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Juepa Je!

Dear Uncle Omar in Italy,
You missed a fine party. Though we were downright heartbroken that you could not attend, we managed to nevertheless have some fun. Fortunately, Uncle Norbert brought his new video camera, and we were able to capture much of that fun on tape! For your convenience, I've attached my favorite bit of footage, which came during one of our spontaneous sing-alongs.

In this piece, you'll see my dad handling lead vocals, while Titi Ida sings back-up. The docs had said that my dad's knee surgery would prevent him from much strenuous activity, but, as you can…

All of the Good Ones

Are taken, yes they are.
This video is just like my life. Sing it, brother.

I can’t believe she puts the cassette in the toaster. Heartless.

A Chance Encounter with Planet Waves

Since the transformation of my living room into a listening room, my record collection has been a woeful, helpless mess. Albums are grouped together more by my fleeting mood or by date of purchase than by anything usefully intelligible, or at all resembling order, such as genre or artist name. If, on some strange and rainy Saturday, I happened to have listened to albums by Mal Waldron, Crazy Horse, and Beach House, these albums will be found shelved together.

What sense does that make?

Some sort of sense, I’m sure, but you know how these things go: It’s all random, man,…

Vinyl Rules & New Blogs Rising

In this nice piece, Arlen Schweiger, managing editor of Electronic House, describes the great amount of fun he’s enjoyed while getting back into vinyl. Even on a modest analog rig ($50 Technics turntable and $100 Cambridge Audio phono preamp), Arlen has had no trouble noting vinyl’s virtues, which in his experience include wider soundstages, better focused images, and tighter bass. Most of all, it seems, Arlen is enjoying hunting for outstanding bargains on used LPs and sharing his discoveries with friends and family. Be sure to check out the slideshow.

Arlen also gives…

Sweaty, Laidback, and Gritty with Salt

It’s inevitable: Working on “Recommended Components,” as I am now, leads to fantasies of new gear, new systems, outstanding new heights of recorded playback! I have to restrain myself, focus. Focus, Daniel-san, focus.

Look eye, always look eye.

Last April’s “Recommended Components” list was created, in part, while listening to Psychic Ills’ Mirror Eye, in a cabin on a cliff overlooking the mighty and restless Pacific Ocean, so it had a kind of acid-laced, overcast, far-off feel to it. (Didn’t it?) This particular iteration of “Recommended Components,” however, is being…

Tote Bags

Good thing I bought all those records.

I strode into the office this morning with my pair of PSB Alpha B1 loudspeakers. John Atkinson will use them in an upcoming review of the Peachtree Audio iDecco D/A integrated amplifier. (With luck, JA won’t break my speakers; he is such an equipment abuser.) I spent some time last night searching for their box, which would have made transportation from Jersey City to Manhattan so much simpler, but could not find it. Fortunately, I did find a couple of yellow shopping bags from the Princeton Record Exchange. Suitably large and durable,…

Plant's Band of Joy

One of the weirder NYC boozing trends as of late is the faux speakeasy. Yes, that would be a room, usually subterranean, that for some unknown reason—perhaps every other cheeseball concept has been exhausted—tries to recapture some of those long lost flavors of the salad days of that joyous time in American history called Prohibition. You remember that grand social experiment perpetrated by the far right of American society that like all right wing idiocies, ignored reality and plowed ahead regardless of the damage it might have caused. Instead of stopping alcoholism, it spread the…

Is Jazz a Young Person's Music After All?

A week ago, I went to see Chris Potter lead a top-notch quintet at the Jazz Standard. It was a great set. Potter’s big tenor-sax sound keeps getting more swinging, more virtuosic, yet at the same time tonally subtler. Joining him were Steve Nelson on vibes, Paul Motian on drums, Craig Taborn on piano, and Scott Colley on bass. Potter was smiling a lot during their solos, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he’d assembled such a crew.

But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about the fact that the set was jam-packed, and with more young people—including young women, in…

A Special Tweeter

This is the Ion TW1S tweeter module found in the Acapella High Violoncello II loudspeaker ($80,000/pair). As you can see from this picture, taken in JA’s listening room, the tweeter module rests beneath the Acapella’s midrange enclosure. (That big, purple bell&#151the color is actually Porsche Amethyst&#151has a diameter of 18.5”.) Housed in a perforated metal box and powered with its own AC cord, the tweeter module is a completely self-contained unit; it accepts a line-level input from an RCA jack and amplifies the signal with a class-A amplifier.

This is the Ion TW1S…

Jason Moran's Ten

Jason Moran’s Ten (Blue Note) commemorates the 10th anniversary of his trio called Bandwagon (with Tarus Mateen on bass, Nasheet Waits on drums), and it’s by far the group’s best recording, maybe Moran’s best all told, which, if so, would mean it surpasses his 2002 solo disc, Modernistic, which is saying a lot. Whether it does or not (I’m still mulling), this is a great album, that much is certain.

This is also the trio’s first album that’s not geared to a concept. It flits across the musical map, from originals to pieces by Monk, Leonard Bernstein, the avant-garde classical composer…