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March 2023 Jazz Record Reviews

The Necks: Travel
Chris Abrahams, piano, organ; Tony Buck, drums; Lloyd Swanton, bass
Northern Spy NS158 (CD; also available on LP, download). 2023. Tim Whitten, prod., eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****

The Necks are an acoustic product of the digital age. The longstanding Australian piano trio has worked, with rare exception, in hour-long spans of gradual development that would make Miles Davis and Gil Evans green with envy. On stage or in studio, they execute their warm yet machine-like repetitions with great precision. In 2017, they broke with formula to meet the…

Analog Corner #259: Audio Union Döhmann Helix 1 turntable and Schröder CB tonearm

Turntables, tonearms, and phono cartridges are tuned systems. That each of them can be adjusted to maximize the sound quality—especially the quality called tunefulness, which is difficult to quantify—drives vinyl deniers crazy. Today, one of them e-mailed me: "You are the stupidest motherfucker I have ever encountered. Go shove a tone-arm up your ass." He followed that with this: "You are demented, deluded, and deaf. Records suck, and always have."

Just ignore them. I do. (Well, I try.)

The ability to fine-tune a vinyl playback system is part of what makes it possible to combine…

Analog Corner #259: Audio Union Döhmann Helix 1 turntable and Schröder CB tonearm Page 2

Setup and Use: The Döhmann Helix 1 comes in a compact road case and is relatively easy to set up. It sits on adjustable leveling feet, from which the turntable itself is completely decoupled. It's big: 23.4" wide by 5.2" high by 18.7" deep. The MinusK suspension requires no tuning or tweaking, other than to adjust the vertical "travel" once the arm(s) has been installed: The suspension is very sensitive to weight.

Audio Union supplies a pair of thick, mirror-imaged aluminum armboards that can be machined to accommodate your choice of tonearm. The boards are bolted, from above, to…

Revinylization #40: Beck & Croz

Turns out rock stars are human after all. Which means music fans should prepare themselves for the coming toll. The next few years are certain to be brutal: Bob Dylan, 81; Paul Simon, 81; George Clinton, 81; Brian Wilson, 80; Carole King, 80; Keith Richards, 79; Jimmy Page, 79; Sly Stone, 79; Rod Stewart, 78; Neil Young, 77; Pete Townsend, 77, and the inexorability rolls on. The news is even worse among the pre-rock era stars, where it's a matter of any day now: Tony Bennett, 96; Burt Bacharach, 94 (footnote 1); Sonny Rollins, 93. Even the ageless one, Willie Nelson, is 86.

January 2023…

Music Matters 2023 Dazzles

Music Matters, the mostly annual audio showcase from Definitive Audio in Seattle, made a welcome return March 8–9 after a two-year pandemic-imposed hiatus. Divided into two two-hour sessions, the 16th edition of the private, ultra-concentrated audio show in miniature saw invitees moving between 20-minute presentations in four rooms, with ample time left for visiting systems in two others and schmoozing with industry legends.

Between several national and regional product premieres, presenters at Music Matters 2023 emphasized the importance of Definitive Audio (with locations in…

Boy Meets Blues: Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, Chess Records

Most of us were not born with musical tastes intact. Tastes develop over time as we learn and experience new music and other things. An open mind, an ear attuned to songs and sound, and a procession of mentors and musical guides make for a musical life that's rich and full. To my way of thinking, the best life has a soundtrack that's varied and constantly expanding.

Which is not to say there aren't transformative events. Prior to my lightning-strike moment—about which, more in a minute—the blues were all around me, as they always are around all of us. As a kid attuned to rock'n'roll,…

Recording of April 2023: Stravinsky: <I>Violin Concerto & Chamber Works</I>

Stravinsky: Violin Concerto & Chamber Works
Isabelle Faust, violin; Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth, cond.
Harmonia Mundi 902718 (reviewed as 24/96 WAV download). 2023. Jiri Heger, prod.; Aurélien Bourgois & Alix Ewald, engs.
Performance *****
Sonics ****½

You might think that by 1931—the year Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) completed his unforgettable Violin Concerto in D Major—orchestral instruments were the same as those used today. Far from it. According to the website of Claire Givens Violins (footnote 1), pure-gut D strings began to disappear after WWI and were…

The Spaces Between the Notes

And to begin with we took out as many [books] as we could. ... We'll take this one and this one, this one, and that one too. ... And we read not one of them all the way through.

At the beginning of the 2022 novel Checkout 19, by Claire-Louise Bennett, I encountered some ideas that resonate in interesting ways with my recent experience of recorded music. The first idea is expressed in the quote above: You take out many books from the library—as many as they'll allow—and you don't read any of them all the way through. There's too much temptation to move from one to the other, "tossing one…

Klipsch La Scala AL5 loudspeaker

There's a good case to be made that the world's greatest—and strangest—audiophile culture resides in Japan. Probably the most important notion the Japanese have introduced to our hobby is that home audio isn't merely a way of heightening the musical art of others but can be an art in itself. This idea's most flamboyant embodiment was the poet, journalist, chef, and amplifier builder Susumu Sakuma, better known as Sakuma-san.

After having built many amplifiers as a young man, Sakuma-san experienced an epiphany: Amplifiers that measured well often failed to make him feel deeply. He soon…

Klipsch La Scala AL5 loudspeaker Page 2

The La Scalas' sound varies remarkably depending on amplification, and they demand and reward high quality; the prospect of them being driven by a big-box-store receiver fills me with sadness. Choosing the right amplifier to use with them wasn't entirely straightforward and required a fair amount of trial and error. The Klipsches' sky-high sensitivity may suggest otherwise, but a single measurement never tells the whole story. I listened to them with five amplifiers controlled by the superbly transparent and tuneful PrimaLuna EVO 400 line stage; here's what I heard.

Ayre AX-5…