LATEST ADDITIONS

I’m making my way, too slowly, through the latest set of Naxos’ “Jazz Icons” DVDs, taken from TV broadcasts of great American jazz musicians on European tours in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Some time ago, I <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/092607jazz/">wrote</A&gt; about <I>Charles Mingus: Live in ’64</I> (a terrific companion piece to his CD, <I>Cornell 1964</I>, recorded just before and released just last year). Tonight I watched <I>Dexter Gordon: Live in ’63 & ’64</I>, and recommend it highly, too.

. . . And the single-Maltites. It's all about the angels' share.

Conventional wisdom has it that the perfect sculpture is present, but hidden within the raw material. And the same conventional wisdom similarly applies to magazine editing: all it needs is careful chipping away at the extraneous material in the raw text files we receive from our authors&mdash;sometimes the barest degree of reshaping, repointing, and restructuring&mdash;and you have a finished product that both maximally communicates the writer's message and makes the anonymous artisan-editor proud of a job well done.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Frank Zappa's death in 1993. The good news is that the Zappa estate is releasing tapes of <I>The Grand Wazoo</I> tour and that Zappa Radio is back online. Wowie zowie.

Bill Bruford ponders his place at the top of the food chain.