Completism. Do you suffer from it? And how do you define it?
My name is Ugly Music, and I am a late-period Art Pepper completist. I buy anything and everything I see by him, post 1970.
Except I don't. If it looks as if it's been recorded on a Woolworth's C90 with a pick-up band I've never heard of, I give it a miss. There are some truly awful Pepper bootlegs out there.
That's the one piece of completism I admit to. But there are two others I can't quite bring myself to acknowledge. I realise I'm building up a collection of alto-player Tim Berne's work, and keep looking out for rarities on the Net. Similarly, I buy pianist Abdullah Ibrahim's albums almost without a thought, whenever I see something I don't have.
Are you a CA (Completists Anonymous) member? How does your condition manifest itself?
Except I don't. If it looks as if it's been recorded on a Woolworth's C90 with a pick-up band I've never heard of, I give it a miss. There are some truly awful Pepper bootlegs out there.
That's the one piece of completism I admit to. But there are two others I can't quite bring myself to acknowledge. I realise I'm building up a collection of alto-player Tim Berne's work, and keep looking out for rarities on the Net. Similarly, I buy pianist Abdullah Ibrahim's albums almost without a thought, whenever I see something I don't have.
Are you a CA (Completists Anonymous) member? How does your condition manifest itself?
Comments
I spent most of the '90s collecting Dylan bootlegs. I have every recorded utterance recorded by him up to 1965 for example. Radio and TV interviews as well as concerts. I also have have in excess of 1,000 bootleg recordings - mostly '80s onwards. And of course I have a recording of each gig I went to.
Then one day I just stopped...