Interviews

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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Michael League: That's One Snarky Puppy
Sasha Matson  |  May 28, 2020  |  2 comments
"What happens in college stays in college" might be the best policy for most undergrad-formed bands, but Snarky Puppy is an exception to that rule (and a number of others). Bassist/composer Michael League found fertile musical ground in the jazz studies program at the University of North Texas when he formed Snarky Puppy in 2003.
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HistoricalInterviews
John Atkinson: a Career in Audio
John Atkinson  |  May 11, 2020  |  27 comments
At the end of April, Adrian Low, the proprietor of Toronto retailer Audio Excellence, asked if he could interview me. "I've been interviewing audio luminaries for some time," Adrian wrote, "partly because I am so interested in how they started, their experiences, and also to share these with fellow audio enthusiasts."

We connected with Skype and, in the two videos embedded below, Adrian and I, along with Jan and Vilip from Audio Excellence, talk about many things connected with my 52 years as an audiophile, my 43 years in audio magazine publishing, and my 33 years at the editorial helm of Stereophile.

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InterviewsReference
Going Dutch (& Dutch): a Conversation with Martijn Mensink
John Atkinson  |  Apr 10, 2020  |  66 comments
In his review of the three-way, active Dutch & Dutch 8c loudspeaker in the August 2019 issue of Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson concluded that "The D&D 8c demonstrates that active, DSP-empowered speakers are the future." I was equally impressed by the 8c's measured performance—a superbly flat on-axis response and an unmatched control of dispersion over the entire audioband—and asked to borrow a pair so I could experience the speakers in my own listening room.
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Interviews
Four Interviews with John Atkinson
John Atkinson  |  Jan 27, 2020  |  26 comments
Occasional Stereophile contributor Steve Guttenberg publishes a YouTube channel about audio that has achieved an impressive reach. As Steve told me in a conversation I had with him last December, 22% of his 98,000 subscribers (at the time we talked) are under 34 years old, and, to judge from the comments, most of them don't read Stereophile!!!! "It would nice to introduce you to them!" said Steve, and proposed he interview me and post the video to his channel when it hit the magic 100k number, which it did on January 9.

Steve visited my place in Brooklyn just before the New Year, and we spent an afternoon talking about audio, magazines, measurements, and music.

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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Bill Frisell: New Ideas in Old Songs
Ken Micallef  |  Jan 07, 2020  |  9 comments
Of the celebrated triumvirate of John Scofield, Pat Metheny, and Bill Frisell—the most original and influential jazz guitarists of the past 50 years—none is more distinctive, or self-effacing, than Frisell, a true changeling of the guitar. Frisell is a jazz-based musician, but his music crisscrosses genres, and his guitar playing isn't bound to or limited by a specific technique. He's a master illusionist, able to alter a song's meaning far beyond its original intent with the aid of a Telecaster guitar, a modest effects chain, and, most importantly, his rich imagination.
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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Manfred Eicher: "You Can't Record Everybody"
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 31, 2019  |  13 comments
There has never been a record producer like Manfred Eicher, founder and sole proprietor of ECM records, the German-based jazz (and sometimes classical) label that celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.

Eicher doesn't quite win the all-time prize for longevity. Edward Lewis started Decca (UK) in 1929 and owned it until 1980. David Sarnoff controlled RCA from 1919–1970. William Paley did the same at Columbia from 1938-1988. But unlike those other, financially heftier titans, who deferred to department heads and studio producers, Eicher has supervised every single one of ECM's albums—more than 1600 of them.

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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Chick Corea: Pioneering Jazz Pianist
Ken Micallef  |  Oct 09, 2019  |  13 comments
Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea belongs to that elite cadre of pianists that includes Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, and Mccoy Tyner, pioneers who reshaped the jazz or- der starting in the early 1960s and continued to make strides into the present day.

The now-78-year-old Corea's attainments are many: composer of the standards "la fiesta," "Spain," "500 Miles High," "Matrix," and "Windows"; winner of 22 Grammy Awards (and 64 nods); founder of at least six colossal improvising units (Return to Forever I and II, Circle, the Three Quartets quartet, the Chick Corea Elektric Band, the Vigil Quintet); popularizer of early monophonic synthesizers, and recipient, in 2006, of an NEA Jazz Masters award.

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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Never Stop: a Musical Interview with Jon Anderson
Jon Iverson  |  Aug 27, 2019  |  6 comments
Vocalist Jon Anderson has been at the center of the fabled rock band Yes since its founding in 1968 and has collaborated with other notable artists including Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Jean-Luc Ponty, and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra. A tireless and prolific musician, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, he has also released more than a dozen solo albums.

Almost exactly 50 years after the July 1969 release of the first Yes album, Anderson visited my house for an afternoon of talk and listening to music. We listened to some old Yes tracks, some favorites from other artists, and several from his most recent album, 1000 Hands: Chapter One, which was 30 years in the making.

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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
John Adams
Sasha Matson  |  Jul 02, 2019  |  0 comments
American composer John Adams and I first met in the late 1970s, when I became one of his composition students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. My recollections from those days endure as near-cinematic images: John lugging his homemade synthesizer—he called it "the Studebaker"—down the hall prior to meeting me at his office; an early performance, at Mills College in Oakland, of Adams's Shaker Loops (footnote 1) for string septet; sitting with Adams during rehearsals for the 1981 premiere of his choral symphony Harmonium (footnote 2), with Edo De Waart and the San Francisco Symphony.
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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Branford Marsalis: Listening with Sonic Ears
Ken Micallef  |  May 30, 2019  |  4 comments
Louisiana-born, 58-year-old saxophonist Branford Marsalis has achieved singular status in the worlds of both jazz and classical music. He cut his teeth playing hard-hitting hard bop with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, led The Tonight Show band, and kicked it with the Grateful Dead. He's toured and recorded with Sting, costarred in the Spike Lee film School Daze (1988), and made his classical debut with the New York Philharmonic performing Glazunov's Concerto for Alto Saxophone on Central Park's Great Lawn.
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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Don Was: What Was Will Be
Sasha Matson  |  May 02, 2019  |  3 comments
Don Was is a music lover. Looking at his extensive discography as a record producer and musician, one is struck by the variety of artists he's worked with: from Iggy Pop to the B-52's, from Roy Orbison to Elton John, with over half a dozen stops along the way as producer for a little band called the Rolling Stones. In 2017, Was produced Gregg Allman's final studio album, Southern Blood (Rounder 610005). And when you include all the music he's had a hand in since 2012, when he became president of Blue Note Records, you're talking about one busy little red hen helping to bake a lot of bread.
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Interviews
Musicians As Audiophiles: Jed Levy
Ken Micallef  |  May 01, 2019  |  32 comments
Tenor saxophonist, composer and hi-fi enthusiast Jed Levy is a perceptive musician and devoted music listener. Over the years, he's upgraded his hi-fi as funds have allowed, typically preceded by intense study of equipment reviews and equally persistent ear-twisting of audiophile friends, some in the industry, some not.
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Interviews
Meitner on the EMM DV2, DSD, MQA, & Digital Audio
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Feb 28, 2019  |  7 comments
Imagine my surprise while I was preparing my review of the EMM Labs DV2 D/A processor in this issue, EMM Labs' manager of production and social media, Amadeus Meitner, informed me that what I'd thought would be a one-on-one chat with his father, EMM Labs founder and CEO Ed Meitner, would also involve himself and EMM's managing engineer of the past 15 years, Mariusz Pawlicki. Once all three had come to the phone, however, information flowed more or less smoothly. My first question was what makes the DV2 special?
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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Bill Charlap: Life, Love, Songs, and Pianos
Sasha Matson  |  Dec 27, 2018  |  3 comments
Autumn in New York—watching Central Park change colors. Also time to catch the Bill Charlap Trio during their annual residency at the Village Vanguard: Charlap at the piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Kenny Washington at the drums in the Church of Jazz, the room the Bill Evans Trio called home in the 1960s and '70s. Exploring the great traditions of jazz and American song has become a Charlap trademark.
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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Wayne Shorter: How the Future Would Be
Ken Micallef  |  Dec 11, 2018  |  3 comments
Wayne Shorter is 85. His mind moves at warp speed, a million miles from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, who rescued him from Newark, New Jersey—or the Miles Davis's second great quintet, for which the saxophonist wrote the compositions that would establish his genius. Shorter's constellation of classic Blue Note recordings from 1964–67—Night Dreamer, JuJu, The All Seeing Eye, ETC, The Soothsayer, Adam's Apple, Speak No Evil, Schizophrenia—is now but a dim cluster of stars in his ever-expanding musical galaxy.
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