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Why Not Listen to Everything?
Casey Miller  |  May 23, 2023  | 
I have been haunted for 15 years by these words: "Very often if I was given the choice of listening to a piece of music I really liked or listening to nothing at all, I would choose nothing at all. ... These days I don't listen to a lot of music, and I find a lot of pleasure in no music. There's a kind of silence and just hearing some conversation from outside, or hearing a police car in the distance, just these fragments of daily life are very poetic and very peaceful somehow."

They were spoken by Britisher David Toop, confirmed music-head, someone who has spent his life playing, listening to, and writing about music. Why would a person who amassed such a dragon's hoard of obscure releases that a documentary was made about it—who tried to listen to every darn thing ever recorded—at the end of the day prefer regular sounds that would not even fit the dictionary definition of music?

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My Back Pages
Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series Vol.17: Fragments: a Masterpiece as It Is Painted
Sasha Matson  |  Apr 26, 2023  | 
Columbia Records continues to extend its Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, which began in 1991. The latest edition in this complex warren of burrows brings us to Volume 17, Bob Dylan—Fragments—Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996–1997).

Fragments—the title—feels inaccurate; these recordings are not shards of some missing whole. Rather, they form a single large, varied portrait. To borrow an analogy from art history, what we have here is the result of cleaning and restoring a large canvas, removing layers of varnish and dirt that had obscured the true colors and textures that were there when it was first painted. Now we can experience this masterpiece in a new way.

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Boy Meets Blues: Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, Chess Records
Tom Fine  |  Mar 14, 2023  | 
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, growing up in the suburbs with a full FM dial, I was exposed to blues-based music current and past, from Elvis on the oldies stations to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

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Thinking of You: Terry Hall & The Specials
Phil Brett  |  Mar 01, 2023  | 
A few weeks before Christmas—the time of year when all public spaces are required by law to play Mariah Carey on an endless loop—this writer was pushing a trolley idly around a London supermarket. I was over by the fresh veg when the distinctive, Hammond-driven intro of the Specials' "Ghost Town" was piped through. Heads nodded. Some shoppers started to sing along.

Weeks later, I heard that Specials front-man Terry Hall had died, of pancreatic cancer. Memories came flooding back.

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Spelunking Jazz Caverns
Andrey Henkin  |  Jan 31, 2023  | 
I never collected baseball cards, played Cops & Robbers, or was a Boy Scout. From the moment I heard the opening guitar riff of Blondie's "One Way or Another," at age 6, it was clear that music would be central to everything I was going to do. It was my first important big thing, and my last.
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My Back PagesWarsaw Audio Show 2022
Some Polish hi-fi discoveries and delights
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Dec 13, 2022  | 
I'd heard many times over the years that the Warsaw Show—officially called Audio Video Show 2022—was a "great" show. But that gives barely a hint of the special nature of this show, the second largest audio show in Europe.
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Hymns of the Republic
Tony Scherman  |  Dec 06, 2022  | 
Summer 1959. The concert under the stars in the Wellfleet, Massachusetts, town parking lot was over. Pete Seeger was packing up his banjo as I approached him gingerly—I was 6 years old. I stuck out the notepad I'd been careful to bring. "Can I have your autograph?"

Towering over me, six-three to my three-eight, Seeger said in exasperation, if not outright coldness, "I don't give autographs. I'm not some goddamned star."

Terrified, I stood my ground.

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Boys' rock band, summer of '66
Tony Scherman  |  Nov 09, 2022  | 
It was another glorious Lower Cape summer, the warm breeze almost viscous against your skin. Tim Dickey played bass, or ersatz bass, tuning his Gibson SG Special down an octave. I played drums. My brother John and cousin Dave Scherman traded leads. Tony Kahn was a good guitarist, but with the surfeit of guitarists, he played organ.
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The Music Problem
Roger Skoff  |  Sep 27, 2022  | 
I remember the exact moment I became an audiophile. It was 1954. I was 12 years old. My father's friend, Mitch Rose, wanted to buy a "hi-fi set," which was what they called them in those days. Mitch asked my father to go with him to help pick one out. My father asked if I wanted to go along for the ride.

I did, and we went to Emmons Audio in Studio City, California, for what turned out to be one of the formative moments of my life.

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Tim Hardin: Reason to believe
Tony Scherman  |  Sep 01, 2022  | 
It would have been in the spring of 1967 that Tim Hardin's music first wafted in over my transom. I was 13. My older brother, who loved Hardin at least as much as I did and was something of a fetishist besides, forbade me to touch his copy of Hardin's debut album, Tim Hardin 1, not even the jacket. He had to be present when I auditioned it. Tim Hardin 2 didn't especially float my boat, so my brother had it to himself. But the moment I heard Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert, I took matters into my own hands, so to speak, and plunked my own $5 down.
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Why do you need all those microphones?
Jim Anderson  |  Aug 03, 2022  | 
"Why do you need all of those microphones?"

I've been asked this question more than once, by musicians you may have heard of. I'm not going to name names, but if you press me I might. Let's see where this goes.

It's a reasonable question, sometimes. Still.

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Quackery, gullibility, and open-mindedness
Rogier van Bakel  |  Jul 07, 2022  | 
Gullibility is a disadvantage in any business, but it's a cardinal sin in journalism. During my J-school years, I acquired the occupational deformity that afflicts most reporters: a degree of skepticism bordering on the cynical. In my professional circles, an adage holds that "if your mother says she loves you, check it out."
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Love, joy, and listening with the whole brain
Brian Richardson  |  May 31, 2022  | 
In audio reviewing, there's a tension between scientific explanations for the qualities of the sound we hear and how the music, as conveyed through our equipment, makes us feel. Insights from the new field of interpersonal neurobiology can help us understand this conflict.
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Mes après-midis chez Don Cherry
Tony Scherman  |  Apr 27, 2022  | 
In the spring of 1969, as an aspiring jazz drummer of 15 pretentiously and largely uncomprehendingly drawn to the music's difficult avant-garde, I learned that Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman's alter ego during Ornette's starvation years and an icon of free jazz himself, had recently moved to the village of Congers in my native Rockland County, New York, just north of New York City. Ornette was putting together a group drawn mostly from his early cohorts, and the call went out to Stockholm, where Don had settled—to the extent that he settled anywhere—with his Swedish wife, Moki. Hence his arrival practically on my doorstep.
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Magic Picture Shows
Herb Reichert  |  Apr 06, 2022  | 
Axiomatically, audiophile audio is about quality of reproduced sound. Experientially though—for me at least—it's about visions in the mind's eye. The older I get, the more attentively I listen to recordings, the more importance I assign to the myriad moving pictures I see between my speakers.
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