"That's pretty odious," Andy Summers says to me. "An odious comparison." His blueish eyes darken. Roughly an hour into our 90-minute face-to-face interview, I'd asked if it bothers him that in terms of reach and staying power, his solo oeuvre will never match his work with The Police.
To me, the observation seemed factual and uncontroversial, like saying that the sun rises in the east. The Police sold more than 75 million records and played some of the largest venues in the world. The night before our interview, I'd watched Summers perform a show in a 400-seat theater in rural Waldoboro, Maine.
In less than 11 years, guitarist Emily Remler went from rising star to shooting star, from her first major exposurean invitation from Herb Ellis to perform as part of "Guitar Explosion" at the Concord Jazz Festival on July 21, 1978to her final concert on May 3, 1990, at the Hotel Richmond in Adelaide, Australia, where she was found dead from a heart attack the next day. She was 32 years old.
The recent Resonance Records triple-LP/double-CD set Cookin' at the Queens: Live in Las Vegas (1984 & 1988) is a welcome reminder of her prowess and a sad marker of what she might have accomplished if she hadn't died so young.
I am sitting earthbound in my living room almost a quarter-century beyond the year 2001, living a similar scenario with the Focal Diva Utopia streaming amplified wireless speaker system. My living room is not at all reminiscent of the Discovery One with its rotating central interior (footnote 1). But with the Diva Utopia system, I feel more in a sci-fi future young me might have imagined than with any hi-fi component I've reviewed so far. About the only thing the Diva Utopia has in common with the stereo systems I grew up withand with my current reference systemis two floorstanding cabinets and diaphragms that move air to make sound.