Interviews

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Ken Micallef  |  Oct 08, 2020  | 
"The data lords are gathering data and giving it to organizations that then manipulate us with the things they know about us, things that we don't even know about ourselves," says five-time Grammy Award–winning composer, conductor, producer, and band leader Maria Schneider. "They give our data to any company that'll pay for it to manipulate you, specifically targeting your vulnerabilities. It takes away freedom of thought, a true discourse where people are thinking for themselves. Count me out."
Julie Mullins  |  Sep 29, 2020  | 
Jonathan Weiss doesn't do things the ordinary way. Nor does he follow the usual audio industry processes.

In 2006, Weiss founded Oswalds Mill Audio (OMA), manufacturer of a range of high-end loudspeakers and other products with exotic, vintage-inspired approaches and designs. Serious handcraft and bespoke materials, from solid hardwood enclosures to leather from luxury makers Hermès and Jean Rousseau, are behind OMA's upper-echelon pricing.

Julie Mullins  |  Aug 17, 2020  | 
The phrase "renaissance man" carries gravitas. It's probably overused. But Damon Von Schweikert believes the term genuinely befits his late father, speaker designer Albert Von Schweikert, who passed away on May 29, 2020, leaving behind myriad contributions to audio through his namesake companies.
Ken Micallef  |  Aug 05, 2020  | 
On iconic singer-songwriter James Taylor's 20th album, American Standard, the lanky crooner adapts the classic American songbook to his easy-rolling musical ways. The result is an American mixture of timeless songcraft.

Where some popular singers use the songbook canon to increase record and ticket sales, Taylor has no need to change himself or increase his audience. He's as comfortable as any man can be, having sold many millions of records the world over for almost 50 years.

Sasha Matson  |  May 28, 2020  | 
"What happens in college stays in college" might be the best policy for most undergrad-formed bands, but Snarky Puppy is an exception to that rule (and a number of others). Bassist/composer Michael League found fertile musical ground in the jazz studies program at the University of North Texas when he formed Snarky Puppy in 2003.
John Atkinson  |  May 11, 2020  | 
At the end of April, Adrian Low, the proprietor of Toronto retailer Audio Excellence, asked if he could interview me. "I've been interviewing audio luminaries for some time," Adrian wrote, "partly because I am so interested in how they started, their experiences, and also to share these with fellow audio enthusiasts."

We connected with Skype and, in the two videos embedded below, Adrian and I, along with Jan and Vilip from Audio Excellence, talk about many things connected with my 52 years as an audiophile, my 43 years in audio magazine publishing, and my 33 years at the editorial helm of Stereophile.

John Atkinson  |  Apr 10, 2020  | 
In his review of the three-way, active Dutch & Dutch 8c loudspeaker in the August 2019 issue of Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson concluded that "The D&D 8c demonstrates that active, DSP-empowered speakers are the future." I was equally impressed by the 8c's measured performance—a superbly flat on-axis response and an unmatched control of dispersion over the entire audioband—and asked to borrow a pair so I could experience the speakers in my own listening room.
John Atkinson  |  Jan 27, 2020  | 
Occasional Stereophile contributor Steve Guttenberg publishes a YouTube channel about audio that has achieved an impressive reach. As Steve told me in a conversation I had with him last December, 22% of his 98,000 subscribers (at the time we talked) are under 34 years old, and, to judge from the comments, most of them don't read Stereophile!!!! "It would nice to introduce you to them!" said Steve, and proposed he interview me and post the video to his channel when it hit the magic 100k number, which it did on January 9.

Steve visited my place in Brooklyn just before the New Year, and we spent an afternoon talking about audio, magazines, measurements, and music.

Ken Micallef  |  Jan 07, 2020  | 
Of the celebrated triumvirate of John Scofield, Pat Metheny, and Bill Frisell—the most original and influential jazz guitarists of the past 50 years—none is more distinctive, or self-effacing, than Frisell, a true changeling of the guitar. Frisell is a jazz-based musician, but his music crisscrosses genres, and his guitar playing isn't bound to or limited by a specific technique. He's a master illusionist, able to alter a song's meaning far beyond its original intent with the aid of a Telecaster guitar, a modest effects chain, and, most importantly, his rich imagination.
Fred Kaplan  |  Oct 31, 2019  | 
There has never been a record producer like Manfred Eicher, founder and sole proprietor of ECM records, the German-based jazz (and sometimes classical) label that celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.

Eicher doesn't quite win the all-time prize for longevity. Edward Lewis started Decca (UK) in 1929 and owned it until 1980. David Sarnoff controlled RCA from 1919–1970. William Paley did the same at Columbia from 1938-1988. But unlike those other, financially heftier titans, who deferred to department heads and studio producers, Eicher has supervised every single one of ECM's albums—more than 1600 of them.

Ken Micallef  |  Oct 09, 2019  | 
Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea belongs to that elite cadre of pianists that includes Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, and Mccoy Tyner, pioneers who reshaped the jazz or- der starting in the early 1960s and continued to make strides into the present day.

The now-78-year-old Corea's attainments are many: composer of the standards "la fiesta," "Spain," "500 Miles High," "Matrix," and "Windows"; winner of 22 Grammy Awards (and 64 nods); founder of at least six colossal improvising units (Return to Forever I and II, Circle, the Three Quartets quartet, the Chick Corea Elektric Band, the Vigil Quintet); popularizer of early monophonic synthesizers, and recipient, in 2006, of an NEA Jazz Masters award.

Richard Lehnert, Meg Seaker, Merridee Shaw  |  Sep 03, 2019  |  First Published: Oct 01, 1981  | 
Years before I moved to Santa Fe, where I eventually became Stereophile's copyeditor, assistant editor, and first music editor, I lived in Boston, Massachusetts. There, I'd spent a year as the in-house typesetter, copyeditor, and book-review editor of East West Journal, an eclectic monthly magazine devoted to nutrition, spirituality, cooking, gardening, conservation, and other subjects. Two years after I'd left EWJ, managing editor Meg Seaker called to ask if I wanted to interview Keith Jarrett for the magazine.
Jon Iverson  |  Aug 27, 2019  | 
Vocalist Jon Anderson has been at the center of the fabled rock band Yes since its founding in 1968 and has collaborated with other notable artists including Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Jean-Luc Ponty, and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra. A tireless and prolific musician, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, he has also released more than a dozen solo albums.

Almost exactly 50 years after the July 1969 release of the first Yes album, Anderson visited my house for an afternoon of talk and listening to music. We listened to some old Yes tracks, some favorites from other artists, and several from his most recent album, 1000 Hands: Chapter One, which was 30 years in the making.

Sasha Matson  |  Jul 02, 2019  | 
American composer John Adams and I first met in the late 1970s, when I became one of his composition students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. My recollections from those days endure as near-cinematic images: John lugging his homemade synthesizer—he called it "the Studebaker"—down the hall prior to meeting me at his office; an early performance, at Mills College in Oakland, of Adams's Shaker Loops (footnote 1) for string septet; sitting with Adams during rehearsals for the 1981 premiere of his choral symphony Harmonium (footnote 2), with Edo De Waart and the San Francisco Symphony.
Robert Harley  |  Jun 13, 2019  |  First Published: Oct 01, 1992  | 
His background may have been in tubed audio product design, but Theta Digital's Mike Moffat is now at the forefront of computer-based digital processor development. His Theta D/A processors are among a handful of products that use Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips and custom filtering software instead of off-the-shelf filter chips (footnote 1). I recently visited Mike at the Theta factory to get his current ideas on digital audio reproduction and what goes into designing a good-sounding processor. I began by asking Mike if he had always been an audiophile.

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