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If Vinyl Man had a shield, it would look something like the Thorens TD 309 turntable. But it would be orange. Or green.
Look: I mean, listen: I mean, look: I'm the sort of guy who is comfortable with the idea that there's more than just music to this whole hi-fi thing. It's not all about the music. That's bullshit. It's also about friendship and peace and art and beauty. It's about belonging. You can get into hi-fi even if you don't listen to music. What? Yes! It's about getting drunk and high and lost. It's about girls and boys. It's also about the gear. But you can get into hi-fi even if you don't like gear. What? Yes! It's about more than just what the gear does. It's also about how…
Photo: Michael Schmelling
Tomorrow is National Sonic Youth Day. (I just made that up.) The band will be performing songs from their new album, The Eternal, at the grand old United Palace Theater up in Washington Heights on 175th and Broadway. For some enticing photos of the venue, visit their gallery. It was born as a Loew's Wonder Theater, one of just five flagship movie palaces known for their lavish beauty and built to mark the chain's dominance of the metropolitan movie-going community. The 175th Street Theater was opened in 1930, while the other four palaces threw wide…
If you like freak shows, then the current travails of the Republican Party are incredibly sweet. Marc Sanford’s “I’m gonna try and fall back in love with my wife” nonsense [need dental work? try repeating that one to your wife?], Palin’s rambling, basketball–and–dead fish–laden resignation speech, and now the pride of Long Island, U. S. Rep. Peter King, calling Michael Jackson names on the day before he is buried. “Lowlife,” “pedophile,” “child molester,” oh yeah, King hit `em all. The run of bad news on Jackson is about to begin again—his toxicology report is gonna cause a circus, not to…
We have to thank 24 year-old music lover, uglypodcast, for this excellent footage from Sonic Youth's July 3rd performance at the grand, old United Palace Theater on 175th and Broadway. Amazingly, this is almost exactly as I saw it; the camera must have been very near where I stood. In fact, the handclaps you'll hear at about 2:00, along with the maniacal howl that erupts at 2:24, belong to me. The limp and weary hands that show up at around 4:13 are almost certainly mine, as well.
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They lived in that space where the deepest ecstasy mingles with danger and madness…
Steve Kuhn’s new CD, Mostly Coltrane (on the ECM label), has no business working, but it does, for the most part really well.
Trane-tribute albums are risky enough; most of them inspire only the desire to spin the originals. Kuhn at least has some bona fides, having played piano in a quartet that Coltrane led in the first few months of 1960 before forming the “classic quartet” that consisted of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones (or, as an occasional sub on drums, Roy Haynes).
The album’s most compelling tunes are those that Kuhn played with Coltrane himself, most of…
The success of any party depends on just a few things: the venue, the guests, the food and drink, and (of course) the music. Evenings at John DeVore's factory at the Brooklyn Navy Yard are invariably successful. More than that, they are fun. You love the place. You enjoy the company. The food is delicious and the drinks do the trick. And (of course) the music is intoxicating. You want to be there.
Monkeyhaus is the name of the sound room—that golden, friendly place filled with vinyl and wood and tube amplifiers, where we sit and talk and listen and laugh—but it…
Photo: Michael Lavorgna
Guests are invited to bring their own LPs to every Monkeyhaus. For a recent gathering, I brought Flash's blistering 1972 self-titled debut. Find this album and get busy to "Children of the Universe."
Special surprise guest at a recent Monkeyhaus: Blackman. Photo by Michael Lavorgna. (The camera had been drinking.)
I've realized why the opening few moments of Tom Abbs & Frequency Response's "Lost" make me want to just stop and cry. I find those moments so painfully beautiful because they remind me of my grandmother (my mother's mother) singing to me when I was a child. At first, I thought it was "You Are My Sunshine," but now I realize that it's "All the Pretty Horses." Listening again, I wish now I had someone to sing it to, someone to play it for.
Hush a bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep little baby.
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
"My…