Though it was cut on July 5, 1958, at the still-new jazz festival, for some reason I always had the year at '57 and didn't realize my error until recently; I had…
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Back in the mid-1960s, I was the unusual white, suburban preteen who, for reasons I've long pondered and never fully understood, was drawn much less powerfully to the Beatles than to blues and R&B. I was a bit of a jazz snob, too. Given these leanings, it's no surprise that one of the half-dozen or so albums that fried my impressionable young brain was that seamless blend of blues, R&B, and jazz, Ray Charles at Newport.
You may have heard that many hi-fi companies—manufacturers, distributors, and dealers—have done very well during the pandemic years. Some reported their best years in business—ever. With COVID-19 forcing people to stay at home, people sought diversion through home entertainment, including music. The industry benefited.
This is exciting news: It's good for all of us when the industry thrives. But another, less welcome thing has been happening, too: Prices have started rising.
In one sense, this is hardly surprising: It's supply and demand, right? If demand increases but supply is…
Jay Jay French has a book out, but it's not what you might think, or not exactly.
French earned fame in the 1980s as the lead guitarist for transvestite metal band Twisted Sister, which produced some of the most recognizable—and widely licensed—rock music in history: "We're Not Gonna Take It." "I Wanna Rock."
These days, French stays busy in other ways. He has a podcast in which he chats with other musicians, members of the music industry, and miscellaneous folks. He's a Beatles scholar with an impressive cache of Beatles records and memorabilia—he seems to have kept everything,…
"When it starts to impact your ability to get to gigs, play gigs, get to rehearsals, meet with producers, get forward momentum to your career, it's not good. The band had fits and starts and fits and starts. Within two years, the singer and the drummer got in a fight, and the singer had brought a rifle ... because we were playing in upstate Massachusetts and there was a family of hunters who lived in the same building that the band was staying in and they said to Michael [O'Neill, the founding lead vocalist], "Next time you come up, we'll go hunting.
"I walked in and watched this…
The Replacements: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (Deluxe Edition)
Rhino R2 659038 (4CD/1LP). 2021. Peter Jesperson, Paul Westerberg, Steve Fjelstad, prods./various engs.
Performance *****
Sonics *** (Intentionally Lo-Fi)
Rhino R2 659038 (4CD/1LP). 2021. Peter Jesperson, Paul Westerberg, Steve Fjelstad, prods./various engs.
Performance *****
Sonics *** (Intentionally Lo-Fi)
The Replacements have a great rock'n'roll Formation Story: Four rough-and-tumble Minneapolis kids, in and out of trouble, bitten by the music bug and headed for either stardom or dead ends. They chose to go all in and make this debut album, which is still heating the blood 4 decades on.
Front-man Paul Westerberg sums up the spirit of Sorry, Ma…
Joe Farnsworth: City of Sounds
Farnsworth, drums; Kenny Barron, piano; Peter Washington, bass
Smoke Sessions SSR-2105 (CD). 2021. Paul Stache, Damon Smith, prods.; Edwin Huet, Paul Stache, engs.
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Farnsworth, drums; Kenny Barron, piano; Peter Washington, bass
Smoke Sessions SSR-2105 (CD). 2021. Paul Stache, Damon Smith, prods.; Edwin Huet, Paul Stache, engs.
Performance ****
Sonics ****
We are at a point in time when most new jazz releases were recorded during the pandemic. Many are direct artistic responses to the crisis. The response of drummer Joe Farnsworth is bound up with the city where he has lived for 30 years.
In New York, the center of the jazz universe, the music stopped in early 2020. Farnsworth says, "I've learned…
Sol & Pat
Sol Gabetta, cello and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Alpha757 (24/96 FLAC download). 2021. Peter Laenger, prod. and eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½
Sol Gabetta, cello and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Alpha757 (24/96 FLAC download). 2021. Peter Laenger, prod. and eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½
For fans of these two highly idiosyncratic artists, the only surprise this album may hold is the music. Others may reel as much at the spontaneous improvisatory nature of the playing as the wildness of the repertoire and the uniqueness of its sequencing.
If there's anything that Leclair's short Tambourin in C major and C.P.E. Bach's Presto, Helm 66 VI have in common with two movements from Jörg…
Peter Ledermann, founder and chief designer of Soundsmith, Inc. (footnote 1), began his adventures in phono cartridges by reverse-engineering Bang & Olufsen's Moving Micro-Cross moving-iron cartridges for customers B&O had abandoned when it got out of the LP player business, and putting them into production. The B&O cartridges were of the direct plug-in variety; once they were no longer made, a worn or broken B&O cartridge would render a B&O turntable unusable.
For those unfamiliar with them, in a moving-iron (MI) cartridge a tiny piece of iron—not a coil or a magnet—…
The Hyperion delivered the sort of microdynamic information that can bring a recorded performance to life. If you listen mostly to acoustic music, whether small or large ensembles, I found that the Hyperion delivered both convincingly.
The other evening I played for a friend—a mastering engineer who shall remain nameless—Bob Ludwig's legendary "pulled from the shelves" (footnote 3) original mastering of Led Zeppelin's II (LP, Atlantic SD 8236). He was awed by the shimmer and sizzle of John Bonham's cymbals, and the tuneful slam of the rest of his drum kit.
The Hyperion's…
It would appear that there are still people out there who are unaware that this is the age of the transistor. Not only are tubed amplifiers not vanishing from the face of the earth, they are proliferating. Audio's equipment directory for 1977 listed three tubed power amplifiers. The same directory for 1984 lists over 30 of them, and the Quicksilver amplifier is not even included!
This very hefty (95lb) stereo power amp uses eight EL34 tubes to deliver a rated 95 watts per channel into 4 or 8 ohms. The unit comes with a plug-in milliammeter for setting bias, and detailed adjustment…