LATEST ADDITIONS

Bad news. Last June 15, in my <A HREF= http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/061507jazz/ >
first entry</A> of the “Jazz Messengers” blog, I broke the news that three months hence, Sonny Rollins, the world’s greatest living tenor saxophone player, would be playing a rare trio concert at Carnegie Hall—with Roy Haynes (one of the two greatest living drummers) and Christian McBride (an outstanding young bassist)—and that his own record label, Doxy, would release the results on CD along with a similar, recently unearthed, never-before-heard trio session that Rollins played at Carnegie 50 years earlier.

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UK newspaper <I>The Telegraph</I> reported March 3 that Sir Paul McCartney has signed a $6 million deal to release the Beatles catalog to iTunes for downloading. While <I>The Independent</I> and the <I>Daily Mail</I> have also reported the same thing, there has been no confirmation from Apple, EMI, McCartney, surviving Beatle Ringo Starr, or the families of deceased members John Lennon or George Harrison.

As Wes Phillips recently reported on this website, CD sales are down and legal downloads of audio files are up. Stereophile has been criticized more than once for not paying enough attention to the subjects of MP3 and other compressed file formats, such as AAC, and for offering no guidance at all to readers about how to get the best sound quality from compressed downloads.

<i>Photo credit: Gordon Polatnick/Big Apple Jazz</i>

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Another of the great ones is gone. Norman Smith had been a refrigeration engineer, but at 36, he decided to apply for an entry-level position as a recording technician at EMI in the UK. EMI had a strict caste system at the time and technical staff (the "white coats") were considered a rank below that of producers and even of balance engineers, who were allowed to sit in the mastering room. By 1962, Smith was promoted to balance engineer and was paired with George Martin for the first Beatles recordings. As balance engineer, he chose the microphones and recording equipment for each session and Smith is generally given a great deal of credit for the clarity and accuracy of the group's recordings from the beginning through the recording of <I>Revolver</I> in 1965. Because of Smith's age (he'd seen service in WWII) and EMI's dress code (ties and lab coats), Lennon nicknamed him "Normal." (Hence the title of Smith's autobiography: <I>John Lennon Called Me Normal</I>.)