N-O-P-L-E," "That's My Weakness Now" and 21 wonderful others dubbed from my LP collection.

I kept a copy for myself.  However, sometime later (I think around 2012) I discovered that the CD-R had failed and become unplayable.  In the meantime I'd changed computers so the files were no longer on my hard drive.  I kept the cover, and threw the disc in the garbage.  The cover got filed away with my huge pile of Windows software on CD, a project for some future date.

Like today -- when I discovered it again while sorting through software to throw away.

I found all of the tracks -- except the few that I had on CD -- on YouTube for free.  Downloaded, converted, imported, arranged in the right order and burned a new CD.  Damn, it sounds pretty good.  I did a good job of sequencing the songs fourteen years ago.

Two of the albums I've been actively looking for for years -- "albums" as in LPs because they've never been reissued on CD -- are Stomu Yamashta's first two albums, recorded January 11, 1971 in front of a live audience. These were the very first commercial digital recordings ever made.

The LPs ARE available, from Japan, for about $50 each (with shipping) but I didn't want 'em THAT bad. They are just percussion improvisations, afterall.

But I check, every few months, to see if anyone's posted them online, or if YouTube has videos.

Lo-and-behold last night I discovered somebody posted them on YT on July 29, in a pretty incredibly good dub. Woo-hoo! They're not much musically, but recording quality on a bunch of percussion instruments (including some really big drums) is infuckingcredible.