LATEST ADDITIONS

As one of the first live albums to be recorded in the hallowed space that is New York City's Village Vanguard, Sonny Rollins's A Night at the Village Vanguard (recorded November 3, 1957, released in 1958) set the template, proving that recording in the odd, triangular club could not only work but could also produce distinctive, satisfying sound. Soon after the recording of the Rollins album, Bill Evans and John Coltrane added live Vanguard albums to their recording catalogs.

Now reissued by Blue Note Records as part of its Tone Poet Series, this three-LP edition, which comes from a different source than previous releases, is that rare audiophile reissue where the sonic differences are immediately audible.

The death of KMET in Los Angeles was a turning point in my young father's life. I was 6 years old when it signed off permanently, ending commercial viability of the progressive, freeform rock format on L.A.'s FM dial.

It's also one of my earliest memories: Windows down and heater up on a cloudy February morning, sitting backseat in an Arby's parking lot before kindergarten, the sound of heresy on the airwaves. Its replacement was Smooth Jazz. We—my father and my 6-year-old self—hated it.

For several months, my wife and I had been living in a cozy studio apartment in New York's Financial District while our apartment underwent substantial renovations. All the old furniture was sold or donated, and decades of accumulated stuff was subjected to triage (sell, donate, or store). All my audio equipment, parts, and tools suffered the same fate. Downtown, my listening was via pretty decent headphones (B&W Px8, Audeze LCD-XC) connected to a Mytek Brooklyn+ DAC and my PC. Meanwhile, we were very busy shopping to equip the "new" apartment.

An all-in-one streamer-DAC-preamp would not have held much appeal for me if my old system was up and running. This, however, was a different time, and I was offered the Grimm MU2 for review with ideal timing.

One August night in 1965, I parked in the driveway of my best friend Derf Marko's house and let myself in the back door. As I entered, I could see to the bottom of the basement stairs, where I observed a loud pulsing darkness with plumes of agreeably acrid smoke floating up through the stairwell. Back in the darkness, I heard Derf/Fred and another person making declarative statements in loud unintelligible bursts. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, Marko's basement rec room looked like a trashed-out tiki bar illuminated by a single red Christmas light hanging just above a Dual turntable. The room was dark to a point where it was impossible to walk without stepping on records or to make out who was there and what was going on. I slouched on a couch, closed my eyes, and let my mind follow the sounds of rock drummers wailing like angry cats.

Soon it was obvious: Marko was frantically playing one drum solo after another while some crazy old dude kept hollering for the next solo before the last one finished. The revved-up stranger kept slapping his knees, muttering, and drumming along with each different drummer. Stacks of unsleeved LPs littered the linoleum floor and pink wool couch I was slumping on. But unbelievably, Marko adeptly—without cursing, fumbling, or hesitation—located every solo he wanted.

I found out later that the crazed "old guy" was Ginger Baker!

Forty years ago, as I was starting out on my audio journey, I railed against the flashy mainstream audio gear of the day. To me less was more, and I tried to convince my friends that my small, austere British-made audio rig, including what my friends jokingly called my Lynn Swanndek turntable (after the Steelers wide receiver), really did sound much better than their big silvery Japanese stacks loaded up with shiny knobs, switches, and meters. Audio was all about the sound after all, and I wasn't interested in some dazzling visual display that had nothing to do with what I was hearing. I gravitated toward gear that wasn't flashy or fancy looking, feeling that meant that the effort and expense to create it went where it counted most, to the parts that made it sound great.

Loudspeaker company GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by audio industry veteran Sandy Gross after he left Definitive Technology. With a design team based in Canada that included Martyn Miller, who is still GoldenEar's senior acoustic engineer, GoldenEar produced a series of relatively affordable speakers that garnered favorable reviews in Stereophile. The most recent of these was the BRX (Bookshelf Reference X) standmount, which I reviewed in September 2020 and have been using as one of my reference loudspeakers since.

The BRX was the last GoldenEar speaker to be produced under Sandy Gross's aegis; in January 2020, the company was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest. At the 2023 High End Munich show, Quest announced a new GoldenEar speaker, the floorstanding T66, said to be the first model in a new series.

Recording music is complicated, and without the crucial assistance of producers and engineers, a lot of great records—not to mention successful musical careers—would not happen. Producers Steve Albini and Michael Cuscuna, two key figures from the music world who departed in recent months, richly deserve to be celebrated.

Though they worked in widely disparate genres—Cuscuna primarily in jazz, Albini in punk and noise rock—they are connected by their extraordinary efforts and unfailing taste. Both were exacting, dedicated, and supremely talented. Without the passion and obsessive nature of this one-of-a-kind pair, such records as Nirvana's In Utero and Mosaic Records' boxed sets, including The Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions, to name just two examples, would not exist. Cuscuna and Albini were guides and molders, shaping music and our perceptions of it.