As demonstrated by the Guardian's 1000 albums special and its combustible blog (has anyone calculated how many man-hours were lost while that was going on?), "the album" is still the basic unit of currency for the obsessive listener. (Full disclosure: I wrote 49 of the 1000.) For classical listeners it's "the work", best accommodated by CDs or DVDs, and for clubbers and DJs it's the "tune", often on 12-inch vinyl or a WAV or FLAC file to sound good over a big system. And though everyone likes the compressed, crunchy convenience of downloads, the idea of the "long-player", whether a concept album or a greatest hits collection, still has a tight grip on the way we think about music.
Take one of Friday's collection of "forgotten" albums suggested by readers - it's hard to think of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra as disembodied tracks, separated from the great sleeve image.
At Pizza Express in Dean Street, where I saw the Jef Neve trio on Thursday, every table has a card that suggests diners take home a CD signed by the artist, assuming (rightly) that every band they promote, however small-time, will have a CD to sell on the night. This is different to the scene of, say, 20 years ago, when few of the younger bands would have deals, and many senior figures (even the big names) had been dropped by their record companies.
Nowadays, despite the music retail crisis, nearly everyone - young, old and in-between - has an album and a MySpace page to help them flog it. For example: Zoe Rahman, Byron Wallen, Carol Grimes, Luke Barlow, Fraud, Ingrid Laubrock, Led Bib, Monika Vasconcelos, Zhenya Strigalev and so on, all artists in the London jazz festival. There are small outfits such as F-IRE and the Loop Collective, and labels like Babel and Basho and Brownswood and Birdjam and a few that don't begin with a "B", like Vortex, which has released the Portico Quartet's tuneful debut. (Talking of music visuals, which I was last week, see Leo Bridle's ingenious video using the Porticos' music.
And there are still artists who are actually signed to major record labels, like the divine Luciana Souza, who appeared with the Britten Sinfonia on Saturday night, or to big indies: ECM has festival stars John Surman, Tord Gustavsen (yawn), Jon Hassell and the brilliant Stefano Bollani & Enrico Rava.
So even if you're not in reach of London, you can construct an audio version of the festival in the comfort of your home. And compile a list of 1000 albums to hear before the next festival. Blog it at your own risk.
