Music and Recording Features

Regina Carter: A Family Affair

Robert Baird May 06, 2014 First Published: May 01, 2014

Making a recording is always a personal journeyeveryone has a story to tell. Jazz violinist Regina Carter's latest, Southern Comfort, is an eloquent musical expression of Carter tracing the roots of her paternal lineage back five generations. For the project's sound engineer, Joe Ferla, it's the final project of a engineering career, and the beginning point of his new life as a practicing musician. The entwining of these journeys gives the album's music and sound a rare honesty.

Music and Recording Features

Many Happy Returns

Corey Greenberg Mar 17, 2014 First Published: Jun 01, 1991

Today is the 60th anniversary of the iconic Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, the instrument that in the hands of Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mark Knopfler, Buddy Guy, Hank B. Marvin, and many other virtuosi, shaped and guided rock music ever since. To celebrate the day, we are reprinting the tribute by Corey Greenberg, himself a Strat player, to the guitar's inventor, the late Leo Fender, that was published in our June 1991 issue.Ed.

Music and Recording Features Interviews

Guy Clark: For the Sake of the Song

Robert Baird Mar 05, 2014 First Published: Mar 05, 2014

As songwriters go, Guy Clark has been touched by the muse more than most. Unfortunately, in recent years he's also been visited by illness and heartache. In June 2012, his wife of 40 years, Susanna Clark, who was both a songwriter ("Easy from Now On") and an artist (the cover of Willie Nelson's Stardust), died in Nashville. In the past several years Clark, 72, has battled lymphoma, had his knees replaced, and undergone an arterial replacement in one leg. He was being treated for skin cancer when I visited his home, south of Nashville, in October 2013.

Music and Recording Features

The Paramount Records Cabinet of Wonders

Robert Baird Dec 24, 2013 First Published: Jan 01, 2014

Party like a rock star!

Or not.

Damned rock stars! Those useless black voids of overweening ego who spend their days wallowing in unfulfilling, sybaritic cycles of mass adoration, endless wealth, and meaningless sex with hard bodieswhat do they add to the greater good, to the advancement of human understanding, to the furtherance of art? In most cases, the answer is: Nothing. Zip, zilch, zot.

Music and Recording Features

Darcy James Argue and His Steampunk Big Band

Fred Kaplan Oct 01, 2013 First Published: Oct 01, 2013

The world is catching up with Darcy James Argue. Two years ago, he was known mainly for having the strangest name in jazz since Ornette Coleman. Now he's a double winner in Downbeat's 2013 Critics' Pollthe top pick for Best Arranger, and tied with Maria Schneider for Best Big Band Leader.

Music and Recording Features Interviews

Terence Blanchard: Animal Magnetism

Robert Baird Aug 08, 2013 First Published: Aug 08, 2013

Down deepest, beneath everything he does, underlying all the facets of his ever-expanding career in music, Terence Blanchard is still a New Orleans guy. Question that and you can hear his dander rise.

Music and Recording Features News

Wilson Audiophile Recordings Return

Jason Victor Serinus Jul 31, 2013 First Published: Jul 31, 2013

Many of David Wilson's highly acclaimed, long out-of-print recordings are poised to make old and new generations of audiophiles very happy. On August 1, the first two of a selected batch of Wilson Audiophile Recordings will return to circulation as high-resolution (176.4kHz/24-bit), CD-quality, and MP3 downloads. Distributed by Naxos via a host of mass-market and hi-res digital music stores, including Chandos' "The Classical Shoppe," eClassical24bit, HDMusic, HDTracks, HiResAudio, Linn Records, Onkyo, and Qobuz24bit, the first titles in the series are Recital, James B. Welch's disc of four centuries of organ music, and Beethoven and Enescu Sonatas, performed by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg, this magazine's "Recording of the Month" for February 1984.

Music and Recording Features Interviews

Willie Nile: the Bard on Bleecker

Robert Baird May 09, 2013 First Published: May 01, 2013

"You see that empty space?" says Willie Nile, motioning toward a lot between buildings on Bleecker Street, an impish Irish grin flickering across his face. "They haven't built anything there yet because Anna Wintour lives around the corner. And that red-brick house over there, the one with the white door? That's where Dylan lived. I used to see Bob around the neighborhood now and again."

Music and Recording Features Art Dudley Listening

Listening #123

Art Dudley Mar 07, 2013 First Published: Mar 07, 2013

Let's say you're lucky enough, or just plain old enough, to have bought a copy of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood on January 12, 1966. Let's say you're lucky enough or just plain smart enough to have held on to it and kept it in perfect shape for the past 47 years. And let's say it was one of the first 500 copies, which the author signed. If so, congratulations: For once in your life, even the smuggest collector can't claim that his copy of a book is "better" or more valuable than yours.

Music and Recording Features

Bruckner: Symphony 9 (with Finale)

Richard Lehnert Jan 23, 2013 First Published: Jan 23, 2013

This reconstruction of the Ninth's Finale is the result of 30 years' work by Bruckner scholars Nicola Samale, John A. Phillips, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and Giuseppe Mazzuca (SPCM). (See March 2010 feature story.) For this new "Conclusive Revised Edition 2012," SPCM shortened by 18 bars the coda, of which little of Bruckner's writing survives, and reworked it to include, based on Bruckner's description, a development of the trumpets' "Alleluia" in bar five of the Adagio. This works well, though the coda now seems a bit short. A further "final" edition is in the works.