LATEST ADDITIONS

As our summer intern, <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/060107can/">Ariel Bitran</a> proved tireless, helping to make the <i><a href="http://ssl.blueearth.net/primedia/product.php?productid=75&cat=0&page=1… Stereophile Buyer's Guide</a></i> our biggest, most beautiful, and most comprehensive yet. His spirit&#151youthful, enthusiastic, passionate, curious, goofy&#151was stimulating and infectious. It was great to have him around, and I've enjoyed watching as his interest in hi-fi grows.

Another gosh-darn write-in competition! Sorry! They're like peanuts (or Campari and tonics). It's almost impossible to stop at just one.

The Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) aggressive campaign against its customers has most recently relied heavily upon the "making available" argument. The RIAA has argued that the act of making a recording available on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network was a crime, even if nobody actually linked to or downloaded the files. In October 2007, judge <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/100807jammie/">Michael J. Davis ruled</A> in <I>Capitol Records v. Thomas</I> that the labels did <I>not</I> need to establish that the songs Ms. Thomas loaded to her KaZaa account were downloaded by others. Ms, Thomas was held liable for $220,000 in penalties.

<I>Disaspora Suite</I> is the 4th in a series of albums recorded by trumpeter-composer Steven Bernstein for John Zorn’s Tzadik label (the others were <I>Diaspora Soul</I>, <I>Diaspora Blues</I>, and <I>Diaspora Hollywood</I>). It’s also the most ambitious, far-flung, and satisfying. The band is a nonet that includes the versatile Nels Cline on electric guitar (strumming, plucking, and occasionally wailing), Peter Apfelbaum on saxes, and Ben Goldberg on clarinet. This is by no means simply “Jewish music.” The sounds and influences drift in from everywhere. The first track starts with an electric guitar riff and bongos back-up that’s straight out of Marvin Gaye. Horns enter, blowing slightly dissonant intervals. Two minutes in, the clarinet rolls in with those punchy klezmer chords, but it doesn’t overwhelm the other spices; they all mix and meld, play in and out and around one another. It’s dark, bluesy, danceable (in your head and on the floor). It careens off in unexpected directions, all of them worth following.

It starts quietly enough, with a simple falling-fifth motif, but the first movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff's neglected Piano Sonata 1 develops into a work of epic proportions nearly 40 minutes in length, with haunting melodies, massive dynamic contrasts, and lush, sensual harmonies.

<B>Scene the First.</B> You are sitting in a concert hall, dead center, row M; the cellist walks on to the stage, sits down and starts to play the prelude to the first of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/1192yoyoma">Bach's solo cello suites</A>, that intricate unfolding of a rhapsodic melodic line within the tight framework of an implied chordal structure. Melody, harmony, rhythm&mdash;none exist at any one point of time in this most exquisite of Bach's solo instrumental writing, yet the skill of the composer, coupled with the artistry of the musician, allow you to perceive the abstract as reality.