There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. Must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush in such a way that an unnatural or uninterrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Pianist Bill Evans wrote that in the liner notes for one of the most important albums ever recorded.
Miles Davis kind of blew. I’m an advocate for those of us who want to make sure that musicians, engineers, producers are credited on recordings. That should include album art and everyone really who contributed to the recording.
But there is a wealth of information that used to be written in the sleeves of albums and CDs written by people with intimate knowledge of the recordings, fellow musicians, biographers, important critics of the time. This stuff is often too short to be printed as an article or a book and it’s probably too long to be included in the text field of some digital service provider. But it’s tragic.
Some of these writings contain information I don’t think is available anywhere else. And we are at risk of losing it forever. I’m hopeful one of two things will happen.
Either someone will tell me where all this stuff actually lives and that is not just evaporating before our eyes or we need to create a movement. We have to ask the record companies to release the liner notes, let us create a repository where they can be gathered and shared without risk of copyright violation. The liner notes, the art, some of it reads like a who’s who of musical and thought leaders.
So it’s a tall ask, but if I’m not alone, let’s create some traction. Comment, release the liner notes. Maybe we can create some kind of open platform and submit this knowledge so it can be shared with future generations.
