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.

Alright. There was <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119464399153888326.html">that piece</a> in the Wall Street Journal where the writer, Terry Teachout, says he's cool with MP3s because they're wildly convenient and because he can't hear very well anyway, being middle-aged and all. He goes on to say that his hearing loss has set him free from the "snare and delusion of audiophilia"&#151that wallet-choking merry-go-round of upgrading for sonic improvements.

. . . 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.

I was once in a sushi bar in Osaka; sitting next to me was a live abalone, stoically awaiting its fate. It stuck its siphon out of its shell, the waiter tapped the tip with a spoon, the siphon withdrew. Again the siphon appeared, again the waiter tapped it with a spoon, again it withdrew.

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.

The PATH train ride from Grove Street in downtown Jersey City to Church Street in lower Manhattan takes about seven minutes, maybe less, and offers a chilling tour of Ground Zero. For just a dollar-fifty, you get a Disney-like theme park stroll through a chalky gray wasteland that'll have you wondering why no real memorial exists.