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David Torn

jazz fusion is a movement in music, that I have to say, often leaves me cold. Yeah, Bitches Brew is great and other masterworks of the genre obviously resonate, but shows like a rare appearance by guitarist David Torn that I caught on Tuesday night at Joe's Pub are less than thrilling.

For those who like me don't know the entire Torn saga, he's a guitarist renowned for his texturalism and his ability with electronics and effects. A former student of Leonard Bernstein, John Abercrombie and Pat Martino, Torn has been laying low since an early Nineties health crisis.

Assisted by…

Sun, Sun, Sun: Here It Comes

After a week of rain and bad news, here comes the sun. I woke this morning, singing it.

Little darlin', it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darlin', it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say, "It's all right"

It is all right. Everything's all right. I'm looking forward to removing the plastic covering from the kitchen windows and enjoying the warm air.

New Releases from Jagjaguwar

Christian recommended a great new band to me: The Besnard Lakes. Listening to them reminds me of Brian Wilson and Pink Floyd and My Morning Jacket. There are shiny falsettos, dream sequences, and reverb-drenched solos. It's music that I want to share with my girlfriend. A Google search then led me to the band's record label, Jagjaguwar. There, I found a happy surprise: entire albums — freely flowing streams of music — not only from The Besnard Lakes, but also from a couple of other interesting bands, Odawas and Alex Delivery.

These bands are so interesting, in fact, that…

Great Art

By the way, I never made it to Milan, but I did find out how much a pair of those shiny KEF Muon loudspeakers cost: A little more than Mikey Fremer's turntable.

$140,000/pair. Yikes!

I am totally happy with the $279/pair PSB Alpha B1s. Thank you very much.

Understatement of the Year

Variety headline: "Digital proves problematic." Oh who would have ever thunk it? Oh wait—maybe it was us audiophiles.

Faking It

Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have written Faking It: the quest for authenticity in popular music, a book that tackles the "pop paradox": the harder popular musicians try to "keep it real," the faker their music becomes.

Is something as transcendently artificial as "I'm a Believer" less valid an expression than, say, something as apparently sincere as "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? Maybe, but I have to admit that I experience joy every time I hear that rising yelp of "Then I saw her face!"—which, at 40 years and counting, makes it a mighty potent act of insincerity.

Taking the Pressure Off

Nick Cave's vocals — searching, pleading, urgent and, normally, red-hot — sounded just a bit soft and cool through the PSB Alpha B1s. Ward wondered:

"Have you tried anything with a sub yet? I'd be interested to hear how taking some pressure off your speakers and filling in the bottom end affects your opinion of the PSBs."

No, I've never added a subwoofer to any of the speaker systems I've listened to at home. I never even considered it, actually. Subwoofers just seem kinda weird to me, more suited for crash-and-boom home theater setups or in the back of some dude…