It's a pretty good list, though, if a little serious. Two books I would have added would have upped the fun factor considerably. First, there's the sadly OOP The Death of David Debrizzi by Paul Micou, which is a joyous yawp of a rant directed at a pompous, prominent impresario dictated from the deathbed of his disgraced…
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Over at The Independent, Jessica Duchen lists her favorite works of literature that prominently feature music. Mirroring Heine, she starts out, "Music begins where words end," which is more or less true—after all most writing about music sucks the juice right out of it.
Maybe so. I think I prefer Michael Dibdin's solution in The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, but fiction is frequently more fun than fact.
George Kerevan reviews Christopher Duffy's Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme 1916, which sounds like a corker. In the first 24 hours of that battle, Britain lost more men than in the Crimean, Boer, and Korean wars combined.
Duffy apparently takes us beyond the conventional saga of incompetent and bloody-minded command and tells a revolutionary story about a battle I thought had nothing new to offer.
Since, over the last few entries, I've developed a thread of recommending other books, I'll also tout Stephen O'Shea's Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the…
Several folks make the case—Agnes Selby, author of Constanze, Mozart's Beloved does so most emphatically. Sound And Fury has it all covered.
That's what I get for trusting Auntie Beeb.
Last night, in Manila–like heat, I trekked southward on Manhattan Island to meet with Jim Davis, owner of Music Direct and one of his right hand men, Colie Brice. One of the best online sources for audiophile wares, both soft and hard, (now, now, let's keep those high fidelity minds up out of the gutter!), Music Direct, as many of you know, also owns the revived Mobile Fidelity label. MoFi was and maybe again THE proudest audiophile label of them all. The extra dynamics they squeezed out of Nirvana's Nevermind will forever amaze me.
But alas, it's now 2006 and according to Davis…
Ward asked, "Did you return the Arcam Solo already? Have you tried any gear yet that you would actually consider going out and buying in the next month or two, were it not for the parade of review gear?"
Yes, the Solo went back some time ago. But not before I came very close to purchasing it. The Solo's a wonderful introduction to hi-fi: it does everything you want it to do, it does it well, and it looks good doing it. It's simple and fun. Something like that is always nice to have around. In fact, I wish I had one here, right now, in my office. I'd play M. Ward's bouncy Post War,…
Speakers of English and Chinese apparently process numbers differently. I'm fascinated for three, no, four, . . . uh, many reasons.
What a score! Here's a promotional short for Irving Mills' Master and Variety labels that shows us Ellington in the studio. Amazingly, the process of record manufacture hasn't changed substantially since 1937.
BTW, in Music Is My Mistress, Ellington devoted a chapter to Mills. IIRC, it consisted of the following sentence: "My mother told me that if you can't say something nice about somebody, say nothing."
It's a paper turntable. I'm sure that Mikey Fremer will be contacting the artist for one to go next to his Nixie clock.
A new way of looking at chords and music. Well, new-ish. Or maybe, not so much.
Depends on who's talking, I guess.