Music and Recording Features

We started issuing recordings on the Stereophile label at the end of the 1980s, both to make available some of test tracks that we were using in our reviews and to enable readers to have access to recordings where the provenance was fully documented. That way the "Circle of Confusion" that Bob Katz discussed on the Stereophile website in 2017, where the sound quality of an audio component couldn't be judged using a recording with unknown sound quality potential, could be avoided. As Bob wrote, "How can any reviewer make a judgment about a transducer without knowing what a recording is supposed to sound like?"

In 2017 we released Tight Lines, an album of classical chamber works that had been composed by Sasha Matson. I had produced Tight Lines, as I had Sasha's Cooperstown, a jazz opera about baseball, which was released on Albany Records and was Stereophile's "Recording of the Month" for April 2015.

Working with Sasha and with renowned engineers like Mike Marciano, Bill Schnee, and Michael C. Ross on these projects had been extremely fulfilling. So when Sasha approached me in the spring of 2021 about producing an album of classical-themed works he had composed for a jazz big band, I didn't have to be asked twice.

The works we were to record were a piano concerto, a symphony, and a tribute to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. Here is how Sasha described the works in the LP sleevenotes:

"Concerto For Piano & Jazz Orchestra features soloist Adam Birnbaum, with whom I first discussed the piece at The Village Vanguard in New York. Adam has been a member of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra in recent years, which supercharges that small stage on Monday nights. I thank him for helping to woodshed the score and parts for this composition—and for playing the heck out of it!

"Capt. Trips is dedicated to the memory of Jerry Garcia. Coming up through middle and high school in the 1960s in Berkeley, we looked to members of The Grateful Dead as our big brothers—as role models! I am pleased that guitarist Steve Cardenas brought his own sound to bear here, summoning Garcia from the Isle of the Dead.

"Symphony No.3 For Jazz Orchestra began as sketches a couple of years back, when I participated in the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, at that time run by Andy Farber and Ted Nash. I thank them both for picking up their horns and pitching in. The title of the fourth movement, "Life Against Death," is borrowed from a book of that name by Norman O. Brown, who taught at UC Santa Cruz when I was a student there."

The album, Molto Molto, is now available on the Stereophile label with the catalog number STPH023 as a double-LP, 180gm set ($39.95) and a single CD ($14.95). The album can be purchased from Amazon and later this week from Stereophile's Online Store.

Molto Molto can be streamed as 24/96 FLAC files on Qobuz, as 16/44.1 FLAC files on Tidal, and as lossy compressed 16/44.1 files on Spotify. Excerpts can be auditioned on Amazon and at Sasha Matson's website.