The Huffington Post today published in-depth interviews with Ernst Jorgensen on The Complete Elvis Presley Masters and Erich van Tourneau on Viva Elvis: The Album. The first run of the 30-disc Complete Elvis Presley Masters is sold out, with more to be available next year. The single disc Viva Elvis: The Album hits stores tomorrow. While both projects feature Elvis, one release focuses on preserving the past in a historically accurate fashion, while the other uses modern techniques to speculate on what might have been if Elvis recorded in 2010.
Van Tourneau oversaw Viva Elvis: The Album and mixed five of the release’s twelve main tracks. “[M]y mandate was to first, really contemporize the Elvis catalog and bring him into ’10. The idea was to recreate the music as if Elvis were recording the song in ’10, so I’ve created new beats, new chord changes, or new instrumental changes for each and every song,” he says. The interview also reveals that a second volume of Viva Elvis recordings may be in the works.
Ernst Jorgensen has been the man behind Elvis Presley music releases for the last two decades. Somewhere between working on a dozen FTD Elvis collectors label releases a year, not to mention Elvis projects for the main Sony label, he managed to find time to oversee the restoration work that went into The Complete Elvis Presley Masters. “It’s like everything you hope would one day happen when you do what I do–when you compile records and you write books–to be able to put all your favorite artist’s master recordings in one box set, and be given the privilege to do a two-hundred forty page book with text and illustrations describing the entire career. It doesn’t get better than that,” says Jorgensen. It does not get much better than the work Jorgensen has done for Elvis’ musical legacy, either.