LATEST ADDITIONS

Check back starting April 3 for live reports from the show.

<I>Stereophile</I> is partnering with the <I>Festival Son & Image</I>, to be held in Montreal, Canada, Thursday April 3 through Sunday, April 6. The first day is for trade and press only&mdash;public admission starts on Friday at 11am. More than 120 brands will be demonstrated in rooms on 11 floors of the Sheraton Centre hotel in downtown Montreal, and the Show's keynote speech is being given by Monster Cable's Noel Lee at 10am on the trade day, Thursday April 3.

The <i>Stereophile</i> <a href="http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?Cat=0&C=1">forum</a&gt; has been hot. I don't even know what's happening&#151I'm only the Administrator&#151but two members are really going at it. It's been going on for days. One dude sees things one way, and the other dude sees things in a very different way, and neither wants to meet anywhere near the middle.

Let's focus on sound for this week. (We'll zero-in on the music next week.) When you want to hear how good a recording can sound, what do you go for? Forget musical merit. What is the best-sounding disc you have in your collection?

"And <I>I</I> say panel speakers can't rock'n'roll&mdash;"

Jason Victor Serinus <a href="http://stereophile.com/news/031308amex/">reported on it</a> a couple of weeks ago, but in case you still haven't seen that American Express ad featuring hi-fi retailer <a href="http://www.musicdirect.com/">MusicDirect</a&gt;, here it is.

A few months ago, I <A HREF= "http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/111007jazz/">reviewed</A&gt; Carla Bley’s wonderful CD, <I>The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu</I>, a deceptively Dada title that referred simply to the nature of the session—Bley’s quartet, called the Lost Chords, joined by the Sardinian trumpeter, Paolo Fresu. I praised Fresu’s “appealing” sound, its “clarion tone with a slight huff of breathiness,” but confessed that I’d never heard him before. Now comes a trio album, <I>Mare Nostrum</I> (on the German label, ACT), with Fresu as co-leader—along with the French-Italian accordionist, Richard Galliano, and the Swedish pianist, Jan Lundgen—and, though it’s not as quirkily magical as the Bley, it’s a charmer. There’s at once a twilight intimacy and a panoramic insouciance to this music. Imagine a gentler Nina Rota, as if he’d scored the soundtracks for early Truffaut instead of boisterous Fellini; toss in some Argentine spice (Galliano, who also plays bandoneon, was close to Astor Piazzolla); and you get a sense of the mood. It’s a bit fluffy and sentimental, but in a good, lively way (though there’s also a spirited arrangement of Ravel’s “Ma Mere L’Oye” and a darkly stirring piece, a Fresu composition, inspired by the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet). The sound quality is quite good, though I wish there’d been less reverb on the trumpet.