LATEST ADDITIONS

By convenient circumstance, I recently caught Tony Jo White on a Sunday night at the Thunderbird Caf in Lawrenceville, a rapidly changing for the better part of Pittsburgh, Pa. In a small but sweet back room, White put on a low key show that shows both his voice and his ability to get in a groove and jam are still potent. His methods are easily understood, he comes out, looking vaguely like a long and lean version of Charlie Rich, when the Sliver Fox wore a similar kind of hat, and plays either spooky ballads or a bluesy, rumbling groove that runs for many verses and becomes a long jam. His hits (or “best known songs” if you prefer) , “Polk Salad Annie” which is probably most famous because of Elvis’ version (Tom Jones actually slays it as well) came off with the needed amount of snap to the choruses. And then there’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” a tune I always forget TJ wrote until he starts singing it or someone puts a Tony Jo record on. It’s a sweeping slow number whose chorus changes are really gorgeously bittersweet. The man has soul, there’s no doubt. And rock gigs like the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival gave him serious rock chops for awhile as well.

Your amp blows up, with flames licking the underside of your wood equipment rack—or you see the flood waters approaching your LP collection. What is the scariest audio thing that's ever happened to you?

Ideally, LPs should be played with the pickup stylus remaining tangential (<I>ie</I>, at a 90&#176; angle) to the groove&#151;just as the lacquer from which the LP was ultimately stamped was cut in the first place. Over the years, many attempts have been made to accomplish this. Back in 1877, Thomas A. Edison's original machines tangentially tracked his cylinders, but Emil Berliner's invention of the flat disc put an end to cylinders altogether. In the 1950s, a number of companies marketed so-called "tangential" trackers that used dual arms, based on conventional pivoting arrangements, to change the angle at which the headshell was mounted as it moved across the LP side. In 1963, Marantz introduced the SLT-12, which used a plastic pantograph to move the stylus across the record surface. Garrard's Zero 100 pivoting arm controlled its independently pivoting headshell with a bar that extended from the main bearing of the tonearm.

<I>Never Stop</I> (on the E1 label) is the album from The Bad Plus that many of us have been waiting for—the first of their albums to consist entirely of original material.

I’ve never been crazy about Ahmad Jamal. His piano style has struck me as patio-cocktails jazz—nice harmonies and rhythm, but soft-spoken, too precious, de-sensualized.

<B>The Neville Brothers: <I>Yellow Moon</I></B>
A&amp;M CD 5240 (CD). Malcolm Burn, eng.; Daniel Lanois, prod. AAD. TT: 53:01

Axpona lives! The Audio Expo of North America, the consumer high-end audio show whose <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/axpona2010">successful 2010 launch</A> in Jacksonville, Florida, established it as the premier high-performance audio show on the East Coast, has moved to the far more accessible and convention-friendly Sheraton Atlanta, in Georgia. Scheduled for April 15&#150;17, 2011, with a special four-hour trade preview on April 14, the show is cosponsored by <I>Stereophile</I> and <I>Goldmine</I>.