Brilliant Corners

On "Ring Them Bells," from the same album, Sufjan Stevens's band-geek arrangement features more than a dozen instruments including a viola, French horn, lap steel, and electric drums, sometimes playing loudly in unison and sometimes creating a floral setting for his delicate tenor voice, which here was thankfully recorded without the usual heavy reverb and overdubs. The d1-unity rendered the instruments with vivid tone color remarkable for a digital source, which lent the playing an unusual amount of beauty and realism. The astonishing electric guitar solo by Bryce Dessner of the National sounded so gorgeous that I listened to the track three times in row.

No amount of harmonic richness can make up for a lack of resolution, and here the Totaldac didn't disappoint. The Rain (16/44.1 FLAC, ECM/Qobuz) documents a live performance by Indian–Iranian ensemble Ghazal. The mid-tempo "Dawn" is a conversation between Shujaat Husain Khan's sitar and Kayhan Kalhor's kamancheh, a husky-sounding Iranian string instrument played with a variable-tension bow. Punctuated by Sandeep Das's tabla, the two main instruments argue, lament, egg each other on, and engage in what sounds like prayer. The recording captures the live acoustic brilliantly, and the d1-unity was so adept at resolving the instruments' reverb trails that at times the music sounded almost orchestral. Hearing Khan's soft vocal come in midway through this ravishing music was downright startling.

The Totaldac's unusual combination of physical solidity, vivid color retrieval, microbe-level resolution, and ability to home in on and reveal musical meaning made me reach for recordings that sound flattened and uninspiring through other digital sources. Since saxophonist Wayne Shorter's death in March, I have been listening nearly constantly to his body of work. His restless experimentation with form and genre and his world-class songwriting sometimes had the effect of obscuring the childlike sense of wonder at the core of his playing, as well as his ability to produce an unprecedented range of tone colors, particularly on soprano. Joni Mitchell, who appeared with Shorter on 10 albums over the course of 36 years, has likened him to a paint brush. On his solo on "Ponta de Areia" from his 1975 album Native Dancer (16/44.1 FLAC, Columbia/Qobuz), a collaboration with Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento, Shorter plays the soprano with the curiosity, stylistic freedom, and palpable sense of delight that would characterize the best of his late-career recordings. The d1-unity decoded it with a physicality, vibrancy, and emotional urgency that I simply don't associate with digital sources.

To see how much the d1-sublime-streamer was adding to this delightful illusion, I replaced it with my own streamer: the much less expensive and kludgier combination of the Sonore ultraRendu and Denafrips Iris digital-to-digital converter (the latter to enable an AES3 connection to the d1-unity). The resulting sound was possibly a hair more forceful but also audibly less refined and purposeful. The meaning of the music was less obvious, and everything sounded just a bit more mechanical. Still, the fleshy, resolute, Technicolor character of the d1-unity remained, and I came away thinking that the Totaldac streamer is not an absolute necessity for enjoying the company's distinct house sound.

The 12-year-old inside me sometimes gets riled by childish questions. Here's the one he wanted answered while we were living with the Totaldac combo: Does it produce the organic textures, whomp, and utter juiciness of the Garrard 301 record player that was sitting on the shelf above it? (footnote 4) You probably know the answer, but I'll tell you anyway. No, it doesn't, not quite, but it does make music sound more unrestrained and physically believable than any digital front end I've heard (save for Totaldac's top-of-the-line decoder, which I mentioned earlier). It reminded me a little of the decidedly odd Lejonklou Källa, which may be even more engaging, though not as colorful and present, and is far more limited in operation. For those of us who struggle with enjoying digital sound at home—from anecdotal evidence, there are still more than a few of us around—the Totaldac d1-unity just may change your listening habits and enlarge your musical libraries. Machines capable of playing millions of tracks without physical media have been around for a while, and some happen to sound pretty great.

Just as the summer heat was heading into its last swoon...
I got an email from Stereophile Editor Jim Austin. "FYI, for obvious reasons," it read. Below was an announcement that Craft Recordings, the reissue label for Concord Recorded Music, was releasing Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners as part of its Small Batch vinyl series. According to Craft, new one-step AAA lacquers from Bernie Grundman were used to press a limited run at RTI using a fancy vinyl compound called VR900. There would be a "linen-wrapped, foil-stamped slipcase" and a "per household limit of two copies." Oh, and it would cost $109, placing it into the rarefied realm of super amazing reissues.

I've waxed cranky about reissues in these pages before—all the while realizing that finding fault with a renaissance of excellent-sounding music on vinyl may sound a bit ungracious. Still, I continue to find some reissues to simply not be up to the sonic thrills of the original vinyl, marketing claims and slipcases notwithstanding. In some cases, the records chosen for rerelease are so easily found on the resale market, or so musically lackluster, or both, that they beg the question of why anyone bothered. With due respect to Atlantic Records, who exactly was clamoring for their recent 180gm vinyl reissue of Phil Collins's No Jacket Required?

Brilliant Corners is something else entirely. An undisputed masterpiece, it captures Monk at his compositional peak, playing with an inventiveness and energy that would begin to drift after his move to Columbia Records in 1962. The original mono recording was released by Riverside, a company known for historic sides by Monk, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, and Wes Montgomery—and also for its records' decidedly pedestrian sound. And some of the original Riverside LPs on my shelves also number among the noisiest records I own.

According to music writer Ashley Kahn's insightful liner notes, included in the Craft Recordings reissue, one reason had to do with Riverside's decision, in 1956, to stop using Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack, New Jersey, studio and move their sessions to Reeves Sound Studio, a reasonably priced outfit on 44th Street in Manhattan best known for recording advertising spots for radio. That's where engineer Jack Higgins captured the 1957 sessions that would become Brilliant Corners using a process billed rather optimistically on the record cover as "Riverside-Reeves Spectrosonic High-Fidelity Engineering." To make matters worse, Riverside didn't allot a budget for rehearsals, and Monk's difficult title track required 25 takes, one of which reportedly ended in fisticuffs, and which had to be edited together by producer Orrin Keepnews into the final version.

To get a measure of the Craft reissue, I compared it with a 1961 Riverside pressing and a 1976 pressing from Victor Musical Industries of Yokohama, Japan. Though in pristine condition, the Riverside sounded forceful and dynamic but also somewhat coarse and pitchy. On the title track, it added a sharpness and sourness to Sonny Rollins's and Ernie Henry's saxophones, while Oscar Pettiford's bass sounded a bit recessed. The decay of the piano notes was truncated as well. This challenging, occasionally strident music wasn't helped by the record's challenging, strident sound—listening to the Riverside proved borderline unpleasant.

These issues were sorted out on the Victor: The horns were more correct, and the bass came forward, though the recording, like many Japanese reissues from that era, sounds comparatively lightweight and dynamically restrained. It provided a pleasant, balanced listen but lacked immediacy, vividness, and excitement. For years, this was the pressing I reached for most often.

From the first needle drop, the Craft Recordings reissue offered a more complete picture of the sessions. Pettiford's bass sounded deep and powerfully resonant, while the horns were richer and brassier than on the other versions. On "Pannonnica," Monk plays the piano with one hand and a celeste with the other, and the latter instrument's bell-like, glassy timbre rang out with haunting accuracy. And the piano on his solo performance of the Tin Pan Alley chestnut "I Surrender Dear" sounded full and reverberant, with long, realistic decay. There was also zero groove noise. I played the reissue straight through twice, marveling at this music, which I hadn't heard sound this sonorous and alive. Listening to it reminded me of watching Walter Murch's reverential 1998 restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, another midcentury masterpiece from a relative outsider.

Is this the best Brilliant Corners in existence? I cannot say, not having heard the 2010 Analogue Productions pressing mastered by Kevin Gray or the 2020 release from the Electric Recording Company. No copies of the former are currently for sale at Discogs, while the latter is selling for about as much as round-trip airfare from New York to Rome. I suppose that puts the relatively high price of this release in perspective. Regardless, kudos to Craft Recordings for this beautiful-sounding version of an indispensable album—a case of a reissue we needed, done right.

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Footnote 4: The Garrard was equipped with a Schick 12" tonearm and a Miyajima Zero Mono phono cartridge.