LATEST ADDITIONS

Reader William King notices that Saturday evening has its own musical demands: "I play my most 'up' party music Saturday night and wonder what other readers favor for this time of the week? I'd like to know what is your favorite Saturday night record?"

Recently, I caught myself smiling at a tiny ad for Nirvana cables that proclaimed them to be "the quiet cable." My smile wasn't because the claim was outlandish, which it wasn't, but because it was so typical of Nirvana Audio Products—small, understated, and all too easy to miss. The ad could just have easily and just as accurately have read "Nirvana...the quiet company."

In my <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/201">February 2000 review</A> of Meridian's multi-talented, multichannel, multi-kilobuck Digital Theatre system, I fumed about the lack of a medium for discrete multichannel music. Even more loudly, I railed against the irresponsible mastering of many Dolby Digital and DTS discs, which place the listener in the middle of an ensemble and swirl the voices around his or her head with little concern for musical or artistic coherence.

Frank Zappa was well known for a lot of things&#151;his sharp satiric wit, his virtuoso guitar improvisations, his excellence as a bandleader, his fearlessness in combating hostile political forces and crooked record-industry executives. But Zappa is all too rarely given credit for his status as one of the most creative musical imaginations of the 20th century, regardless of genre.

Last Friday at the Jazz Standard, I saw clarinetist Don Byron play compositions from his 1996 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/recordingofthemonth/696/"><I>Bug Music</I></A>, maybe his greatest album, certainly one of the most exciting jazz albums of that decade. It features music from the ‘30s by John Kirby, Raymond Scott, and Duke Ellington—an era largely neglected by jazz musicians and historians.

Vol.17 No.2 (February 1994)

Vol.17 No.10 (October 1994)