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May 2023

If you want a good example of vinyl’s healthy return as a format, take a look at Blue Note’s Tone Poet reissue series. Jazz lovers have embraced it, despite the slightly higher costs. The Tone Poet LPs are mastered to an audiophile standard and the packaging reflects the care everyone has taken in presenting the great Blue Note and Pacific Jazz titles in the series. The covers are made of heavy cardboard, with tipped-on, laminated artwork prepared by Stoughton Printing. Most of the covers are gatefolds, with photos from the original sessions. Record Technology Incorporated, one of the best vinyl plants in the world, presses the 180gm LPs.

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May 2023

For most of my “Art+Tech” columns so far I’ve led with the music. More often than not, I’ve used the art to see how well a piece of technology can reproduce it.

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April 2023

GoGo Penguin: Everything Is Going to Be OK

XXIM Records
Format: 24-bit/48kHz WAV download

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GoGo Penguin’s new album, Everything Is Going to Be OK, arrived April 14 on CD, LP, and download, about nine months after the band’s EP Between Two Waves was released. Like that EP—the band's first record since moving to Sony’s XXIM Records—the LP features the band’s new drummer, Jon Scott, and integrates the occasional synthesizer in the mix. The trio has used studio technology to alter and process its sound in the past, but now it has embraced electronic keyboards to help it move in some new directions.

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Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.

April 2023

Composer Wayne Shorter died on March 2 this year, at the age of 89. Along with the release of a massive, career-capping biography of fellow saxophone giant Sonny Rollins, this is a landmark—the symbolic end of a jazz era studded with remarkable iconoclasts. Miles. Monk. Trane. Wayne. Sonny. We all know their unique sounds; hearing them in our heads as soon as those single names pass the lips.

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April 2023

“James Brown was born to lose. He refused to accept that fate.” Those words begin the biography of the Godfather of Soul included in the booklet that accompanied Star Time (1991), a four-CD anthology that presents a comprehensive overview of Brown’s career. Harry Weinger and Cliff White continue the story: “Brown was determined to be Somebody. He called himself ‘Mr. Dynamite’ before his first Pop hit, and ‘The Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ before the business knew his name.”

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March 2023

Ralph Towner: “At First Light”

ECM Records / Universal Music
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV download

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Ralph Alessi Quartet: “It’s Always Now”

ECM Records / Universal Music
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV download

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Although ECM Records has released its share of music by European jazz musicians, the label has also given exposure to American musicians since it was established by Manfred Eicher in 1969. The label’s first release was pianist Mal Waldron’s Free at Last (1970). Keith Jarrett’s solo piano recordings for the label increased his popularity and ensured the label’s financial viability, and his Standards Trio recordings with ECM reaffirmed his place in the jazz pantheon. Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Charles Lloyd, and Peter Erskine all made fine recordings for ECM.

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March 2023

I’m on the email list for the writer Ted Gioia, who maintains a Substack blog publication called The Honest Broker. Gioia’s list of accomplishments is long—he is a music historian whose many books, including The History of Jazz (in its third edition as of 2021) and Music: A Subversive History (2019), are well regarded. Gioia has also written many music reviews, and, for a time, owned a record label. His fiction reviews are also well worth reading, but they seem to have migrated to The Honest Broker, which is a pay site.

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March 2023

This is a story about creativity, power, and choice. It’s also about breaking from what’s expected and taking a risk in new territory.

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February 2023

Palmetto Records PM2208CD
Format: CD

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Overall Enjoyment

Esperanza Spalding is a genre-defying musician with a strong foundation in jazz. Fred Hersch is a pianist and composer with an extensive discography as leader and sideman. His playing shows great sensitivity and beauty, and he brings a unique interpretive touch to the work of other composers. He asked Spalding to join him at the Village Vanguard for four nights in October 2018. He assumed she would be playing bass, but instead Spalding chose to focus on singing, with Hersch accompanying.

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February 2023

Music is the reason for high-end audio. I still recall the first time I heard music on something that was better quality than the stereo console my parents owned. When I was in high school, I knew a keyboard player who worked part-time in an electronics supply shop. He convinced the owner, who might have been his dad—we’re going back quite a few years so the details are a bit fuzzy—to let him set up an audio shop in a section of the store.

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