That was a long time ago, and the place is much…
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I still remember 315 Bowery as the dank, old punk club, with the wobbly bar stools and the awful sound system. Last time I was there, I sat in a lopsided booth, in a pool of beer, and had my ears blown out by relentless guitars and a singer dressed in rags. I crouched down into the booth and tried to hide from the sound that came erupting from the old, abused speakers. But I came to the party late. By the time I made it to CB’s, the magic was already gone. The place was an echo of punk rock, a memory of a revolution, a museum shop.
Today’s social networking is a joke, or worse: A death knell. Modern technology and the Internet seem determined to bring humankind to a state of complete separateness, determined to destroy civilization, to destroy our ability to fully connect and properly communicate.
We have eyes to see, but we refuse to use them. We have mouths to speak, but we choose instead to text, to tweet, to “like.” As our language deteriorates into acronyms, initialisms, and emoticons, we move deeper into cyberspace and deeper into ourselves, and farther from the material world. We spend our days…
My column on the best jazz albums of 2010 is in today’s edition of
Slate, replete with strategically selected 30-second sound clips, illustrating my points (to the extent—very limited—that 30-second clips can do that). Here’s the list, minus the mini-essays and the sound clips, but I’ve written about all of these albums over the past year in this blog.
1. Jason Moran, Ten (Blue Note).
2. Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden, Jasmine (ECM).
3. Geri Allen, Flying Toward the Sound (Motema).
4. Dave Douglas, Spark of Being (Greenleaf).
5. Fred Hersch, Whirl (Palmetto).
6.…
Every now and then, I hear people complaining about the lack of good, new music. I figure these people just aren’t paying attention, or they’re looking in the wrong places, because I have the opposite problem: I am overwhelmed by all the good music there is to explore. I’m so blinded by good music that “bad” music doesn’t even show up on my radar. Just about everything I hear is at least interesting, if not a potential “Record to Die For.” My simple advice on this matter: Identify the thing that makes you happy, and then go deeper into it. And when you think you’ve explored it all, look…
Wes Phillips tried the Etymotic Research Custom-Fit earmolds in December 2010 (Vol.33 No.11):
In my review of Etymotic Research's hf5 and hf2 in-ear headphones in the August 2010 Stereophile, I mentioned that the company was about to offer custom earmolds via its Custom-Fit program, which would produce custom eartips for its headphones via a nationwide network of audiologists, for a cost of about $100/pair. Once the master molds have been made, additional pairs of earmolds are available at a discount.
I'd had earmolds made previously, first for my original pair of Etymotic ER-4s,…
The first part of a six-part BBC documentary narrated by the late John Peel
Born in January 1941, Don van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, died Friday, December 17, 2010, of complications related to multiple sclerosis.
Even though he gave up music in 1982 (beginning a successful career as a reclusive artist until hampered by the onset of multiple sclerosis), Captain Beefheart left an important and influential musical legacy.
Safe As Milk, the 1967 debut album, didn't exactly burst onto the music scene, but it did create some cult interest, even amongst students like me…
The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009); hardcover, 318 pp. $24.
In his lifetime, J.S. Bach (1685–1750) was an obscure figure. He never lived in a major city, he didn't work in the musical form—opera—that in his era could propel a composer to stardom, and his style seemed antiquated to many. Bach saw a mere nine of his compositions published; when his consummate masterwork, The Art of the Fugue, appeared the year after he died, it sold just 30 copies.
Eric Siblin includes these…
My house is 35 minutes from the Arkell Museum of Canajoharie, New York, home to key works by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, and William Merritt Chase. The Arkell also contains a favorite of mine: The Rainbow, by the New York State landscape artist George Inness. In that 1878 painting (footnote 1), one sees a few cows being driven along a hillside path, while a steepled village sleeps in the background. The quality of light that Inness captured or created in The Rainbow is enchanting: It brings more depth, complexity, and sheer autumnal longing to the scene…
When I powered the system back up after installing all of this, it seemed the Shunyatas were doing a number of things I like—to a greater degree than I associate with cables at all, let alone AC cables. "Winterlong" and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," from Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Live at the Fillmore (LP, Reprise/Classic 44429-1), had a better, larger sense of scale. Instruments sounded more explosively dramatic, and voices were similarly punchier: There was more holler in the singing (I mean that in a good way). Cecille Ousset and Rudolf Barshai's fine recording of Prokofiev's…
Second, I tried something out of the ordinary (for me, at least): I powered my iMac with the Shunyata Hydra V-Ray, to see if it could make even a slight difference in the sound of music files streamed from therein. I admit, I so expected to hear no difference that I almost wrote the rest of this paragraph ahead of time. And I admit, not only was there an audible improvement with my computer plugged into the Hydra V-Ray, that difference was just as significant as the one wreaked on my Thorenses, and quite possibly more so. Singers had more body, instruments more substance and texture—oddly…