No matter how much I upgrade my digital rig, my trusty $1195 Well-Tempered Record Player blows it away without half trying. . . That's why I corralled a bunch of promising midpriced cartridges and spent a couple of months settin' 'em up, breakin' 'em in, and listenin' to 'em on my favorite records.

So much critical ink has been spilled on Maria, Pablo Larrain and Steven Knight's biographical fantasy on the last days of operatic soprano Maria Callas, that everyone who hasn't yet seen it "knows" exactly why. Which is a crying shame, given that very few reviews present the musical reasons that make Maria essential viewing, especially for people who care deeply about music.

Caroline Shaw: Leonardo Da Vinci (soundtrack); Ethel String Quartet: Persist (Works by Allison Loggins-Hll, Migiwa "Miggy" Miyajima, Xavier Muzik, Sam Wu, and Leilehua Lanzilotti); Zlata Chochieva: Works for Piano and Orchestra; Rococo: Works by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Dvořák, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich; Tchaikovsky: The Seasons; Romance in F minor; Mozart: Serenata (Eine kleine Nachtmusik | Posthorn | Haffner).

Avishai Cohen: Ashes to Gold; Matt Slocum: Lion Dance; John Hollenbeck: Colouring Hockets.

The Violent Femmes: Hallowed Ground, 40th Anniversary Reissue; Christopher Owens: I Want To Run Barefoot Through Your Hair; Iron Maiden: Powerslave (40th Anniversary Edition); Lucinda Williams: Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles from Abbey Road.

Arriving in Japan from the United States is like being turned upside down. This condition lasts for much of the first week. When I visited in November, the time difference between Tokyo and New York was 14 hours. "The floating world" is a term for the pleasure-addled urban culture of Edo-period Japan, but it's also an apt description for the twilit and not-entirely-unpleasant weirdness of first arriving in Tokyo. Everything seems slightly unreal.

I'd come to Japan for several reasons, one of which was simply to spend more time in what for me is the most enjoyable place on the planet. Another was to explore the country's distinctive listening spaces, which I've been thinking and occasionally writing about over the past few years. During that time, listening bars and cafés from Boulder to Sydney have been popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and for many of these new venues, Japan's jazz kissas (or kissaten in the Japanese plural) are both the model and spiritual mothership.