Once More Into the Catalog with Concord Music Group

Story by Bill Kopp

Concord Music Group was founded in 2004, the combination of two labels: Concord and Fantasy. The group subsequently added to its stable Telarc International (jazz) and Stax (soul/r&b). Their catalog also includes a vast list of titles from smaller jazz labels including Riverside, Prestige and Stretch. The group quickly earned a well-deserved reputation for exercising care and thought in the repackaging and reissuing of catalog items: large chunks of the back catalogs of Paul McCartney and Frank Sinatra — two of the world’s greatest-selling artists – are now administered by Concord. I asked Chris Clough, Concord’s Manager of Catalog Development, if there is a guiding philosophy for reissue projects.

“Well, obviously we want it to be something of quality,” Clough says. “Something that’s probably not already been done. We’re always looking for titles that haven’t been reissued, or that maybe weren’t done as thoroughly as they could be.”

Concord recently acquired rights to a sizable portion of the Ray Charles catalog, and quickly set about a schedule of compilations and reissues. In most cases the label added bonus material. “I’ve been looking at it as, ‘What hasn’t been done?’” says Clough. “A lot of the Ray catalog has not even been on CD. We did a few things that had already been out; it’s kind of like, ‘Well, you’ve got to do Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music because that was a huge record.’”

“Then,” he continues, “after that, we started looking around. I was a big fan of the LP Ray Charles Live in Concert, and I figured since it was a live show, there might be some unreleased material. And sure enough, there was. So after digging around in the vault, we turned up seven bonus tracks. And some of them – most of them — were really good. I don’t think there’s one where I could say, ‘Well, I can understand why that wasn’t used.’”

Clough has his own theories as to why some tracks were originally left off. “I think Ray probably left ‘Georgia’ off because he didn’t want it to compete with the [studio] version.” But he believes that some of the decisions went beyond commercial considerations.

“I think,” Clough opines, “on a couple of the tracks, Ray might have thought he gave a little more than he wanted to. I’ve listened to a lot of Ray’s live recordings. [On this one] he didn’t know he was being recorded, and I think he gave a little more on these performances; more than he might have been comfortable sharing with the wider world.”

Another Ray Charles reissue of note was 2010’s version of the 1961 classic Genius + Soul = Jazz. The Concord repackaging expanded the album to a 2CD set, with the thematic addition of three other Charles albums: 1970’s My Kind of Jazz, Jazz Number II (1972) and My Kind of Jazz Part 3 from 1975. The project connected the dots between four albums spread over a long span of time.

“A lot of people don’t know that side of Ray,” notes Clough. “He was an incredible player. He was a great songwriter, singer and performer, but he could really play, too.” Clough points out that on these albums, Charles “wanted to flex a little, and show the world he could [compete] with the best.”

When a label such as Concord approaches a reissue project, they are – almost without exception – dealing with old analog tapes. Sometimes they have access to multitrack masters, but more often they have only a “final mix” that has been in some sort of storage for half century.

For a title like Ray Charles Live in Concert, there never were multitrack masters. That live album was recorded by Wally Heider, a master of that kind of work. Clough believes that Heider “kept it simple, got his mix, and recorded it on the fly.”

When they do have the option of working with multiple tracks, Concord’s reissue team does carefully consider that an option. “Sometimes it does make sense,” Clough argues. “Sometimes you can go back in and clean up some things that happened when it was originally recorded.” He refers to occasional buzzes and hiss, pointing out that “Some things take away from a recording, so you want to minimize those.”

The condition of the master tapes varies widely. “They’re all different,” Clough says. “Sometimes they’re pretty ratty.” He makes the point that stewardship of these historic tapes has been under the control of various people over the years. Some exercised more care than others. “Some show signs of…less than optimal storage situations,” Clough says, taking pains to be diplomatic.

At the time many of these recordings were made – especially in the jazz genre – the idea that anyone would be interested in hearing them ten, twenty, fifty years down the line probably didn’t even receive serious consideration. “I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus,” says Clough, choosing his words carefully, “but Bob Weinstock at Prestige was notoriously thrifty. He would reuse tape, and as far as outtakes, his approach was, ‘Well, if it’s not going on the album, who cares about it?’” That may account for the dearth of unreleased material from that label, but Clough allows for another possibility: “Those guys were incredible players, so they maybe did it in one or two takes.”

Luckily, in many cases, someone along the way decided that many of these recordings were important, and made sure they were preserved. Clough mentions George Horn (Chief Mastering Engineer at Fantasy) making sure that the Creedence Clearwater Revival masters were preserved.

Sometimes the Concord Music Group reissue team does have to resort to baking the tapes. This is a process that is exactly what it sounds like: the magnetic tapes start to flake, to separate from themselves. The music literally falls off of the tape. So the reels are placed in a low-heat oven for several hours, causing the material to re-adhere. The result is a tape that can again be played…once. “With the technology that’s around now,” Chris Clough (Concord’s Manager of Catalog Development) says, “once you’ve baked a tape, then you can do a super-high resolution archive, and then you can work from that. Once it’s digitized and you’ve got that good transfer, you can go back to that, rather than the original tape.”

Concord has cultivated very good relationships with the Ray Charles Foundation and Frank Sinatra Enterprises, co-stewards of these reissue projects. The list of titles that have come out in the last few years on Concord has been a nice mix of expanded reissues, thematic compilations, and occasional rarities (such as the Ray Charles set Rare Genius: The Undiscovered Masters). A number of interesting projects are in development, or at least under review. “We’re hoping to put together a Ray Charles Complete ABC Singles box set,” Clough reveals. “It would include a lot of savory b-sides that not a lot of people know about. Even a-sides that didn’t make it as hits, that didn’t make it on albums.”

Some of those songs are great, and haven’t shown up before owing to lack of space. “When we did Genius: The Ultimate Ray Charles Collection, we had to have X number of songs that people expect. There are probably ten songs that, if they weren’t on there, we’d be crucified,” Clough chuckles. “So there’s a lot of really great stuff that most people just haven’t heard.”

Clough describes this potential Complete ABC Singles set as a major undertaking, with challenges related to “sourcing the material” and putting it all together. Likely to be five or six discs worth of material, the project “requires a lot of work before you can really start. And we’re in the process of doing that now,” Clough says.

Concord has also embarked on a jazz reissue series under the umbrella title The Original Jazz Classics Remasters. In the last year or so alone, archival releases have included albums of historical import from a staggering list of greats: Ella Fitzgerald, Ornette Coleman, Cannonball Addereley, Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Wes Montgomery, Cal Tjader, Stan Getz, Vince Guaraldi and others. In addition to the appending of relevant bonus tracks when available, these high sonic quality discs add value by including new contemporary liner notes that help provide context for the music.

“The average jazz fan,” says Clough – whose job it is to know these things – “is the sort of person who buys a physical CD. They want to read the liner notes. They want to know who originally engineered it, who remastered it. And we hire high-quality writers who really understand these records and can give them context. They can bring things full circle,” he points out. “When the original liner notes writer wrote about it, no one knew that John Coltrane was Coltrane.”

On some level, some of the Concord reissues are a clearly labor of love. Some titles are important but unlikely to shift in units necessary – if viewed individually – to justify their release from a cost/benefit analysis point of view. “It’s always a balancing act,” Clough admits. “We run everything through a P&L process before it gets greenlit.”

“A lot of it hinges on the mechanical fees,” Clough explains, referring to the royalties due to the publisher/owner of the recording (as opposed to the actual composer or performer), a rate calculated based on the length of a song. “Jazz is tough, because songs are really long. And anything over five minutes gets exponentially more expensive the longer it goes. There is a threshold, and we do take that into account,” he says.

“The market is shrinking,” Clough admits. “But sometimes you can tuck something in: maybe if you’re releasing five titles, you can include one that isn’t as commercially viable but that is an important title. If you feel strongly about it, you try to roll it into that group. But that gets harder and harder to do.”

Clough reflects on the joy that he experiences when working on these catalog projects. “When I found Ray Charles’ live version of ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ [included on the 2011 expanded reissue of Ray Charles Live in Concert] I couldn’t believe it. It was a totally different arrangement; it just blew my mind. It was really stunning.”

He continues. “We just re-released The Staple Singers album Be Altitude: Respect Yourself. There were a fistful of outtakes to choose from, and some of them, you could see why they didn’t make the cut. But the ones we included, I said, ‘I don’t understand why this wasn’t on the original record! It’s great!’ Some of these were dynamite songs that had been sitting in the vaults for ages. And we wanted the world to hear them.”

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