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The name of the essay is "Fervor," and that's what Ross writes with. If you can read the last paragraph of this tribute to Ms. Hunt Lieberson without tearing up, you have my condolences.
Earlier this week I was invited to Per Se, a sleek restaurant in the Time Warner Center here in NYC for a lavish lunch sponsored by Concord Records. Co-owner Norman Lear was there. So was former SNL and now Letterman band leader Paul Shaffer who served as MC. The occasion was the release of another Ray Charles project which I will be writing about in more detail in an upcoming issue of the magazine. Titled Ray Swings—Basie Swings, it's an elaborate studio creation. Again though, Look for more in December's Stereophile.
While the music was interesting, Per Se was less so. Portions fit for…
As the US eliminates music education from its curriculum, we begin to see proof that music has "real" benefits. I thought that exposing kids to beauty and greatness was enough, but what do I know?
How sex, rum, and WWII ignited the fad that will not die.
This one's for Buddha and Mike.
I never worked in a Tiki bar, but when I was a bartender, I picked up a copy of Trader Vic's Cocktail Book. It had a lot of crappy drinks in it. An Angel's Tit, IIRC, was creme de cacao served in a champagne dish, with some maraschino liqueur floated in the center with a half cherry perched in the middle—first, it sounds awful, but worse, it sounds like precisely the sort of labor-intensive drink a busy bartender does not want to make. However, Vic Bergeron (or his ghostwriter) was great…
"Stephen," Jaime asked, "Do we have any hi-res images of audio gear?"
"Sure," I said, "Is there anything in particular that you're looking for?"
"Loudspeakers, I guess. I have to create a house ad. Immediately."
"No problem. I recently collected a bunch of images for our Buyer's Guide. If you go on our server, you'll find them in my folder, all grouped into specific categories."
"Great."
Collecting those images had been a lot of fun. Much more fun than verifying web addresses. First, I dove into our archives and selected my favorite…
Discovery of a "hybrid" skeleton in Portugal has paleontologists speculating that it might be the result of Neanderthal/modern human mating, perhaps challenging the "out of Africa" scenario.
Yeah, I know the interaction between proto-humans and Neanderthals has been the subject of a lot of fiction, but I've always felt that paleontologist Björn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger was the best—not least for its tender/hot scenes of Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal sex. Dance speculated that Neanderthals did not so much die out as much as become "bred out." Kurtén called Dance "paleo-fiction" because he was…