Stereophile

Plenty of albums have one or two great tracks, but once in a while, an album will be near-flawless from start to finish. Name an album that you think is perfect from beginning to end.

Watching Bobby Bradford and David Murray on the bandstand together at the Jazz Standard Saturday night (see my last blog entry) inspired me to take another listen to the only CD that paired them together, <I>Death of a Sideman</I>, recorded in 1991 under Murray’s name but featuring nothing but Bradford compositions, eight tracks’ worth.

I’m not going to get all flowery and poetic on this one. I’m just going to say: Buy this record.

As I was saying a few days ago, Bobby Bradford’s rare appearance at the Jazz Standard last Saturday was one of the most bracing sets I’ve seen in a long time. In the early-to-mid ‘90s, New Yorkers could go hear this sort of jazz—exuberant, free, but highly disciplined music—almost every night at the Knitting Factory. Just about everyone in Bradford’s band on Saturday was a regular at “the Knit” in its heyday—David Murray on tenor sax, Marty Ehrlich on alto, Mark Dresser on bass, Andrew Cyrille on drums: an extraordinary band.

Whenever anyone marvels at the enormous Genesis II.5 loudspeakers in my house, I'm quick to tell them that the II.5 is the <I>smallest</I>, least expensive loudspeaker made by Genesis Technologies. In fact, the company makes two larger speaker systems, the $33,000 Genesis II and the $70,000 Genesis I (footnote 1).

As the sixth annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest draws to a close at the Denver Marriott Tech Center, what is now the largest annual audio show in the USA could boast an attendance of 3700, 200 more than last year. Prominent among attendees from 49 states and overseas was a notable increase in the number of under-40 attendees. No doubt they were drawn by the rise of audiophile computer-audio playback, the resurgence of vinyl, and the large exhibit hall populated by the Head-Fi headphone community. The younger attendees included an influx of students, who responded to RMAF’s concentrated outreach to local colleges.

The sixth annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest had already closed when I finally had the time to stop by Reference Recordings’ booth to check out their latest mouth-watering HRx high-resolution master WAV file DVD-Rs. There I encountered Demian Martin, who, together with Ray Burnham, has produced the Auraliti (pronounced Aurality) disc player ($800).