Jazz notes (From York Press)

Jazz notes

12:15pm Friday 5th March 2010 in

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The Long-Player Goodbye, the album from vinyl to iPod by Travis Elborough, £8.99 (ISBN 978-0-340-93411-1)

WHEN I got into this very readable book, I started wondering about the author. Does he exist? Is he a front for Brian Matthew or George Martin? No. He does seem to exist and has his own MySpace to prove it.

Travis appears to be a learned gentleman with a sense of fun and the book reflects this, being well referenced and footnoted with an extensive bibliography. While scholarly, the author resists pomposity in style. His book is written in a colloquial style that will at times have you pondering foreign phrases and classical references.

The book takes us through the vinyl wars between the big companies which brought on the death of the breakable and heavy 78rpm discs which had served throughout the 20th century. The main rivals 45rpm seven-inch vinyl and 33rpm vinyl LPs (at 10 or 12 inches) – both won.

The new plastic medium brought a great improvement in quality (no longer the sound of bacon cooking in the background) and longer playing time enabling whole symphonies to be carried in one sleeve.

The sleeves became an art form sometimes more noteworthy than their contents. The kids bought records in their millions, while a few of their peers obtained celebrity, wealth, and in many cases, a drug habit.

The author covers this in fascinating detail from both sides of the Atlantic. He enjoys wide musical tastes but succeeds in distancing himself from any one style or artist, avoiding the trap of hagiography.

My only criticisms are to do with omissions. I would have liked more on the impact the LP had on the jazz world. The author deals with the coming and going of other formats and the convenience and ubiquity of the mp3. He allows the death of the LP to remain largely unchallenged.

In the hi-fi fraternity, there are many who maintain that the LP still provides the best route to audio excellence and continues to remind us of a time when recordings were simply and well made before the days of over-digitisation and audio compression.

The Long Player Goodbye is for anybody interested in the evolution of popular music in the past 50 years, regardless of their age and preferred medium. An excellent book that is difficult to put down even to turn over the LP playing in the background.

* Don runs The Music Goes Around website (themusicgoesaround.co.uk), based in York.