Muhal Richard Abrams - The Complete Remastered Recordings Vol.2

his music is immortal !! this is an amazing collection

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I bought a couple of these CAM Jazz Black Saint & Soul Note box sets directly from the source about four months ago and have been leisurely working my way through the contents. Both boxes were factory shrink-wrapped and apparently new. So imagine my shock today when, for the first time, I pulled the album Colors in Thirty-Third out of this Muhal Richard Abrams box to give it a listen. The disc was thoroughly scratched, with a couple of long, deep scratches and quite a lot of lighter scuffs, as if the CD had been dropped on a floor and stepped on or otherwise very roughly handled. It seems to be playing OK, but it is still inexcusable for a company to manufacture and ship something that is supposedly new in such horrifying condition. This would barely rate a Good as a used CD on Discogs. All the other discs in the box appear fine, and the return window has long-since closed, so I am stuck with a new box with one badly-scratched CD in it. I am guessing that the remaining stock of these out-of-print sets are repackaged returns and not truly new. Consider yourself forewarned if you think about buying one of these boxes — and inspect each disc thoroughly upon receipt to avoid any ugly surprises!As for the music, this is the better of the two Abrams boxes. The first volume is focused upon Muhal’s acclaimed big-band recordings, which have a kind of sameness to them after awhile. The ensembles tend to eschew traditional jazz qualities of instrumental virtuosity in favor of more pointillistic group interplay involving a lot of little-known players. Big emotional moments or climaxes are avoided, and while each album erupts briefly into a kind of nouveau swing, most of these records peter out in an unsatisfying whisper. The emphasis then is on Abrams as a composer and the music is an acquired taste.This second volume is easier to approach, containing a greater variety of material, including a lot of duets and small-group recordings that emphasize improvisational skills and bigger-name collaborators like Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton. Ironically, the disc that was heavily damaged in my set is perhaps the best recording in the box, a nearly-conventional post-bop set with some star players like Andrew Cyrille, Fred Hopkins and Dave Holland. It moves into various duet and solo passages that reflect Abrams’ diffusive style, but it also simply swings harder than a lot of his music. Good stuff. Too bad somebody used it as a scouring pad before CAM Jazz shrink-wrapped it and shipped.