For the most part, it's not the labels that have to bear the workload of tallying different pay-outs for Tower; it's the distributors. And it's been my experience that at least several of the distributors had been doing this all along: Tower had always enjoyed better terms and lower prices, chalked up by the labels as part of the cost of doing business with their best, most reliable customer. Those costs naturally got passed along to the labels in billing, but it's the distributors who took the biggest, most immediate hit when Tower began foundering. And in some cases, the trickle-down effect took the form of labels being dropped by distributors. Fascinating that this article appeared in the Boston Globe, the same paper whose longtime jazz critic just gave up his job in order to go work for Branford Marsalis's new label, Marsalis Music. The main thing that the modern major labels have lost sight of entirely is that jazz has always been an incremental business: You sell 800 or 2000 of a title during the first year, perhaps, but over time the best of those titles by the best of those artists keep selling and selling and selling. That's why during any given week, 'Kind of Blue' still outsells just about any new release on offer, the singers aside. The unnamed producer in the article had one thing wrong: There's nobody in the business, I'd hazard to guess, who really thinks there's another Miles Davis out there. Instead, they keep looking for new ways in which to package and sell the Miles Davis recordings they already have, for little cost and maximum return. SACD is the latest iteration of that, now that it's beginning to take off with the high-end early adapters. Meanwhile, everyone wants a new Diana Krall or a new Norah Jones not because they sell well for jazz but because they simply sell well. Krall is playing exactly the same halls that Rush and the Who and other rock bands are playing on their current tours, and when I was doing some chart research for my sister last night, I found that Jones is Top Ten on the *pop* charts in Spain and France and is building up an impressive Adult Contemporary radio breakthrough in the US. That's what the major labels are looking for. (Incidentally, the chart research I was doing was a tally of all the sales and airplay charts that a new Elvis Presley remix is currently topping. The King ain't dead yet, apparently.) Jazz simply needs to get used to being a cottage industry again, because we're never going to go back to a time when jazz is popular music that sells in popular music numbers. The further we get from that Golden Age (which was the '30s, for Chrissakes, and to a lesser extent the pre-rock '50s), the fewer sales we should expect for the typical jazz release. I think the new Osby and Moran discs on Blue Note and the new Chris Potter on Verve are tremendous records that may well have long legs and sell for years, but they're not going to rack up instant sales that a major multinational will appreciate. That may mean harder work with lower returns, but in the end, it also means avoiding the major labels' stifling of the creative impulse, i.e., D.D. Jackson hitting writer's block when RCA was pressuring him to "make a Brad Mehldau Trio record," a writer's block that only came unstuck when he and the label agreed to part ways. That said, ironically, I'm eager to hear the upcoming Brad Mehldau CD, recorded with alt-rock producer Jon Brion and featuring performers like Jim Keltner and Matt Chamberlain. Warner Jazz makes very few strong decisions and even fewer strong records, but this one could be a real breakthrough. Of course, as a reviewer noted in this month's Jazz Times, it sure wouldn't hurt if there was still an AudioGalaxy around through which people could "accidentally" find Mehldau's version of "Paranoid Android." Steve Smith ssmith36@sprynet.com

Steve Smith wrote:

[...] I think the new Osby and Moran discs on Blue Note and the new Chris Potter on Verve are tremendous records that may well have long legs and sell for years, but they're not going to rack up instant sales that a major multinational will appreciate.

Excellent discs, but will they get the chance to sell for years, or will the be cut-out in a year or two? Alan Lankin -- lankina@att.net Jazzmatazz http://jazzmatazz.home.att.net