Tighten the laces on your Vans and jump on your skateboard, strap on your helmet and hop on your scooter, pump some air into the tires of your cruiser, do whatever you have to do, dudes; Dash, sprint, leap, fly like Olympians to your nearest record shop and lay down the $19.99 for the new Leila Arab album.

<B>GONZALO RUBALCABA: <I>Discovery</I></B><BR>
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, piano; Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motian, drums<BR>
Blue Note CDP 7 95478 2 (CD only). Charlie Haden, prod.; David Richards, eng. DDD? TT: 54:06

<B>Editor's Note from 1992: </B><I>This seminal J. Gordon Holt essay on how the art of recording natural sound became compromised in favor of unmusical artificiality for good commercial reasons was originally published in August 1964, in Vol.1 No.8. Though most people these days listen to classical music from CDs, not LPs, in the intervening decades, recording technology has not changed for the better as much as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, the days of wretched multimiking excess described by Gordon are past, and it's rare to find the music treated with the lack of respect typical of a mid-'60s Columbia session. Although some of the smaller companies&#151;Reference Recordings, Delos, Chesky, Mapleshade, Dorian, and Sheffield Lab in the US; Meridian, Nimbus, and Hyperion in the UK&#151;consistently use honest, minimal miking, it is not unknown for the majors in the '90s to do likewise. And the use of time delay for spot microphones, pioneered by Denon in the mid-'80s, means that instruments that might tend to become obscured at orchestral climaxes </I>can<I> now be brought up in level without unnaturally time-smearing the sound. I still find it sad, however, that it is rare to hear the sheer dynamic range of a live ensemble successfully captured on a commercial recording.</I>&#151;<B>John Atkinson</B>

<B>Editor's Note from 1992: </B><I>This seminal J. Gordon Holt essay on how the art of recording natural sound became compromised in favor of unmusical artificiality for good commercial reasons was originally published in August 1964, in Vol.1 No.8. Though most people these days listen to classical music from CDs, not LPs, in the intervening decades, recording technology has not changed for the better as much as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, the days of wretched multimiking excess described by Gordon are past, and it's rare to find the music treated with the lack of respect typical of a mid-'60s Columbia session. Although some of the smaller companies&#151;Reference Recordings, Delos, Chesky, Mapleshade, Dorian, and Sheffield Lab in the US; Meridian, Nimbus, and Hyperion in the UK&#151;consistently use honest, minimal miking, it is not unknown for the majors in the '90s to do likewise. And the use of time delay for spot microphones, pioneered by Denon in the mid-'80s, means that instruments that might tend to become obscured at orchestral climaxes </I>can<I> now be brought up in level without unnaturally time-smearing the sound. I still find it sad, however, that it is rare to hear the sheer dynamic range of a live ensemble successfully captured on a commercial recording.</I>&#151;<B>John Atkinson</B>

A <A HREF="http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/uknews/2505034/Culinary-secrets-of-D… cookbook</A> of 58 dishes, meticulously hand-written and illustrated by Corporal James Abraham Harrison will be auctioned next month. The gimmick to this cookbook? Harrison was one of Montgomery's Desert Rats and served as mess chef in the North African desert.