Free jazz Loft Grail Adventures In Ku Ta Ba Wa Do 100 Private Pressed 1973 Lp

$

88

The product is a rare and unique 1973 vinyl record titled "Free Jazz" by artist Richard Minsky. This avant-garde album was privately pressed and is considered a grail for jazz enthusiasts. The record offers a distinctive listening experience with its experimental and innovative style, making it a valuable addition to any vinyl collection.

Private pressing of 100 copies (50 came with a book / 50 as stand alone LPs) with hand stamped covers (some copies autographed by all of the musicians), includes a 9 page musical score insert. Wax excellent unplayed w 2 small rub marks.  Cover autographed by members of the ensemble.

(from Richard Minsky's website)

Adventures In Ku-Ta-Ba Wa-Do

Gerald Jackson, an artist whom I had always admired, showed me a book he had created with pages of pastel color fields interspersed with pages of his poetry. I thought it would be a great project to undertake as a small edition, and developed a method for creating color field images by printing a flat linoleum block on the motorized 8x12 Chandler & Price platen press, using crumpled paper and bits of paper collage as makeready.

To translate the handwritten poetry into typography and retain the intentionally varied word spacing of the original, I hand set the text from foundry type in Goudy Oldstyle. To coordinate the impression quality of the type with the color prints, I made offset plates from a proof of the typogra- phy and printed the poems on a Multilith at the nearby printing shop of Fred D’Alauro, from whom I had gotten the C&P.

Peggy Kelly, one of my printing students, did much of the presswork on the color prints, hand- feeding the paper after I did the makeready and Gerald had approved it.

The original manuscript had no title, and Gerald suggested Adventures in Ku-Ta-Ba Wa-Do, based on one of the poems. As I read the book I heard music in my head, and moving through the colors was like listening to an oratorio or opera.

I wrote a score, assembled a group of musicians, and booked time at Mercury Studios on 57th Street, with recording engineer Chuck Irwin. The score follows the color sequence of the prints and uses the poems as a libretto. The musicians had the color prints on their music stands, as the score called on them to interpret the colors

We recorded four or five takes of each section of the work on 8-track tape, made selections, and mixed down to a stereo master just under 40 minutes long. I had 100 copies made as LP records —50 to go with the edition of the book and 50 to sell separately and to send to radio stations. I hand set type for the record jacket, printed them letterpress in silver ink, and the musicians signed each one.

In 1973 the book, record and score were issued. I sent copies of the record to three alternative ra- dio stations: WKCR (Columbia University), WNYU (New York University), and the independent WBAI. All three played the recording in its entirety. In January 1975 we staged a performance based on the recording at Ornette Coleman’s Artist House, on Prince Street in New York’s SOHO.