Hey Walt, I can't help you with Italian but I'll clarify another area that you touched on.
Bob Muller's life work in the Joni Internet community is assembling and disseminating the covers. Bob is also extremely generous about making copies of a huge variety of Joni interviews and concerts on a "blanks and postage" basis on the "Music" type of CD-R. God bless Bob for his time and for being so generous with the Community. -- On the other hand, Simon is the Archivist. As I see it, Simon focuses on 4 aspects of Joni's career. First, he unearths and catalogs the best sounding versions of the various recordings. If he finds an important recording like the Second Fret sets from Joni's coffeehouse days, he'll try to track down and borrow the original tape, archiving it to digital audio tape (DAT). He's been known to contribute video to Ashara's video project too. Secondly, Simon is building documentation of Joni's performances. This goes way beyond a discography, and includes performance dates, playlists, and personnel lists. It surprises me that no one has done the cataloging for Joni. I believe that in the Jazz world, for example, this kind of information is often assembled for artists of her stature. This documentation is used by music historians and critics for other artists all the time and frankly, it's a crying shame that nobody thought of it sooner. Third, Simon has orginized many of these recordings into various formats, a process called "mastering". For example, when a recording is distributed (a "tree") on premium cassette, the contents of Side A is different than when it is distributed on DAT. Mastering is a time consuming activity and is little appreciated unless you've done it. (Right Chuck?) Simon's trees have spanned Joni's entire career, from the pre-contract days to the Brian Blade-powered tour, to the "Both Sides Now" tour, to the "TNT Tribute". Simon's treed material ALWAYS includes thorough tracklists. For some performances, like the "TNT All Star Tribute to Joni Mitchell" and the "A Day In The Garden" show, more than one version is widely circulated, richly interesting, and historically important. This brings me to his fourth area of concentration. Four. Simon is perhaps most famous for "audience recordings" of Joni's shows. Without getting into exact details, lets just say that he has uhmmmm "acquired" and freely shared amazingly accurate, digital recordings from Joni's recent live performances. The better your stereo, the better these recordings sound. As an audiophile, I have written many times about the accurate bass and the uncompressed, grainless sound. I love being able to experience the "hall sound" of the Hammerstein Ballroom, just as the audience did at the TNT taping. While I also enjoy the TNT show as a stereo video, these audio qualities are completely absent from the soundtrack of the TNT show taken from the soundboard. So, anyway, that's a summary of Simon's roles in Joni's career and that's why Karen O'Brien acknowledged his contribution in her biography, "Shadows and Light". Lama ps. I'm proud to offer premium-quality cassettes of many of Simon's treed audio. Contact me offlist for details. Walt said, <edited> >(For those jmdlers who speak even less Italian than I do, I just >basically said welcome, that Bob Muller is our "archivist" and >that there almost *has* to be someone in jmdl-land who speaks better >Italian than I do, but maybe he doesn't need a translator anyway.)
