Fred Kaplan

McIntosh MC275 power amplifier
Tube Power Amp Reviews
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 18, 2010  |  1 comments
It's been a while since I've had a classic amplifier in my system, and McIntosh Laboratory's MC275 is as classic as they come. Introduced in 1961 as the "powerhouse" of that era's newfangled stereo tube amps (two 75W amplifiers in one chassis!), the MC275 retained its position as the amplifier to own—challenged only, perhaps, by Marantz and a few others—until 1970, when it fell prey to the widespread wisdom that transistors were king and tubes were dead, and the model was discontinued. The MC275 briefly returned in 1993, in a limited "Commemorative" edition to honor the late Gordon Gow, longtime president and chief designer of McIntosh Labs. To everyone's surprise, that edition sold well, and McIntosh, gingerly at first, crept back into the tube business.
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Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder on vinyl
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 14, 2010  |  First Published: Oct 15, 2010  |  7 comments
For some time now, I’ve been urging (begging) the audiophile vinyl-reissue houses to focus on Duke Ellington’s great 1950s albums on the Columbia label, and finally Pure Pleasure Records has done it.
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John Carter & Bobby Bradford
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 01, 2010  |  4 comments
The latest 3-CD box in Mosaic Records’ Select series, John Carter & Bobby Bradford, is something of a revelation. I’ve heard several albums over the years by the two musicians separately, but never their collaborations of 1969 (as the New Art Jazz Ensemble) and ’71 (as John Carter & Bobby Bradford, though playing with much the same quartet), both recorded on the obscure Revelation label. Now here they are, reissued with unreleased takes and a whole unissued (unknown) duet session that was laid down in ’79.
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Bitches Brew straight up
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Sep 26, 2010  |  10 comments
Sony/Legacy’s 40th anniversary, deluxe reissue of Bitches Brew, Miles Davis’ landmark fusion double-album, is everything that the company’s 50th anniversary reissue of Kind of Blue tried to be but wasn’t: a fitting commemoration, handsomely packaged, with liner notes by a scribe (Greg Tate) who fully grasps the music and its cultural significance, and—a remarkable achievement—a boxed set that warrants tossing the original out.
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Sonny Rollins at 80
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Sep 11, 2010  |  6 comments
A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning. They saw Sonny Rollins’ 80th-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City last night, and they’re still marveling (especially those too young to have witnessed giants walking the earth in great number) that, finally, they’ve seen a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now.
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John Zorn's Book of Angels
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Sep 06, 2010  |  0 comments
John Zorn’s rep as the angry bad boy of the downtown avant-garde has always been a bit of a caricature. His music has long stressed wit and beauty as much as squeals and hollers. But in the last few years, he’s tapped into a buoyant, almost gentle lyricism while still sounding distinctively Zorn.
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PS: Fred Hersch's Whirl ON VINYL
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Aug 31, 2010  |  1 comments
Soon after raving over Fred Hersch’s new piano-trio album, Whirl, I learned that it was also available on 180-gram vinyl. I’ve since obtained a pressing and can report that, good as the CD sounded, the LP sounds considerably better.
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Fred Hersch's Whirl
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Aug 20, 2010  |  5 comments
Fred Hersch, one of the top handful of jazz pianists on the scene, spent several months in a coma last year, owing to complications from HIV, with which he’s been living for well over a decade. When he emerged, he had to teach himself how to play piano all over again—not the technique, but the reflexes, the timing, the coordination—but you wouldn’t know it from Whirl (on the Palmetto label), his first album since the return.
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Blue Note 45s and the Sunday Times
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Aug 10, 2010  |  9 comments
I have an article in the Arts & Leisure section of this past Sunday’s New York Times about vinyl reissues of Blue Note jazz albums mastered at 45 rpm.
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Charlie Haden's Quartet West Goes East
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan  |  Jul 31, 2010  |  1 comments
Charlie Haden has been playing this week at Birdland in New York with his group Quartet West or, as he calls this incarnation, “Quartet West Goes East,” with Ravi Coltrane filling in for Ernie Watts on tenor sax and Rodney Green taking Larance Marable’s chair on drums.
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