LATEST ADDITIONS

Jason Moran finished a week at the Jazz Standard in New York City last night and confirmed his standing, at age 32, as <I>the</I> jazz pianist of our times. A few years ago, I saw Moran playing in duet at Merkin Hall with Andrew Hill, one of his mentors, more than twice his age. Afterward, a friend of mine, a trumpeter just a little older than Moran, made a sharp observation about their respective generations: Hill, a leading avant-gardist from the ‘60s then undergoing a renaissance, played in one style, his style; Moran played in many styles, all styles. Though he didn’t put it in these terms, Hill (who recently died of cancer) was the jazz equivalent of an abstract expressionist painter (say, Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell), while Moran is the supreme post-modernist (say, Robert Rauschenberg) who appropriates everything around him, including ready-made objects, and somehow makes it all his own.

Personally, I've enjoyed the Potter books finding the themes more archetypal than "derivative," but <I>chacun &#225; son go&#251;t</I>, ya know? What I found interesting about Ron Charles' rant was this pithy argument: "We're experiencing the literary equivalent of a loss of biodiversity." In 1994, according to a Stanford survey, over 70% of fiction sales were from just five authors.

John Flahive answered the phone one evening. On the other end of the line was a stranger, George Martorano calling from prison. That call changed both their lives.

With the introduction of the 1000 Be series in 2005, Focal slipped its exclusive, high-performance beryllium tweeter out of the stuffy-looking Utopia series and into a sleeker, more stylish, more modern form.

<I>Bookshelf loudspeaker</I>. The phrase may be common usage, but I really dislike describing small speakers as "bookshelf" models. Place a pair of high-performance minis on a bookshelf against the wall and you destroy much of the sound quality for which you've paid. Yet place the same speakers on good stands well away from room boundaries, and while it could be argued that their footprint is no smaller than a conventional tower speaker, with the best designs you'll get true high-end sound, particularly regarding the accuracy of midrange reproduction and the stability of stereo imaging.

<B>JOHN ABERCROMBIE: <I>The Third Quartet</I></B><BR>
John Abercrombie, electric & acoustic guitar; Mark Feldman, violin; Marc Johnson, bass; Joey Baron, drums<BR>
ECM 1993 (CD). 2007. Manfred Eicher, prod.; James Farber, eng. DDD. TT: 59:45<BR>
Performance ****&#189;<BR>
Sonics ****&#189;

Things looked grim for Internet radio late last week. On July 11, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals declined to delay the <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/031907internet/">increase</A&gt; in digital performance royalties the Copyright Royalty Board imposed last March. The new fees were scheduled to go into effect on July 15, retroactive to the beginning of 2006.