LATEST ADDITIONS

The French have a phrase for it: plus ça change, plus la même chose, which can be roughly translated as "the more things change, the more they stay the same." I was reminded of this when recently reading through the December 1980 issue of The Absolute Sound. There on p.368 was the statement that "Dave Wilson (Virgo) has joined the staff...to construct a testing program that will allow us to determine if some of the peculiarities and anomalies we hear in evaluating equipment can indeed be numerically measured."

Anat Cohen’s <I>Poetica</I>, on her own Anzic Records label, is a fresh breeze of an album, and I mean that in a good way. Still in her 20s, Cohen plays clarinet with a polished edge and verve second only to Don Byron’s. Born in Tel Aviv, schooled at Berklee, honed in New York clubs, playing not just modern jazz but Brazilian Choro and Dixieland, she lets all her influences show but none of them dominate. Her tone bears something of klezmer’s lilt but none of its schmaltz. Her arrangements have the joyful-melancholic sway of Israeli or Latin folk music but none of its sentimentality. On the album, she also plays two knottily catchy original tunes, a Jacques Brel song, and a tinglingly lovely cover of Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament,” the last backed by a string quartet. The sound, mixed by Joe Ferla and mastered by Sony’s Mark Wilder, is excellent.

When Fred Kaplan made his <I>Stereophile</I> debut with his review of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/307rogue">Rogue Audio Atlas power amplifier</A> last March, our scheme was also to publish his writings on the music that fuels his soul, jazz. Starting this past weekend, you can find Fred's thoughts on recordings, concerts, musicians, and the music at <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/">http://blog.stereophile.com/fr…;.

On June 15, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), US Chamber of Commerce, and the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy (CACP) announced an ambitious agenda to convince Congress and the White House to "transform the enforcement of U.S. intellectual property rights laws."

Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 11. The move was not entirely unexpected, since the company had indicated in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/051407tweeter/">May</A&gt; that it might be forced to file if it could not access additional funding.

Jazz Messenger, June 15, 2007

I launch this blog with two bits of news that should make all jazz fans quiver. A brief prelude: Three years ago, an archivist at the Library of Congress discovered, during a routine inventory, the long-lost tapes of a 1957 concert at Carnegie Hall by Thelonious Monk’s quartet featuring John Coltrane. The tapes were pristine. The music was glorious, Monk playing his most archly elegant piano, Coltrane his most relaxed yet searching tenor sax. Blue Note released the concert tapes on CD, to jaw-dropping acclaim.

Bagheera can't believe I spotted her in the closet with her cloaking screen on.