[ARSCLIST] Good prices on good music

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Concord Music Group is the company that has rolled up Concord, Fantasy and Telarc. They sell 
everything right from their website:
http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/

Good prices, see especially the Stax 50th anniversary promo.

Also interesting, Concord seems serious about breathing new life into their now vast holdings. They 
have already issued some modern remasters of the Stax catalog, which was last remastered by Fantasy 
mostly in the 1980's. And, they've contracted legendary jazz producer Orin Keepnews to supervise 
remastering of his favorite Riverside titles, called the Keepnews Collection. I hope they go back 
and do a wave of remastering for the Pablo catalog, because many of the Fantasy CD's don't do 
justice to the excellent recordings. Also would be nice to remaster all the great Contemporary 
albums engineered by Roy Du Nann. Need to do it right, though. Du Nann explained in an interview 
some years back with Stereophile magazine that he sometimes added plate reverb during LP mastering, 
which is why some of the Fantasy CD's don't sound right vs. the original LPs.

I think but can't confirm that Concord Group either never went into LPs or quickly sold out all the 
remaining Fantasy LPs. If you notice, the last of the Fantasy LP stock from the 80's and early 90's 
is widely discounted in the online retail world.

See also all the Fantasy and Telarc SACD titles available.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the stated intentions of this company. If they can make it work in 
the modern music business model, it's great news for fans and collectors. Selling directly from 
their website at very competitive prices is a great start that other, bigger, companies can learn 
from!

Finally, there's a good interview with Orin Keepnews about this reissue series at Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/2f4pgx
see the "video" link about 1/3 down the page. I hope I'm of that clear mind when I get into my 80's!

-- Tom Fine