LATEST ADDITIONS

Maude Maggart finishes out a six-week stay at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room near Times Square this Saturday. She’s an appealing throwback, including in her repertoire; her best album, I think, is a collection of old Irving Berlin tunes. Her voice is sultry yet sweet, laced with vibrato, pure in tone, mischievous in intonation. Her current show, called “Speaking of Dreams,” which I saw last night, is ripe with naturally passionate slow ballads. Her few shifts uptempo (Sondheim’s “On the Steps of the Castle” and a Jobim tune with acid-trip Marshall Barer lyrics called “Lost in Wonderland”) made me wish she’d do more, but I’m not complaining. Her swoon through “Isn’t It Romantic” was bewitching. Even the show’s one cabaret clich—a medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Look to the Rainbow,” and “The Rainbow Connection”—came off as anything but; it was even stirring. Ms. Maggart looks five or so years younger than her 32 years, and she’s been singing in public for more than half of them. Cabaret clubs are not usually my scene, but I’ll go see her again happily.

The 2008 Vacuum State of the Art Conference & Show will take place on May 24-26 at the Hilton in lovely Vancouver, Washington. VSAC was started in 1997 by Dan and Eileen Schmalle of the Bottlehead Corporation, designers of <a href="http://www.bottlehead.com/et/et.html">some sexy vacuum tube kit amps and preamps</a>. While the Schmalles are no longer involved in managing the conference, they will be on hand as exhibitors, along with many others offering some similarly sexy, tubey goodness (like <a href="http://www.experiencemusic.net/">Experience Music</a>'s The Chase amplifier in the pic above).

Perhaps the greatest praise anyone can let loose upon any silly piece of audio gear is that it inspires the discovery of new music. Right? Alright then. The Rega P3, in all its ashen splendor, does this for me. So much so that I'm going broke. I feel as though I'm single-handedly (with one hand behind my weary back, that is) revitalizing the record industry. I've spent so much money on new (used) records that I could've purchased my own P3 by now. In fact, I've decided that that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy my own P3. I'm in the office now, wishing I was home with the P3. I'm proofreading Michael Fremer's review of the P3-24, which will appear in our July issue, and I'm thinking, <i>I'm going to buy this thing.</i>

It's said that your first experience on entering a space sets the tone for all that follows. At LP pressing plant Record Technology, Inc. (RTI), that experience is my encounter with veteran pressman Richard Lopez, who responds to my request for direction. As he leaves his vintage record press to lead me to owner Don MacInnis, Lopez reads aloud the sticker on a box of recently pressed LPs. "WORLD'S FINEST PHONOGRAPH RECORDS," he declares with pride. As I reflect on how few workers today feel so connected to the products they make, I sense that something special lies ahead.

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Has John Zorn gone mellow? His two new CDs, <I>The Dreamers</I> and <I>Lucifer</I> (both on his self-owned label, Tzadik), are swaying, swinging, crazy with catchy hooks, occasionally downright mellifluous. I don’t mean to overstate the contrast with the preceding Zorn <I>oeuvre</I> (which entails over a hundred albums, at least a thousand compositions). The time has long passed when Zorn—whose name is, almost novelistically, German for “anger”—gained notoriety for squealing on the alto sax like a banshee and cutting up compositions into surreal collage. The stereotype was never right: from the start of his career, in the mid-‘70s, he could play be-bop, Hammond-based soul, and Morricone movie-themes at a high level. But in the ‘80s, he delved more avidly into ear-ripping shards-of-sound (with fitting titles like <I>Torture Garden</I> and <I>Grind Crusher</I>). When he turned to exploring chords and melodies in the ‘90s, he didn’t abandon “noise” entirely; several of his great Masada albums alternate between blues or ballads and rippers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Up to a point, I liked that stuff, too. But these two new CDs have almost none of it. They’re jammed with buoyant, playful, joyous music—and I mean that in a good way.

Personally, I think Pink Floyd should do a reunion tour simply because <A HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7374994.stm">this</A&gt; would make a fabulous concept album.