CD liner notes

[Nano]

I don't know what do you think about this, but I find most liner notes on CD editions of disco material kind of... well, not satisfying to say the least. Maybe I should say what I look for on liner notes, I don't know exactly, I'm thinking loud, please walk with me a while:
-Some years ago I added many points to CD editions with liner notes because there was really few and poor information about disco & black music in general on books and magazines (maybe because most of them are written by white guys? I dunno). So when I discovered the "Disco years" series by Rhino I was glad (also for some "obscure" hits) but then I found the notes were done in a very "light" style, like someone remembering bits and a few details on the times beneath the songs... I was looking for things like "this belongs to THAT album" or "THAT fella played bass", and it kind of dissapointed me. Also I saw it was below-par prose, at least compared to traditional liner notes in jazz LPs and CD re-editions.
-Then, jazz liner notes don't have so much information, after all... but they offer some analysis on the music other than what position the track reached in some chart. Also, the jazz notes tend to be written by guys working on "Downbeat" or "Musician"... Who knows the guys in these disco CDs?
-It's dissapointing, and even more: I found this in CDs of legends of soul too. For example, I have a Curtom edition of two Curtis Mayfield albums, "Curtis" and "Got to find a way". Strangely, it's two CDs when both albums could find room in just one. Then, the liner notes are awful!!! Badly written and just saying things like "oh yeah, Curtis was a master!" I can't understand it; it diminishes the whole edition, nicely packaged and remastered.
-Mostly I think the big labels' editions tend to have better work, at least the "remastered" version of later years. Marvin Gaye's have excellent notes by David Ritz, who was Gaye's biographer. But when you get to independent labels, it's like they couldn't afford money to pay a good reviewer. Sometimes I think it would be better to put just the credits!

What do you think?

[paul]

Hey Nano.
I too had issues with the liner notes found in many of the disco cds. About 10 years ago when I started adding cds to my collection, I noticed that the liner notes were either disparaging to the art form or indifferent to the music and the artist. I just assumed that these people who reviewed the music came out of that "disco sucks" camp or they were too young and had no clue about the music.
Now, I generally ignore the liner notes if they're there and if I'm curious, I'll do a net search on the particular artist.

[QUINNY]

Surely it's not that easy to strike a balance that will satisfy evryone, when writing liner notes. One man's beautiful, informative prose is another's arty farty crap and when originally released, in the case of probably 90-95%, one record is like any other in terms of effort to reward ratio.
Don't forget, different people will buy a CD for very different reasons. So far as Disco is concerned, many, many tracks must have been made by union rate session musicians who were forgotten about, even before the disc was originally released. I doubt if many of the musicians can even remember all the tracks they played on (Laurin Rinder being one - see his interview), so how could one expect this kind of info on a CD compilation?
As someone who's been in the music business for 30 years, I can tell you that lots of musos don't care about things as much as collectors of records do. It's just another day at the office for many of them.

[Nano]

Ah, Quinny... will we EVER agree on anything?
I understand many session musicians being in it just for the money and not giving importance to those disco records... That's precisely the work of music journalism: digging in and recovering precious information that otherwise would be lost forever.
Note that the same thing happened with other incarnations of popular music: doo-woop, English beat, early rock and roll, Sixties soul... But now there are many journalists and critics giving us the facts -not to say interesting opinion- about these music forms and the industry built on them. I mean, we all know by now who Phil Spector or Al Jackson were, but at the time they didn't even had their name printed on their records.

My guess is this kind of serious investigation tends to appear like 10-20 years after the fact, when some of the kids who really enjoyed the music become music journos and write their version of the story (I think the articles reunited in "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll" are a good example).
Now there are some good articles -and even books- on disco too. Maybe we would like to be more, but certainly there's a lot more of information than in most CD liner notes. And then there's Internet...
I'd like to see some of these guys -Tom Smucker, for example- doing that job.