LATEST ADDITIONS

David Murray has a new jazz album out. A decade or two ago, this wouldn’t be worth a shrug (though it would be worth a trip to Tower); he came out with two or three jazz albums every month. Those of us lucky to live in New York could also go see him lead his big band at the Knitting Factory every Monday night and see him play in a half-dozen other bands, as leader or sideman, at clubs all over the city. Then, in the mid-‘90s, he fell in love with a French woman, moved to Paris, broadened his musical palette (playing with Guadaloupean drummers, for instance)—all to nourishing effect, but the few times each year when he returned to New York and hooked up with a jazz quartet or octet again, it was a nearly always a spine-tingling experience (yes, a clich, but it really was).

Mistakes&mdash;we all make 'em. Why, just yesterday a kindly friend corrected my typo "Little Deuce Coop" before it appeared in print under my byline. But what if your <I>oops</I> involves a thermonuclear device?

A nuclear physicist reviews <I>Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element</I>, arguing that understanding the element could help us construct a rational policy for dealing with its dangers.

"You better not lie," the song tells us, but flying reindeer and a benevolent fat guy in a red suit is hardly an advertisement for truthiness.

A skill I definitely do not possess. BC (before Computers), I was effectively mute.

"What the heck is <I>that</I> icon trying to tell me?" I had switched on Denon's new DVD-3000 player&mdash;a cute "Welcome to DVD World" message scrolled across its display&mdash;and put a disc in its drawer. The icon, which looked at best like a Japanese character and at worst like a child's drawing of a house (complete with windows), was lit up in light blue on the display. But the game was given away by the magic words "96kHz 24 bit" illuminated in red below the mysterious icon. For this was no DVD movie, but a test pressing of <A HREF="http://www.chesky.com">Chesky</A>'s new Super Audio Disc, <I>The Super Audio Collection & Professional Test Disc</I>, which makes use of the DVD-Video specification's provision for including a two-channel, linear-PCM signal encoded with a 96kHz sampling rate and a word depth of up to 24 bits. (Contrary to what you may have read in the popular press, using DVD-Video to carry high-definition sound quality does not introduce a new and incompatible standard.)