Maria Schneider’s early set last night at the Jazz Standard—part of her 17-piece Jazz Orchestra’s traditional Thanksgiving-week run—reaffirmed and advanced her position as the preeminent big-band composer of our era.
The world's largest classical label, Naxos of America, has released its first Blu-ray music package. <I>The Virtual Haydn: Complete Works for Solo Keyboard</I> contains three Blu-ray audio discs plus one three-hour Blu-ray videodisc that together hold 15 hours of music. All performances are by Tom Beghin, a baroque specialist and musicologist based at McGill University. Sound engineer Martha De Francisco, an Associate Professor at McGill, recorded the performances in high-resolution (24-bit/96kHz) PCM sound.
About 2200 years ago, a Greek writer named Antipater of Sidon compiled a list of the seven wonders of the world, which included a 100'-high statue of the Sun god Helios, erected next to the harbor of Rhodes on the Aegean sea. A of S called it the Colossus of Rhodes, for an obvious reason. Now there's a new Colossus, the derivation of whose name is a little less obvious, but which could justifiably be included in any contemporary listing of the seven wonders of the audio world.
Smalls is, well, a <I>small</I> jazz club in New York City’s West Village and, while far from the most comfortable establishment in town, it’s certainly among the most authentic and dedicated. The cover is cheap, the audience is youthful (two facts that are probably related), the musicians are usually the best up-and-coming players, and established masters sit in now and then too. (Last week, Albert “Tootie” Heath played drums with the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson.)
This past Saturday night was Sonic Youth at Terminal 5.
The hurricane is coming, the fire's running down the mountain, the dust storm approaches—if you had to leave in a hurry and could only grab one thing from your audio system, what would it be?
Chris Vogel of the Space Coast Audio Society is excited. He believes he has developed a “dramatic improvement” for treating deleterious, devilish static—not only on compact discs, but in compact disc players and even integrated amplifiers.
On November 19, Scottosh manufacturer Linn Products held a press conference in London to announce that it was forthwith ceasing the production of CD players, and effectively replacing them by its new DS-series "digital streaming" components in its product portfolio.
I have reviewed and owned so many Paradigm speakers that they feel almost like members of the family. I've owned the v.2 and v.3 versions of the Reference Studio 60, and reviewed the v.3 version in <I>Stereophile</I> (in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1204paradigm">December 2004</A>, Vol.27 No.12). My long and intimate relationship with this speaker is founded on the best of reasons: We are extremely compatible. The Studio 60, in all its incarnations, is large enough to be used as a full-range speaker with nearly any program material, and yet is compact enough to be easily accommodated in my relatively small Connecticut listening room. It neither looms over me nor disappears into the space. Used as a center-channel speaker, it's just short enough to clear my line of sight to the video display. Finally, and despite inevitable price creep over the last decade, the Studio 60 still comes in under $2000/pair—my line in the sand for a <I>reasonably</I> priced system.
My favorite moment in the Zack Snyder film <I>Watchmen</I>—apart from the Dylan-fueled title sequence, which itself contains some of the most memorable scenes in recent cinema—comes when retired crimefighter Daniel "Nite Owl II" Dreiberg arrives home to find the doctrinaire and mildly crazy Walter "Rorschach" Kovacs in his kitchen, eating beans straight from the can. The startled Dreiberg asks his visitor, "Would you like me to heat those up for you?"