To congratulate myself for getting our <i>2010 Buyer’s Guide</i> out the door on time (pretty much), I zoomed out of here this past Tuesday night and headed straight to Other Music for some new records. I think the people who work there are starting to recognize me.
I haven’t listened to Monster’s Beats, the large and flashy headphones branded by hip hop producer Dr. Dre, but I have noticed more and more people wearing them on the streets and in the subways, so I was definitely intrigued by Matt Calderone’s e-mail. The PR rep for New York City’s Dobbin/Bolgla Associates wrote:
Lady Gaga wanted to create a headphone that would combine Dr. Dre's sense of sound with her own sense of style. The result is Heartbeats, which have a look inspired by the studded jackets Lady Gaga and her friends once wore.
<i>Lady Gaga surrounded, appropriately, by paparazzi. Ha, paparazzi! Get it?</i>
I haven't written lately because my right hand has been in a cast from my fingertips to my elbow—rendering me, as a writer, essentially mute. Writing, thinking, and feeling are, for a writer, inextricably linked. How do I know what I think if I haven't written about it?
<I>Ben Webster and Associates</I> is one of the loveliest albums put out in the past couple years by Speakers Corner Records, the German-based audiophile reissue house. (Its LPs are distributed in the U.S. by Chad Kassem’s Acoustic Sounds.) Recorded in 1959 on the Verve label, it features Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Budd Johnson on tenor saxophones; Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Ray Brown, bass; Jimmy Jones, piano; Leslie Spann, guitar; Jo Jones, drums.
We all recognize that the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/374">Super Audio Compact Disc</A>, despite being an almost ideal format for high-resolution audio, has not replaced the "Red Book" CD. However, Sam Tellig's comments in the June and July issues of <I>Stereophile</I>, and Steve Guttenberg's "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/whatever_happened_to_51-channel_mu… We See It</A>" in July, unleashed e-mails urging me to champion multichannel sound (don't I do this already?) and smite the unbelievers (not a chance).
For an artform in which sound is everything, popular music has been blessed with strangely little poetry: There may be no other genre where high-mindedness falls with such a thud. Leonard Cohen remains the most striking exception, not just for the genuine seriousness of his music or the adulation of his audience, but for the ability of the former to survive the latter.
Finding new music used to be easy: listen to the radio or find a talkative clerk at the local record store. Now that the Internet has changed everything, how do you find new music?
Ornette Coleman shuffled onto the stage of Jazz At Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater Saturday night, and that was remarkable enough. JALC, Wynton Marsalis’ house of jazz, is typed as a conservative institution—to some, the antithesis of the music’s inherently progressive nature—yet here was the quintessential avant-gardist, making his debut appearance in the lavish concert hall on the opening night of its 2009-10 season.