LATEST ADDITIONS

One afternoon, as we passed a stack of George Foreman Grills, she saw the record player, a mottled beige-brown box familiar to any Gen-X kid who spent time in their elementary school library. It had the reinforced metal corners and industrial clasps of a steamer trunk and a thick green handle made of indestructible Cold War plastic. Written across the top in black marker: #0027. How this piece of surplus ended up in the wayward-housewares section of a suburban thrift shop was surely an interesting story but not my concern. There it was, shut tight and resolute, perhaps since the 1970s. The price: $8.

With a miniature box speaker like my reference Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5as or the similarly sized Harbeth P3ESR XDs, which I'm auditioning this month, I have to sit very close to experience any of their direct, "off-the-cone" energy. If my listening position gets too far away or the speakers are positioned too far apart or too far from the wall behind them, the sound thins and loses body.

I didn't need to sit close to those 1947 Altec A5 Voice of the Theatre horns I used to use.

Read the back notes on the beautifully packaged new reissue from Craft Recordings and Acoustic Sounds and clarity emerges. The Fox wasn't born in Contemporary's studio/shipping room. Instead, it was laid to tape at Radio Recorders, Studio B, Los Angeles, in August 1959. It was the first record produced by David Axelrod, who would become a fixture at Capitol Records. It was released by short-lived label Hifijazz. Contemporary reissued it in 1969, and it has rarely been out of print since.

The venue was the Midtown Bar. If they'd known what she was doing, her parents would have objected and her musical peers would have sneered, so Eunice Waymon performed under a pseudonym: Nina Simone. Adding to the indignity for this classically trained pianist, playing wasn't enough; she was also expected to sing.

The years melted away—George Lawrence Stone's sticking variations, Benjamin Podemski's concert drum solos, dog-eared "Real Book" charts, college big band concerts, smoky jam sessions, a basement practice routine that nearly deafened Mom. Once I was in NYC, there were classes at Drummer's Collective.

With intense application, playing became rote. But in rare moments of surrender, it wasn't me playing the music anymore. The music played me—ideas transmitted effortlessly, without thought, guided by some unseen force: maybe the woman in the third row, maybe the ghost of Tony Williams. In such moments, when fatigue stilled the mind, instrument and music intertwined, a single entity responding not to conscious thought but to some unknown, unknowable force. What ensued was beyond my mental reach.

The tunes seem to roll like a Sunday drive on a country road, in and out of dark hollows and up and down hills. Three of its 10 songs have become folk-rock standards: "Friend of the Devil," "Sugar Magnolia," and "Truckin'."