Issue 157

By the time this article comes out, I will have returned from my annual trip to Puerto Rico. My mother, a senior, retired to a condominium my parents bought in the early 1980s. It’s a bit far from New York, but she loves living in San Juan, one block from the beach. The air is clean and fresh, and it’s always sunny. The last time I was able to visit was in February 2020 when I spent a harrowing four days in the hospital undergoing emergency hernia surgery. I was doubled over on my mother’s kitchen floor hoping it was only a stomach virus, until I felt the protrusion coming out of my chest.

Before ending up in an emergency room for 22 hours waiting to be admitted, I spent most of my time shopping, running errands, and accompanying my mother to appointments. I was having a nice visit and even got some free time every day to enjoy a quiet cocktail at the La Concha Hotel, just up the street from our apartment in the Condado district. It’s a completely refurbished gem from the 1950s, named after a shell-like structure that once housed the famous La Perla restaurant. Hurricane Maria of 2017 beat it up pretty well but they renovated the hotel’s pools and patios, where I sipped my expensive daiquiri in a secluded nook overlooking the rising Atlantic Ocean, which has begun to erode the beach that was once double the width.

I like to be lulled into a meditative haze by the sounds of lapping waves and wind in the palm trees, but on that occasion, a DJ completely disturbed my peace with loud dance music all for the benefit of pensioners, families with small children, and middle-aged people trying to catch up on their reading. After a blistering set worthy of a rave on Ibiza, the music finally stopped. Serenity returned, or so I thought, and then came the mariachi band in full charro costumes with all the horns, guitars, and violins.

At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. Was there a catered theme party somewhere? I adore mariachi, but just because there is a common colonial background does not make music from southwestern Mexico and Puerto Rico interchangeable. However, the pensioners, families with small children, and middle-aged tourists seemed to enjoy it. It went perfectly with pre-fab Piña Coladas and slushy margaritas as if we were at a resort in Acapulco. I was disappointed in the hotel’s entertainment director, who didn’t know, care, or think that guests deserved to hear traditional music from Puerto Rico. There is so much to choose from a heritage that spans back 500 years, when Spain landed on the Caribbean island of Boriken.

The island’s first music was created by the indigenous Taino people, who were subjugated and then nearly decimated by disease, rebellion, and forced labor by the early 16th century. They passed on maracas and other percussive instruments to enslaved Africans who were brought to replace the Tainos on Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations. This is where members from different African tribes fashioned drums out of rum barrels for communication and thus introduced a style of music and dance called bomba. It remains an art form of Afro-Caribbean resistance, unity, and perseverance around the island.

 

Jibaro emerged in the 19th century and was named after the machete-wielding Hispanic sharecroppers, in their iconic handmade palmetto-leaf hats, who worked the interior highlands of Puerto Rico. The central instrument is the cuatro guitar with five courses (pairs) of double strings.

 

Plena is the urban working-class music of the early 20th century. It’s a genre that was one of entertainment but also functioned as a musical newspaper (periódico cantado) which informed the poor and under-educated people who lived in the barrios of Ponce in southern Puerto Rico. One can easily identify a plena band by the hand-held flat drum called the pandereta.

 

I don’t expect a major hotel chain to feature bomba, plena, or jibaro –  that would be downright revolutionary, but surely salsa would be the obvious choice. The golden age of 1970s mainstream salsa is the result of indigenous, African, and Cuban music fashioned by various Latin entertainers in New York City such as Ray Barretto, Johnny Pacheco, Tito Puente, Héctor Lavoe, and Willie Colon, among many others. However, salsa doesn’t need a stage full of Fania All-Stars with a giant jazz orchestra and elaborate scores. It requires nothing more than some beautiful voices, congas, percussion, cuatros, and Boricua emotion.

 

On second thought, perhaps stripped-down salsa is too evocative of Puerto Rico’s racially, economically, and socially stratified history. Even citizens at the top, who consider themselves fully European Spanish, still embody remnants of indigenous people  – sometimes literally in their DNA – every time they eat native cassava, guava, and pineapple, or consume coffee, bananas, and sesame seeds brought from Africa. Music and food have always tied the people together into a diverse, exciting, complex culture that is now waning.

I remember the first time my parents and I went to visit Servando, a friend of the family, in 1984. We flew from JFK on Eastern Airlines and landed at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. The terminal was semi-enclosed at the time; luggage rattled on a conveyer belt into an open-air plaza where hot, wet, ocean air weighed down our formal flying outfits. Waiting close by were un-airconditioned taxis usually driven by older gentlemen wearing short-sleeve, button-down guayabera shirts, and straw fedoras. They would invariably crank up the music, probably as a way to dissuade us from asking too many tourist questions, and some, much to my mother’s dismay, would smoke a stinky Puerto Rican cigar all the way to the hotel.

The beachside Holiday Inn in Isla Verde was more of a motel, and so close to the airport that we could hear airplanes departing and arriving regularly. I didn’t care. All I did was eat new exotic foods and swim in the warm clean ocean during the day. At night we took taxis to nicer hotels along the route from Isla Verde to Old San Juan. There was the El San Juan, Dupont Plaza, La Concha, Caribe Hilton, and El Convento. This is when I tasted fried plantains, paella, and octopus salad for the first time, and helped myself to sips of mother’s Bacardi and coke. My stepfather was a barfly and sniffed out any lobby with a lounge band, but the music was usually schlocky, stuffy, and tame. Occasionally, my stepfather showed off his dance skills, but it was intended to be background music and not the vibrant beats from the taxis. Our friend Servando never accompanied us to the lounges. Unless it was Pablo Casals, Andres Segovia or maybe Puerto Rican classical music called danza, all other music was for common people, and he was no commoner.

 

Servando was the last of his generation who dressed in white linen suits, his gray hair slicked back with pomade exposing a high sloped forehead and topped with a long brim Panama hat to protect his aristocratic face. He would go for strolls every day, before and after the sun reached its highest point. I could go along but only if I was properly attired – no shorts, sneakers, or tank tops. Stops would include the bakery, Banco Popular, the Pueblo supermarket, and the corner shop for limes and rum. He only drank Ron del Barrilito, produced in nearby Bayamón since 1880 by the Fernández family from Santander, Spain.

Walking along Condado’s Ashford Avenue, Servando would tip his hat to prominent older ladies he knew. Some were covered with mantilla veils if they were mourning or going to church; some would be accompanied by companions to carry the parasol and parcels. “Buenos Dias, Doña ______,” Servando would say with a slight bow. I might be introduced in the midst of lengthy conservations from which I could make out certain words having to do with the health issues of family members. To save myself from catatonic boredom, a pushcart vendor might happen along with homemade coconut, caramel, or sesame candies. After we parted ways with another bow, he would catch me up on the conversation, “Doña __________ comes from a very good family from Spain and a very old family in Puerto Rico,” as if the only good families ever came from Spain, followed by her pedigree. The late husband was always an important scholar or industrialist and the son was a doctor or lawyer in New York or Miami. Halfway through the stroll, we would make our way to an outdoor coffee counter for a pick-me-up and to sit on stools beneath the shade of trees and a corrugated roof as protection against daily sun splashes.

Servando ordered espresso for himself and my cafe con leche (espresso with hot milk) from the lady behind the counter manning the silver coffee machines and a display case of pastries, fritters, and empanadas. The coffees were served in real cups along with a dish of dark damp local sugar – the tangible emblem of misery, abuse, and profit for hundreds of years. If Servando was tired, we stayed for two cups, giving him a chance to smoke one of his Turkish cigarettes whose blue smoke floated lazily in the heavy air as he told me what I should be reading. A professor at Columbia University, Servando insisted on testing my aptitude in French and Spanish. He had the unfortunate role of acting as my Latin tutor for a solid school year and all I remember is that the plural of farmer is agricolae; the singular is agricola.

He would have hated modern-day San Juan with its shabbily-dressed man-children on scooters and women in near-nude beachwear on the main promenade. He would have hated contemporary culture even more. Servando owned no television – neither in New York nor San Juan. He once saw me admiring the voluptuous Iris Chacón, known as “La Bomba,” the original Puerto Rican bombshell attired in a mesh and bead bodysuit, on the cover of a magazine and said, “Tomás, there is vulgarity (pronounced vool-ga-reet-tee) all around us. We must dissect the culture with pincers for anything worthwhile, with pincers (pronounced peen-serrrrs)! Do you hear me?!” I did, but he had no idea of my appetite for vulgarity or the love I had developed for Puerto Rican television.

After a morning of professional wrestling, I watched Walter Mercado, the flamboyant astrologer who divined our future while dressed in ornate gowns and bejeweled capes. There were wildly politically incorrect historical soap operas known as novellas, and, of course, Sabado Gigante hosted by Don Francisco, an hours-long pan-American variety show with acts from all over the Spanish-speaking world. It was a weekly immersion into Latin culture which hosted all styles of music. Whether in Caracas, Miami, New York, or San Juan, everyone from grandparents to toddlers would sit down to watch comedy skits, contests, musicians, and dancers.

Everything has changed, though. Sabado Gigante is off the air. Walter Mercado, Don Francisco, and Servando have all passed away, and salsa, which once ruled the airwaves, has been replaced by reggaeton, a blend of Jamaican, Latin, and hip-hop music. It’s probably what the DJ at La Concha was spinning.

The airport transportation on my recent trip was a roomy new taxi, hermetically sealed, and cooled by air saturated with artificial scent comparable to laundry detergent. In 1984 it would have been rude to ask for windows to be closed and the air conditioner turned on, but now it seems rude to ask for open windows and fresh air. The polite, perfectly bilingual young man turned up the subscription radio service to lavish me with the strains of Phil Collins’ “One More Night.” Was that for my easy listening enjoyment? I felt slightly offended. El no me conoce. He doesn’t know me, a guy who lived on the edge of Spanish Harlem during the 1970s. I convinced myself that he probably has a standard playlist for chunky white guys from the States. He wasn’t even born when I was haunting the lounges of San Juan. Judging by his age, he was more likely to play Reggaeton artists like Bad Bunny or Daddy Yankee after he dropped me off. It’s safe to say that everyone has heard Daddy Yankee whether you know it or not. He is featured in “Despacito” (2017), a song by Puerto Rican-born artist Luis Fonsi. It is one of the most popular crossover songs since “Macarena” (1993) by Los Del Rio.

 

Every time I visit, my mother’s neighborhood feels less Puerto Rican. Residents have been displaced by near-empty ultra-luxury properties, Airbnbs, and new millionaires seeking out juicy tax breaks. The old family villas protected by rusting ironwork sit quietly waiting for their final hours – abandoned by everyone but sunbathing iguanas by day and the back-and-forth song of coqui frogs by night. There are no less than a dozen major hotels in the Condado and the cruise ship port is within walking distance. The shops, cafes, and restaurants are geared to a demographic expecting sushi instead of roast pork and Starbucks instead of cafe con leche. I’m always careful about lamenting the good old days, because what was good for me was probably horrible for an entire population, but I don’t want Puerto Rico to resign itself to being subsumed, consumed, and then erased. It is slowly happening economically, culturally, and politically, as the island is neither a state nor sovereign country but an unincorporated territory of the United States with little power except its cultural identity.

In the spring of 2021, La Concha unveiled a 20 by 30-foot mural of salsa singer Héctor Lavoe painted by graffiti artist Alec Monopoly. Seeing that painting on the sidewall of the hotel gives me hope that enough people will look up and ask, “who is that?” If I’m strolling along Avenida Ashford, at the same age now as Servando was back in 1984, I will be happy to answer that question: “that is Héctor Juan Pérez Martínez, born in Ponce in 1943 and buried in Ponce in 1993. He was a world-renowned performer from the 1967 to 1990 and is still one of the greatest Latin singers of all time.” While there are many street-art renditions of Lavoe in other parts of Puerto Rico, it is significant that the main tourist center finally has a clear and visible homage to a Puerto Rican artist, salsa, and by extension, all the Borinquen folk music that came before. Perhaps La Concha, with its steadfast oceanside shell, will be the very thing to help guard the pearls of local art against the inevitable storms and erosion. The mural is a good start. It almost makes up for the mariachi band and rave DJ, almost.

 

Header image: Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Brad Clinesmith.

It’s cabaret and beyond for the modern world: Octave Records is proud to announce the release of Hothouse Flower by Scabaret, three multi-talented women who combine impassioned vocals, virtuoso piano and viola playing, drawing from a variety of diverse musical influences to create an album of modern cabaret pop.

Vocalist Hannah Jackson can soar to operatic heights, as on “Casualty,” or invite listeners into an intimate emotional world, from the dramatic “Scabaret” to the pensive “Life at Lightning Speed,” and its reflections on the transitory nature of being. In fact, Jackson was a contestant on the TV show The X Factor. Songwriter Amy Faris is stunning on acoustic and electric pianos, synthesizers and other instruments. Violist Kimberly Sparr has performed with numerous symphony orchestras and in solo, chamber music and orchestral settings. The result is a blend of jazz, classical, theater, pop and other uncategorizable influences, with a stylistic and sonic range that is captured with sonic depth, nuance and detail.

 

 

Hothouse Flower was recorded at Animal Lane Studios in Lyons, Colorado using Octave Records’ Pure DSD process and the Sonoma multi-track DSD recording system. It was mixed at PS Audio in Boulder, CO. Hothouse Flower (SRP: $39) is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible only using a PS Audio SACD transport, or by copying the DSD tracks on the included DVD data discs. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download (including DSD64, DSDDirect Mastered 192kHz/24-bit, 96kHz/24-bit and 44.1kHz/16-bit PCM) at $29 SRP from psaudio.com at this link. The album was recorded, mixed and produced by Scott Faris and mastered by Gus Skinas. Additional work was done by Zach Balch, recording engineer, and Giselle Collazo, assistant mix engineer. Octave Records’ Jessica Carson was the executive producer.

The women of Scabaret are not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves, or delve into the complications and difficulties of relationships and life, as “Life at Lightning Speed” notes: “Wanna try every door before I go/Wanna say yes to every dance and never leave an ‘I love you’ to chance.” There’s plenty of humor, laced in lyrics like: “I am much better on paper/And you are much better off if I stay here” from “Better On Paper,” a song that mixes lush electronic keyboards, Kimberly’s viola punctuations, and the recorded sounds of a clacking typewriter and ripping paper.

I interviewed Amy, Hannah and Kimberly, along with engineer/producer Scott Faris, about the making of Hothouse Flower.

Frank Doris: The first obvious question is, how’d you come up with the name Scabaret?

Amy Faris: Well, I wrote a song called Scabaret and Hannah was at my house, learning some of [our] new [material], and she said, “well, what if we just name the band after the song?” I feel like the “scab” part of it comes from kind of a wound. We all kind of have wounds we accumulate during our lives. And eventually they scab over and we become stronger because of them. [“Scabaret” is a] very dramatic song, full of tumult. But then at the end there’s some type of healing.

 

 

FD: You’re not afraid to wear your hearts on your sleeves. On the other hand, there’s a lot of humor laced in the lyrics. How do you wind up having those two things happening at the same time?

Hannah Jackson: That’s kind of who we are. We are strong dynamic, multifaceted women. So, that naturally comes out in our music and our performances. We take people through the low lows and the high highs, and all the colors that go into the mosaic of life, and that’s how we approach all of those topics, from our experiences as women. We can be serious and contemplative and then turn it around and be silly and jamming out and making everybody have a good time. And, you know, that is required a lot of the time.

FD: Especially these days.

Now comes the inevitable question: how did you get together? You all have such different backgrounds. Hannah, you were a vocalist on The X Factor. Kimberly, you’re a classically-trained viola player. Amy, you write songs and play piano and encompass a huge variety of styles. Hannah and Amy, I see you’ve been working together for around 15 years. How did Scabaret come about?

AF: It was completely an accident. I had a friend at a little dive bar in town who said, “Hey, we’re doing a series [about] women musicians in Lubbock {Texas]. Would you like to play some of what you’ve written? And I was like, “no, I absolutely would not!” ‘Cause I hate solo piano gigs! “But,” I said, “I have written a ton of new songs.” And so, I thought I’d get Hannah to sing these songs. Then I ran into Kimberly at a party [and asked her to play viola]. And then it just exploded and took off. People liked it.

Kimberly Sparr: The very first time I met Hannah was at a ballet performance. Amy [and Scott] wrote a score for a ballet. I was in the string quartet and Hannah sang some of the pieces. So, I totally on board when [Amy] asked me to do [the recording].

FD: Did you just come in with this concept of a modern-day musical cabaret, or did that happen by accident?

AF: I don’t know! I feel like with [this group of people] we can do any style in the world. The sky’s the limit. So, [the record] just kind of expanded into a bunch of different styles.

FD: How do you come up with your song ideas? Do they just pop into your head or do you labor over them for, like, 20 years?

AF: Some of both. The songs on the album range from the early 2000s all the way to last May, which is when I wrote “Life at Lightning Speed.” Usually, a lyric will come first and I just keep my phone with me all the time and type [ideas] into Notes. Sometimes I’ll be doing something really mundane like driving or vacuuming. I’ll get an idea for a little bit of a melody with a lyric, and then it’s just a matter of making myself sit down at the piano, and parts come to me through the day. Who knows how long a song will take? “Who Loves Me” took five years.

FD: You recorded Hothouse Flower mostly live in the studio.

KS: Yes. But there was a lot of pre-record preparation.

FD: What about the typewriter on “Better On Paper”?

Scott Faris: Hannah actually performs that live during their shows. The typewriter that’s on the album cover liner notes is the actual typewriter [used in the recording].

 

 

FD: There’s a lyric in “Scabaret”: “the blues in her hair.” That’s so abstract that it stood out and hit me. Where’d that come from?

AF: Scott colors my hair and there’s blue in it usually. And I like the idea of the blues as sadness. And also from a painterly aspect, just thinking about a woman [being] painted; there’d be blue tones in her hair.

KS: People who have gray hair, some have that blue wash and I thought [that’s what it meant]!

FD: Speaking of humor: you quoted the theme from Hawaii Five-O at the end of “Burn” …that must have been deliberate!

AF: I like to put little musical jokes in and see if anyone notices. No one has mentioned it except you.

FD: Well, they’re not music writers, are they? (laughter)

Hannah, what was it like to be on The X Factor TV show? The liner notes mention you were on it.

HJ: That was about 10 years ago and it was an interesting experience. It was very “Hollywood.” I learned a lot about being behind the scenes of a reality show like that. It really did give me a leg up. I got to meet Simon Cowell who kissed my face four times, and he is delicious. He is yummy, yummy, yummy, a sweet man. All of that meanness or whatever is just for television. He’s actually a fine-hearted person.

 

 

FD: Would the album have turned out any differently if the pandemic hadn’t happened? And, in the liner notes you mention that your sister as having health issues. How did that affect what you did for the album?

AF: The pandemic has slowed us down as a group. I don’t know that the album would have been a lot different, though, because I wrote most of these songs before the pandemic. “Life at Lightning Speed” is one of the songs I’m most proud of. And I do feel that the pandemic influenced that really heavily. Good news: my sister is cancer-free at this point. She’s doing well.

HJ: I can only speak for myself, but as a performing artist, going through a pandemic [gives you a desire for] quality over quantity. So, we are compiling a list of quality shows that we want to do. We don’t want to play every restaurant gig available. And, we want to travel.

SF: I have something I want to add. “Scabaret” is actually the first song they recorded [at Animal Lane Studios] and it was earth-shattering. Amy and Kimberly were in the same room [when they recorded the track], so the piano and the viola are bleeding all over. We did have Hannah in a booth because I wanted to get a really intimate vocal performance from her and be able to [mix] her on top of the band, because if a vocalist is standing near a grand piano, sometimes that’s tough [to get a good balance]. Being in the control room in that moment was vsceral. This being recorded on DSD was an earth-shattering revelation for all of us sonically. To finally hear the emotion in Hannah’s voice, the emotion in Kimberly’s playing, to literally hear not just the bowing, but almost the individual, for lack of a better term, grains of it. It’s so lush, so gorgeous. The resonance of that piano. It was literally almost a “moved to tears” moment.

HJ: I actually did cry, Frank, in that moment, because it was the first time I heard my voice like that. The camaraderie of that experience of all of us together and hearing [the music] so clearly was, oh, it was overwhelming.

AF: It was a little scary on our end because yeah, you could hear every breath and every little movement and you could hear my foot hitting the [piano] pedals and you know, it was kind of like, yikes, this is so exposed. Um, it, it sounds beautiful. I’m so glad [the engineers] were actually able to capture those little human moments.

 

Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz have multiple Grammy Award wins and nominations to their credit, as well as European awards such as the Echo Klassik and Le Diamant d’Opera. The couple has a unique partnership that has resulted in a wide range of critically-acclaimed co-produced and co-engineered recordings. Currently, they are up for a 2021 Best Immersive Recording Grammy nomination for jazz artist Patricia Barber’s Clique (reviewed by Tom Gibbs in Issue 144).Part One of our interview in Copper Issue 156 included their thoughts on making their mixing techniques as “invisible” as possible, in working with live orchestras and big bands, and discussed their favorite recordings done by each other.

John Seetoo: When I was researching your discographies, obviously there's tons and tons of classical and jazz stuff you’ve worked on, but I didn't see that much for country, R&B, rock and roll and other kinds of music. Can you go a little bit more into some of the work you've done in those genres? Any particular anecdotes you might have? And, have you ever collaborated together working in genres other than jazz and classical?

Jim Anderson: We have a series of symphonic recordings that we've done with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra in Norway. I was brought in as the engineer, and Ulrike as producer. She essentially was my boss for the three recordings, the last of which was a Grammy nominee two years ago in the Immersive

JA: Especially the last piece, Kverndokk’s Symphonic Dances, that we did. That was the Grammy nominee from 2018, I think…

US: 2020.

JA: Sorry. When was the last year?

US: That was, I mean, the Grammys; the ceremony was 2020, January 2020. But isn't it a nominee from 2019 then?

JA: Well, I guess, yeah, you know, the last couple years, you can just kind of throw away. (laughs) But the thing about that was we said, okay, this music, we want to have it be much more cinematic; much more like a film score. The immersive element of that recording is not the orchestra on the stage, the ambience in the back. It really wraps around, and I think that's why it became a Grammy nominee. We very successfully took an orchestra and made a very immersive experience.

US: About other styles. When you work for big broadcast networks, as I did, then you end up doing . I did a project with The Keith Emerson Band and orchestra, which was kind of interesting, because we were known a classical environment, and some Norwegian conductor brought in Keith Emerson and the band to Munich and Los Angeles. It was a big, let's say, crossover, one of the biggest crossover projects I've done. I can't say it was entirely successful because the ideas of how to produce something were too different. I think the outcome was, quite okay. I've done Indonesian gamelan music; I’ve even done stone xylophones. Fado (Portuguese traditional music) with Mariza (Mariza – Live at Philharmonie im Gasteig in Munich). This was from a radio broadcast at Bavarian Radio, Channel 2. Most of Ulrike’s recordings were for BR Klassik. BR 2 is something different. And Parisienne – I like Zaz very much. That was one of the best ones: Z-A-Z (French singer-songwriter Isabelle Geffroy, aka Zaz). She is great. (Zaz Live Tour – Sans Tsu Tsou, released in 2011, was from a live broadcast at Studio 2 on Bavarian Radio for a show called “Bayern 2 Studio Club.”)

JA: John, I have a whole background in radio documentaries to add to that. When I worked with Jane Ira Bloom and her Emily Dickinson project (Wild Lines: Improvising Emily Dickinson), basically, she gave me the poetry that was read, and the music, and said, “you know, do your NPR thing and turn it. So, essentially, we turned it into a two-record set. One CD has the music and the other CD has the kind of NPR-type produced audio experience with poetry and music and it's all timed out. That's kind of where I started actually doing that kind of work and I still enjoy doing it every once in a while. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylWtXrrznRE

US: We have two audiobooks lined up where we want to actually, in part, do the readings and the music to them. Those will be coming out in the next two years, I think.

JS: When you're dealing with unfamiliar instruments – say you were doing Japanese music, and you may have to record koto and shakuhachi, for example: do you have a standard fallback protocol? In order to be able to capture unfamiliar sounds, what would your favorite mics would be – those you are most familiar with?

JA: We recently did an album with Min Xiao-Fen called White Lotus. I've done Chinese instruments for many, many years. And I’ve always had a fascination with trying to make these instruments are really foreign to, let's say Western ears or American ears, and trying to make them so that they're pleasing to listen to from our aspect. Trying to actually make them very high-resolution audio, and very hi-fi, because they have fascinating sounds, and they have a lot of detail that you can bring out. Ulrike was – I like to call her my “technical producer” on that kind of thing. I was doing the recording and the mixing, but she was really maintaining our technical quality as we record. , we would rely on good-quality tube microphones like the Brauner VM-1, or work with a lot of omnidirectional microphones like the DPA 4007 or 4006. We would also use Sennheiser 8020s, and the Neumann KM 130, and all that kind of thing. And, worrying about and really trying to create space, through spacing of microphones, doing a lot of stereo , not just panned mono. With that stereo , you can actually get a lot of detail that you wouldn't necessarily get if you just put a single microphone out there. White Lotus is really a stunning recording.

US: It starts with getting out the books and reading about these instruments. When I was in Japan and asked my host there what certain instruments were, the next day I got 15 pages on the shakuhachi and the shamisen and all these things. There is a very good book that we always go back to. It's a German thing from Professor Meyer – What is it called again?

JA: Something that was done early on: Acoustics and The Performance of Music by Jürgen Meyer. These days, computer simulations make everything easier, but he studied the frequency ranges of all these instruments . Three-dimensional readouts of how an instrument sounds, and things like whether it might actually be useful to place a microphone sometimes even behind it, because that's a frequency range that maybe you’d want, or don't, or something like that. A couple of times, with Toshiko-san (Toshiko Akiyoshi), we had three taiko drummers and a big band, and when Lew (Tabackin) played the flute, very often was trying to imitate a shakuhachi. And so, kind of knowing what that should sound like, and then being able to interpret that sound and then incorporate that into big band… I also spent time in Japan and worked on some film soundtracks, working with the Japanese with koto ensembles they call Living National Treasures. All of this ends up entering collective knowledge. And I can kind of know that either worked or didn't work. And I can then use the technique .

JS: Both of you are working in very high-resolution digital and specializing in immersive mixing. Since you both have long-enough track records to remember it, do you miss analog tape at all? And, are there any projects that either of you have worked on in analog that you wouldn't mind revisiting to try to do as an immersive digital audio remix?

JA: (laughs) It's not particularly the analog tape that is going to make it into an immersive recording. When I remixed Patricia Barber's Modern Cool in 2012 or 2013 and turned that into an immersive recording, that was a recording from 1998. I had printed two sets of microphones that I knew I could use in various formats. I essentially had enough material on tape that I could actually kind of bend and stretch and create a surround for immersive impression. And a lot of that comes from microphones , seeing either different spectral responses, or the differences in the time arrival of the sound because the mics are in different locations. And that's really what makes feel like it's a natural environment that you're sitting in. As far as reverting tape... You know, I don't know if I really want to go back there. First off, wherever do you find the tape?

US: And the technician who can maintain it?

JA: The last recording I recorded on analog tape was back in about 2001, Terence Blanchard's Let's Get Lost. It was mixed and mastered to DSD by Mark Wilder and released on SACD on Columbia Masterworks. . We worked in two different studios. And the first time we did a playback, before the musicians entered the room, I hit play, and the speed was all over the place. It was just a mess. I actually had the maintenance guy come up, and I said, “get this machine out of here, get in another machine. And let's do it again.” So, I talked to the musicians and said, “hey, we have a little problem over here; we're gonna have to reset our machine, and we'll have to do a new take.” Then we had to go to another studio, we had kind of the same band, but different vocalists. I'm not naming names here. But the thing was, we did a take, and before the musicians came in, we hit play. And guess what? That analog machine again was a mess – the speed was all over the place. I mean, you couldn't play it back. The musicians would looked at you and asked, “what is wrong here?” Again, we had to throw that machine out and start . That was the last time I used an analog tape machine. At the same time , we were moving on, getting more and more into 48 channels of digital and all that kind of thing. At that time, Pro Tools really was just a toy, and hadn't stepped up to the game yet. So, we were using a Sony 48-track for the most part back in the early 2000s. But as Pro Tools got better, we got 192 kHz and all that kind of stuff, it just became ubiquitous. Also, at that point, you couldn't even get tape, and the machines became boat anchors. So everything kind of flipped over. The one thing that has really sold us is improving the sampling rate, and the sampling frequency. And improvements in clocking. I think we've gotten results that, frankly, are better than what you could get on analog tape these days. A good high-resolution file is really hard to beat as far as we're concerned.

US: Well, I think what is interesting in analog is, from a production point, is that in analog, you have to make decisions. The problem about digital is sometimes people can't make decisions anymore, because track count isn't really a thing anymore. And the hard drives are so big that everybody thinks they can do 5,000 takes, and that doesn't necessarily get better . So, there are some production aspects of tape that I kind of like in that you actually have to rehearse. And then you have to make decisions. So that's good. On the other hand, a lot of all of what we do these days with, you know, flying in a vocal here, doing a little thing there…that would not be possible, if you happen to like the standard of what people are used to, which is a good and a bad thing of perfection. It's simply not possible in analog unless you have unlimited funds, your own technicians, and really good tape machines. And those things rarely come together. We had recently a discussion about 16 tracks, with no noise . I mean, that is really a great sound if it's transferred well. I did a transfer of 16 tracks last April. But we had to fly to Skywalker Sound to do this transfer, because there are just so few people around that still have machines on that level and the maintenance on that level so that you can actually do these kinds of transfers. They took care of the analog side. I took care of the digital side and I think it was a fantastic transfer. But in terms of revisiting, I mean, we just actually did a remix of an analog thing…

JA: …but from 1992.

US: But the had been transferred at 24/96 , and not really with special care, which I understand, because they didn't have the budget for it. So, it is what it is, I think, you know? (laughs)

JA: I think of the analog format, I think 16-track, 2-inch at 15 ips was probably about as good as it was going to get. There's a 1997 analog recording I did with Cassandra Wilson, Jacky Terrasson and Mino Cinelu (Rendezvous). I just got a copy of the Japanese release, and it just sounds great. Bob Belden was the producer on that. He said, “I want you to do 16 tracks.” and I asked, “Why?” He said, “so we limit our decisions here.” So, we couldn't load it up with a lot of vocals, and we couldn't load it up with a lot of percussion. By the time we did a pass, we basically filled up 16 tracks at one time. It made for a very nice, spontaneous recording. But also – 16 tracks, my god. There's a recording I did in 1998 on Blue Note with Tim Hagans and Marcus Printup on trumpet called Hubsongs: The Music of Freddie Hubbard, and Freddie Hubbard was in the control room producing, along with Bob Belden. When I compare that album to other recordings I made during that time, it just sounds bigger and fatter than anything else from that period. And that really is because of the 2-inch 16 track analog tape format and again, at the time, there was nothing that could beat it, but now, a good high-resolution file really can compete. Because, if I wanted to go back and do something , again, it would be to do it in that mode. I really wouldn't go to do a 24-track analog. You know, I heard something on the radio yesterday, Ron Carter – The Golden Striker album, and when I was listening to it, I thought, “gee, that sounds pretty good.” And then I thought back, “Oh my god, that's the one I did on 16 tracks, 15 ips with Dolby SR!” httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqzR8Nv6QYQ (Part Three of the interview with Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz will continue with their comparisons of the pros and cons of analog tape vs. digital; artists they had always wanted to work with; and a discussion about immersive audio production.)

 

A stunning Philips GA 312 turntable, circa late 1970s. People were wowed by its touch-sensitive illuminated controls.

Close up of the GA 312. The light-up controls are the three buttons along the bottom.

Photos of the GA 312 courtesy of Howard Kneller, who still has its original box!

Quad electrostatic loudspeaker ad, 1959. Many would say the tagline is still true today.

Another design that's stood the test of time: the Thorens TD 124 turntable, made from 1957 to 1965, and in its MkII version until 1967. It was reissued in 2020 in updated form as the TD 124 DD.

For those with more modest tastes and budgets, here's a Philips ad from the 1960s.

Howard Kneller’s audio and art photography can be found on Instagram (@howardkneller, @howardkneller.photog) and Facebook (@howardkneller).

As Seen Through a Woke Prism As Copper is and should always be about the music, I want to say this up front. Looking at his career purely as a musical artist, I have always been a huge Michael Jackson fan. His development as an artist and the music he created are among the greatest pop music achievements ever. Add to that the fact that his groundbreaking videos (especially 1983’s “Thriller”) blew MTV wide open a year before my band’s video, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” aired, which, without a doubt, made it easier for my record label to accept Twisted Sister’s much longer, narrative version (the one with the screaming father), to push onto MTV, rather than the shorter edit originally intended for video promotion. Which brings me to this review. Last week my wife and I went to see the new Michael Jackson “jukebox musical,” MJ: The Musical, on the recommendation of a close friend and Broadway veteran musical performer who cautioned us, “the show is amazing but the book had a lot of flaws.” That description tells you all you need to know. On a purely visceral, musical and theatrical level, the show and its main star Myles Frost, as the older Michael Jackson, are astonishing. (Two other actors portray Jackson: Christian Wilson as the younger Jackson, and Tavon Olds-Sample playing Jackson from his teen years through his early 20s.) The history of the musical journey of “MJ” as the greatest solo artist in pop music history, from the Jackson 5 in 1969 up to the 1992 Dangerous tour, is blissfully performed, with incredible staging to go along with the flow of the show. This is where, however, it gets a little tricky. The first time I heard that a musical based on the life of Michael Jackson was coming to Broadway, I thought to myself: what’s next? Gimme Shelter: the Harvey Weinstein musical? Love Me Tender: the new Jeffrey Epstein musical? Oh…the list could go on and on. Such are the thoughts that went through my head, and how could they not. The media saturation regarding the sexual misconduct accusations against Michael Jackson was pervasive – but he was never convicted of any crime and this is where the musical, in my opinion, is allowed to create a narrative with an off-ramp. As we live in a cancel culture and “woke” world in which The Cosby Show has, among others, almost totally disappeared from TV and Gary Glitter’s music has vanished into thin air, it came as no surprise to me when I started reading stories in music industry journals about whether Michael Jackson’s music was also going to disappear from the airwaves, both terrestrial (AM/FM stations) and online/satellite (Sirius XM). The programmers interviewed and quoted really didn’t want to take the music off because of the allegations of sexual misconduct against Jackson, unless the public demanded it. That uproar never came. Thus the Jackson 5 and all the iterations of MJ’s career are broadcast daily in a frequency that doesn’t appear to have diminished. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9e3U2Fxnbg With that public indifference comes the big gamble. With a song catalog that is as varied and timeless as Jackson’s, can a Broadway “book” be written that allows a story to be told without touching on (sorry about that) the child sex scandal allegations and, lest one forget, the exact nature and controversy surrounding his death in 2009? How you want to rationalize these (not-insignificant) issues in terms of paying the high ticket price of a Broadway show, as well as your ability to enjoy the musical is dependent upon how much you can separate yourself from all the bad press. Here is some insight into MJ’s career that was not mentioned in the show but may interest some of you: my band Twisted Sister recorded part of our 7-million worldwide-selling album Stay Hungry at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, where Quincy Jones had recorded Jackson’s Thriller two years before. Some of the engineers on our record had worked on Thriller there as well. They told us some stories. According to these studio people, Michael’s record label, Epic, was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1982 and that Jones was warned that Thriller (which they said was $750,000 over budget and nine months late) was in danger of not coming out if Q (Quincy) didn’t deliver the album in 48 hours after the notice given him. Q did mix it in 48 hours to make Columbia/Epic happy, along with a note saying that he needed two more weeks to really get it right. After Thriller was finally delivered, the collective brain trust at Columbia/Epic reported back that the only song that was a marketable single was “Billie Jean,” and that it would not be sufficient to stave off bankruptcy because the album wouldn't sell past 3 million copies! Of course, no one could have imagined that Michael Jackson would premiere his “Moonwalk” on national TV during the Motown 25^th anniversary special in May 1983 which, like the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, altered the popular music landscape and catapulted Thriller to sales of more than 100 million copies worldwide (estimates vary and I might have more to say on this in a later article), making it the most successful album in history. As far as MJ: The Musical is concerned, the framework and timeline in which it takes place is critical to maintaining a fun, positive and ultimately uplifting message. I had no idea how the scandals and MJ’s death would (or would not) be dealt with. The show opens with a scene in a rehearsal room for the band and dancers. It shows how Michael is obsessed with every single detail of the upcoming 1992 Dangerous World Tour.

I thought to myself, watching this intro and knowing what I know about the creation of a “performance arc” for the purpose of constructing the narrative, well…how convenient. 1992 was before the sexual allegations. Sure, there had been all of the plastic surgery, the skin whitening, the chimp. the friendships with Brooke Shields and Macaulay Culkin, the purchase of the Elephant Man’s skeleton, and the rumors of him sleeping in an oxygen chamber, but that was all the cheap Wacko Jacko National Enquirer kind of stuff we all knew about. What if the narrative begins and ends there, in 1992? That would save having to deal with all the rough stuff, all the sexual allegations and his death. The show is masterfully staged and, for the most part, so are the musical excerpts – there are so many hits that some are limited to bits that are just a minute or two long. And the hits just keep on coming, as does the nostalgia of the Jackson 5’s debut at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, The Ed Sullivan Show, the Soul Train debut and on and on. It is amazing that the music just washes over you year by year, decade by decade, with the show connecting all the dots that you would expect.

Yes, there is a drama-filled Berry Gordy/Suzanne de Passe moment. (Suzanne de Passe was the one who brought the Jackson 5 to Motown and was later made president of Motown Productions.) There’s the Jackson 5 breaking up (and getting back together later on) with Michael going solo and, of course, Michael’s titanic collaborations with Quincy Jones. But weirdly, there’s no mention of the legendary Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever 1983 TV special. While the breakthrough TV show was alluded to (the “moonwalk” sequence with the white glove was recreated) it was never specifically mentioned, for reasons that puzzled me. They had already portrayed Motown founder Berry Gordy. That performance was as important to the solo Michael Jackson rise as the Beatles’ The Ed Sullivan Show performance by the Beatles. Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, was portrayed in a very negative light in his treatment of young Michael, so as to (in my opinion) create a Bogeyman and explain away any of Michael’s insecurities and peculiarities (and I do mean all of them…). On the other hand, Jackson’s mother Katherine Jackson was portrayed as almost saintlike. As a producer, I get that, given so much material, a lot has to be left on the cutting room floor. But I question some of those decisions. And to be fair, for example, in Bohemian Rhapsody, the worldwide smash movie about Queen and Freddie Mercury, the producers, who were the band themselves, didn't get the timelines correct on when some of the songs were done. How did that happen??? Since this show was approved by the Michael Jackson estate, you can only imagine how they must have given very strict ground rules to the creators.

 

All the actors and the dances are first-rate, up there with some of the best choreography I have ever seen staged on Broadway. The audience was racially mixed, which also made me feel good. The performance by Myles Frost is absolutely mesmerizing, like you were watching Michael talk, sing and dance in front of your eyes. I have no idea where they will ever find another singular performer that so embodies his character as does Myles. The audience, especially in the end, went crazy. That tells you all you really need to know. If you can put aside all the issues I have brought up, then you will have one hell of a time. We did and we had questioned whether we could. That question was answered unequivocally.

Header image: Myles Frost as Michael Jackson. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy.

On to the Show Floor! After seeing the offerings from Cambridge Audio and Meze Audio at the Bellagio hotel (see my coverage in Issue 154 and Issue 155), I headed to the Las Vegas Convention Center on one of the official CES shuttles. This was my first sign that this was going to be far from a normal CES.

These buses are normally filled to capacity, and with a queue to get on them. Once you get in line, it usually takes two to three buses being loaded with people before you finally get to board. This time, not only did I walk on, I was able to sit in the back of the bus with many empty rows between myself and the other passengers. It was not one of the first buses to the show and the crowd may have been much less because of that, but this was the first time I was not on a CES shuttle that was filled to capacity or had a long wait before boarding. Once I got to the Las Vegas Convention Center it was more of the same.

Though the halls and show floor showed some signs of life, it was a far cry from the bustling and packed shows of the past, where it was wall-to-wall people and the aisles were something akin to a slow-moving Los Angeles traffic jam. LG and Panasonic usually have large booths filled with innovative products.

However, both of them pulled out of the show this year – Panasonic at the last minute. The latter did put their space to some good use for attendees by placing tables and comfortable chairs there, along with facilities for charging electronic devices.

 

A brighter spot for audio fans was the VOXX International booth. VOXX is a conglomerate that includes many different audio companies, including Jamo, Klipsch, Onkyo and Pioneer, among others. The hallway leading into their booth had displays with photographs with some of these companies’ founding fathers, with information telling their stories and contributions to audio. Paul W. Klipsch was a colorful figure well-known to those steeped in audio lore, but some others, such as Takeshi Godai of Onkyo, George Baker of Energy (loudspeakers) and Rainer Haas of Magnat (plasma tweeters, and loudspeakers) are not as synonymous with the companies they founded and it was enlightening to learn more about them.

Speaking of Paul W. Klipsch, the highlight of the VOXX booth was undoubtedly the Klipsch Jubilee speaker. The Jubilee is a further development of the famous Klipschorn, a seminal audio product that is renowned for its efficiency, dynamic sound, unique style, and required corner placement. The Jubilee is a two-way design using a corner horn for the bass, and the Klipsch representative mentioned the stunning 108 dB (1 watt/1 meter) sensitivity – and $36,000 per pair price. Also on display were the Klipsch Forte IV speakers from their

Heritage line, plus a variety of Onkyo and Pioneer receivers, and personal audio products from all the brands marketed by VOXX.

TCL has become a popular enthusiast brand for their high-performance, high-value Roku and Google-enabled QLED televisions. TCL is expanding their offerings in the extra-large screen space with their aptly-named XL Collection.

Particularly noteworthy is the 98-inch Class XL QLED TV model 98R754, selling for $7,999.99. This is an attractive price for a flat-panel television almost 100 inches (!) in size. It is hard to evaluate picture quality in show conditions, but what I saw looked promising.

Audio and media rooms can get dusty, and accordingly TCL’s Breeva line of smart air purifiers may be of interest to A/V fans as well. The top-of-the-line Breeva A5 is only $199.99 and features five filtration modes and a timer among its plethora of features. I plan on reviewing one in my own media room soon.

Samsung’s star of the show was their new Freestyle projector, a portable 1080p LED projector that has built-in omnidirectional sound and can even access streaming apps. The Freestyle resembles a small coffee can on a swivel stand that can also be mounted in light sockets (with an adapter). Numerous booth displays showed off its capabilities by projecting on a desktop, a kitchen table and even the wall of a tent. The Freestyle is available now for $899.99.

Sony made a big splash not with televisions or audio gear, but with two electric cars displayed under the Vision-S name. I remarked to one of the Sony booth representatives that I did not know Sony was going to make electric cars, and his response was, “neither did we, until yesterday.” Little info was provided about the cars’ price, range, or availability. The representatives also said they did not know how they would be marketed in the US, be it through a traditional dealer network, factory stores like Tesla, or online. The cars themselves were very attractive and, viewed from a distance, the interiors seemed to be a nice compromise between a traditional automobile with an instrument cluster and conventional controls and the modern minimalism of a Tesla Model 3. More details about Sony Mobility and the Vision-S automobiles should be available this spring.

Onward to The Venetian Having seen the major players exhibiting on the Convention Center show floor, I headed over to the towers of The Venetian hotel, the traditional home of high-performance audio at CES. At the last CES (in 2020; CES 2021 was virtual only) there was grumbling from high-end audio exhibitors that the 2020 show would be their last. Frequent complaints included the quality of attendees (fewer press and dealers were attending), the cost of participating and exhibiting, and the show’s transitioning away from home entertainment and towards smart home, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices, and other technologies. Shows such as Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (now defunct), CEDIA and Capitol Audio Fest offer a chance to reach more of their intended audience, for less money. If high-end audio exhibitors were already heading towards the door, the pandemic got them through it and out in a hurry. Normally there are three floors of audio exhibits at The Venetian, with each floor having three wings and with most every room or suite occupied. This year, I counted only three A/V exhibitors in the entire Venetian Tower. There may have been more there, but I did not see their names on the signage placed near the elevators. JVC/KENWOOD was their showing off their always-impressive JVC D-ILA video projectors. They usually have the best image quality of any company demonstrating projectors at the show, and this year their demo was as impressive as ever. If you are building a cost-no-object home theater, in my opinion this is the projector to get. SVS had two suites filled with subwoofers, stereo speakers, amplifiers and home theater systems. Vice President Nick Brown gave me a tour and proudly pointed out their CES 2022 Innovation award for their Prime Wireless Pro powered speakers. SoundPath speaker cables and interconnects were also displayed, and I can vouch for their quality, as I use them in my own system. Accessory manufacturer Austere also had a suite with their power conditioning solutions, cables, and cleaning accessories. I spoke with Austere founder Deena Ghazarian after the show and she reported a positive experience, as the low attendance allowed them to have quality conversations with those that stopped by, and they were able to reach more people than they usually did. This was a rare endorsement of CES coming from an audio products manufacturer this year.

Closing Thoughts It is likely that the sparsely-attended CES 2022 will prove to be an outlier, due to the many companies pulling out because of the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19. As an audio fan as well as a writer covering the industry, it is my hope that one day audio will return to the show in force as it was years ago. My first CES was in 2004, and the audio exhibits were located at the Alexis Park Resort, off the strip. The suites were full of audiophiles enjoying and discussing the products and the companionship of like-minded others, and the exhibitors were a who’s who of audio companies, from mid-fi to the highest of the high end. However, I was told by an industry insider that the changes to the show, as well as the costs of Las Vegas in general, mean that a bustling audio segment of the show is truly gone for good. Still, I am holding out hope. Thirty years ago, no one foresaw the vinyl renaissance and LPs outselling CDs in 2021. Perhaps there can be a renaissance for audio at CES one day, as well.

Based on “MacArthur Park” by Jimmy Webb, as recorded by Richard Harris

The Linn was never waiting for us, Frank, It ran one step ahead As we followed in this dance Between The Beatles and Katy Lied, which were pressed In a 1970s fevered slab of hot, black plastic from MoFi, No transparent “Yellow Submarines” at 33 and 1/3, all bits. McGowan Park is melting all LPs All the silver polycarbonate reflectors are in backpacks at the Grand Canyon, but... Someone left the Linn out in the rain. I don't think that I can run it, Ivor, again, 'Cause it took so long to tune it, And I'll never get that perfect bounce again: Oh no! I recall you with the Goldmund on your rack, Exuding gravitas, On the floor, around your MITs, The Weavers, like tender babes in Chad’s hands, And the old folks playing fiddles in that Hall called…Carne...gie. McGowan Park is melting on the dark side of the moon, All the Flaming Lips’ transparent pink chords flow down. Someone left Yoshimi in the rain, again. I don't think I can replace it, 'Cause it took so long to find it, And I'll never buy on eBay (with PayPal) again. Oh no!

There will be another Ekos for me For I will sing of Jelco and deflect those poisoned AROs, Yes, I will have another LP12 Lingo for me, Someone will bring it from Glasgow, for sure, I will drink the Macallan 25, though it's not young, And never let you catch me looking at a Talisker 18, And after all the nude styli of my life After all the MC carts I have replaced You'll still be my one Troika. I will lower the stylus into the groove with a lift Because this really isn’t a Naim ARO, and I do like lifters. Plus, I will play the songs that I remember, and new ones; And bass will flow like a river through my home. And after all the CDs I have trashed, Oh, after all the vinyls I have saved, I'll be thinking of Linn, And wondering, “Why? I have a JRT Rossini already.” McGowan's Scotch is melting all the ice, All the sweet, gold liquor runs amok. But someone left Mikey out in the rain; And I don't think that he can take it, 'Cause the LP12, he replaced it, And he hasn’t cared about Linn since he got an RPM-2 with a Capella arm in ‘93, Oh yes!!! Oh yes!!! Yes Oh no … “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 All good children go to Scotland”

Header image: Richard Harris as Professor Albus Dumbledore, promotional photo.

As Melody’s dad was delivering the tractor to his son, I wandered over to the trout pond. Some of the senior citizens from Rapid City were fishing on the pier. They sat quietly with their eyes fixed on the spot where their lines hit the water. The slightest ripple would cause them to yank their pole, hoping to snag a trout. “Any luck today?” I asked. “SHUSHSHSHSHSH!” they responded; “you’ll scare the fish.” I didn’t feel particularly welcome there, so I wandered over to the beach where three seniors were seated on lawn chairs. There was a lot of discussion and laughter. They had lines in the water but didn’t seem to be paying too much attention. During the course of the greetings, I learned that Terry, the short guy with the Australian accent, was a retired commercial airline pilot, the heavy woman named Olive was once an insurance adjuster, and Paul, the guy with the goatee and long hair, was a professor emeritus of physics. After they learned who I was, they handed me a shot from a bottle of single malt stashed in a handbag and resumed their dialog. I was beginning to understand their fascination with fishing.

Olive: “So why doesn’t Lucas show up to these outings anymore? I know he’s not sick.”

Terry: “You can’t be sure of that, love; maybe he’s not letting on.

O: “Well, that may be true, but I’m worried he’s becoming a curmudgeon. He always finds excuses to stay at the home and sit on the porch or watch TV.”

T: “Maybe it’s S.A.D.”

O: “Sad?”

T: “No…well, yes. I call it Self-Arrest Disease.”

O: “What?”

T: “Well mate, he’s decided that he’s too old, too painful, and too tired to be active anymore, so he's placed himself under house arrest.”

O: “I think he’s scared to leave the home. I think fear’s got a grip on him.”

Paul: “Fear is a disease. It makes strong people weak, and weak people demented. A life controlled by fear is a life without power or joy.”

O: “Who in their right mind would choose that when seniors around the world are hiking mountains, sailing seas, writing books, and volunteering to improve the lives of others?”

P: “People who are scared.”

T: “Of what?”

P: “They are scared of the unknown.”

T: “What are you talking about, mate?”

P: “They’re afraid of dying, Terry; they don’t know what’s on the other side and that fear is crippling them.”

T: “Most people are afraid of dying, but they don’t have S.A.D.” O: “True, some people have strong religious beliefs that comfort them.”

T: “My father was a faithful evangelical all of his life, yet he expressed doubts before he died. He said that without empirical evidence, no religion can lay claim to the absolute truth.”

O: “Perhaps all spokes lead to the same hub?”

T: “Or perhaps they just lead down the garden path.”

P: “That’s why some take refuge in science. If Einstein is to be believed, all matter is a manifestation of energy. If all matter is energy, then everything in the universe – the entire quantum field – constitutes the divine matrix or God. Some say that death is nothing more than matter returning to energy, just as every ice cube goes back to being water. Nothing is destroyed or lost, it just changes form.”

 

Previous installments in this series appeared in Issues 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149.150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155 and 156 – Ed.> Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Olof Nyman.

Most audiophiles, at one point or another, encounter a skeptic – someone who righteously opines that what we do in this hobby (like spending more on high-end gear than on our car) is ridiculous and some would say frivolous. A few times in my own journey I was asked with a smirk, “what’s the goal?” and “when does it end?” Well, thanks for asking, well-meaning friend, beloved spouse, or random contrarian… Hearing beautiful music (especially unamplified acoustic music) being played live by inspired musicians simply thrills me – offering up an experience of being emotionally moved, sometimes to tears, sometimes to quiet laughter, with maybe some scoffing or belly grunts in response to the impossible wonder that’s unfolding before us. So, for me, the ultimate goal for this avocation, even after over forty years of engagement, has not changed – which is to re-create to the best of our ability the sound of live music and to be able, at least to some degree, suspend disbelief of the aural illusion and be transported to various musical events that we were not lucky enough to present at, especially those legendary performances that occurred before we were born.

How else can we experience that? This obsession in essence allows us to build a bridge (audio gear) with an overall sound signature pleasing to our ears, and gain access to our own customized Museum of Music (LPs, CDs, etc.) with more brilliant content than we could ever explore in one lifetime. Sitting in front of a well-designed high-end system, even the most resolute skeptic, if they’re honest, will hear more clarity, tonal richness, detail and dynamics than they’ve ever heard before…but until they experience the illusion of an entire system disappearing right in front of their closed eyes, they won’t quite feel the magic of being there. To me, this system disappearing act is Level One, the true embarkation point on the audiophile’s journey. Beyond hearing the in-breath of the musicians or the metallic twang and scrape of the bassist’s fingerprints on thick strings, having the intention of the composer revealed to us through the music is probably the most elusive on our spectrum of checkpoints. In my experience, that has only been possible when our aural sense is given the floor and with eyes closed – as to not add ocular input to confuse the listening experience – we allow ourselves to be immersed while applying a good measure of suspended disbelief. This is a state of mind where we are willing to drop the inner chatter and allow our ears to give us the sensation that we’ve been transported to a different time and place. Eastern mystics will laugh, saying, “it’s all illusion, so we might as well enjoy it!” Indeed, the brain is truly remarkable…so let’s have some fun exploring: In 1897, a scientist named George Stratton published an intriguing experiment illuminating the power and adaptability of the human brain. He fashioned a set of eyeglasses that would flip the wearer’s world upside down (of course, an illusion). The participants in the experiment wore these glasses 24/7 for an extended time. What is truly amazing is that after a few days of wearing the glasses, their brains flipped the flip! The brain corrected the cognitive dissonance introduced by a physical influence (the glasses)! Here’s an experiment that shows the brain’s stunning processing power and its ability to present our world to us in ways we can understand.

Deep breath and read on: Can you raed tihs? I cdnnolt blveie tabt I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. Tihs sohws the pheonmneaI pweor of the hmuan mnid! Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy. it deosn't mttare in waht oredr the Itteers in a wrod are, the only iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat Iteer be in the rhigt pclae. The set can be a taotl mses and you can sltill raed it woulhit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef. but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slplnieg was ipmorantt! You just read what seemed like a bunch of jumbled letters and made sense of an entire mixed-up paragraph. That’s your brain at work, showing off. Here’s another example. Soften your focus and stare at this moving graphic…cool, huh? Except that there is nothing moving in this image…nothing. To prove the point, just stare at any of the black center-holes for a few seconds and watch everything stop (It never actually started). Our wonderful brains create an illusion of movement that we see every time we look, even when we know it’s not real. Our brain processes incoming data in ways we’re just starting to understand. Will we get to experience the Holodeck in our lifetime? Probably. Today’s “augmented reality” technology is getting closer every year. But it’s not about tech…we can go old school on this illusion thing – like, when we get lost in a well-written book that we can’t put down…our brain lets us feel like we are there, each page evoking a myriad of moving images of our own creation as we read. Like submarines that don’t have windows, our brains use echo-location – akin to sonar – to place musicians and instruments in space. But in our culture, it seems easier to accept the illusions the eyes see, but the ears…not so much. “I’ll believe it when I see it!” is the common cry of a skeptic. Truth is, “you’ll see it when you believe it.” Suspending disbelief makes all this possible, which explains why we keep striving for an ever-improving experience of the illusion of reproduced music. We spend lots of time and mountains of cash making adjustments, trying outlandish tweaks and supplicating the Gods of Audio to get the images and soundstage aligned in a rock-solid 3-D illusion of a musical performance. We close our eyes, suspend disbelief and trust our systems and music to immerse us in aural bliss. As for the skeptics, bring them on. We are supported knowing the absolute joy a well-designed, holographic-illusion-creating audio system can bring into their lives.

That’s why we do this...and once they experience it for themselves, there’s no turning back. Their lives are changed forever. Alón Sagee is Chairman and Chief Troublemaker of the San Francisco Audiophile Society.

Alón’s writings for Copper can be found in the following issues:

• The Audiophile’s Cat: https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/the-audiophiles-cat/
• Chinese Food for Thought https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/chinese-food-for-thought/
• The Not-So-Great Wall of China https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/the-not-so-great-wall
• Everest, Part 1: https://www.psaudio.com/article/getting-high/11/
• Everest, Part 2: https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/getting-high-part-two
• Everest, Part 3: https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/getting-high-part-three/
• Mongolia, Part 1: https://www.psaudio.com/article/five-weeks-in-mongolia-part-one/
• Mongolia, Part 2: https://www.psaudio.com/article/five-weeks-in-mongolia-part-two/
• Two Hands Clapping: https://www.psaudio.com/article/two-hands-clapping/
• Sublime Moments: https://www.psaudio.com/article/sublime-moments/
• San Francisco Audiophile Society/Biography

And some more fun: Can you identify this place? Is it an illusion, a photograph, or a painting? Write a comment with your answer. Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/Clard.

KK finds out that embracing a dormant format is full of surprises. Audiophiles come in many flavors, and I am not even remotely bothered by those who are, say, equipment junkies with $100,000 systems and only three LPs. There are scientific types who probably hate music and live for specifications. There are quasi-religious proselytizers who think digital causes cancer, or transistors are a substitute for Viagra, or other benighted souls. I love ’em all, which is why the buzz for me is about the history of audio, as much as it is for my all-consuming love for music. Like 8 to 10 hours every day. It never occurred to me that I was an historian, but that was how I was described after writing five books on the subject, and it beats being called a hi-fi hack or other contemptuous slight. Suffice it to say, I am overly fascinated by the forgotten tales of hi-fi, in part because the audio industry has the worst record of any in respecting its past.

Google the number of lavish books about electric guitars, fountain pens, tractors, or whiskey, if you don't believe me. What has been occupying me of late are not only reel-to-reel tapes in general, but those from out of left field in particular. Some of the discoveries so revelatory (at least, that is, to me) that I wish I had a platform with which to share them outside of our community. Not that I believe the R2R format can be revived beyond the current cult. When I first renewed my interest in open-reel tape, nearly five years ago, it was only about sound quality. Repertoire? That never even entered the equation because I knew that I only had a dozen or so tapes, most crucially a copy of the Capitol 7-1/2 ips version of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Why “crucially?” Because it was the very tape played by Tim de Paravicini at the 2017 Tokyo International Audio Show which started me on the journey that would end up with me scouring eBay for other tapes – obsessively. Ultimately, I called it quits when the total passed 2,500 or so. This passion for tape didn't creep up on me slowly: it was immediate. Among the tapes I did own were copies of Aretha’s Gold on Atlantic and The Very Best of Roy Orbison on Monument, both in excellent condition. As re-introductions go, along with Sgt. Pepper, it was not unlike how I got sucked into worshipping Italian red wines: after 20 years as a true teetotaler, my first taste of vino was a late-1980s Tignanello. And to think that it could have been Manischewitz…. It didn't take long for me to want more. My first open-reel purchases, prior to embarking on the eBay addiction, were acquired at the UK’s AudioJumble. There I found a half-dozen tapes on one of the stands, at £10 ($14) apiece. What I soon learned was that open-reel tapes – even at 40-years-plus, and/or those of the generally lower quality 1/4-track, 3-3/4 ips variety – bettered any vinyl equivalent. (Note: if you’ve read this far, may I respectfully assume you accept that bold, perhaps even absurd statement, or that you are at least willing to allow me to believe it? Please do not bombard Copper with emails about how Kessler is full of s***, how vinyl is superior, yada yada yada. I have already exhausted the R2R-vs-LP debate with no less than Michael Fremer, resulting in a friendly stalemate as I am always happy to let the deliciously misguided Mikey believe what he likes. Moreover, I can count as allies on my side of the argument this organ’s Jay Jay French, the dear, departed Tim de Paravicini, and the legendary Bob Ludwig. So, as the Eagles sang: get over it.] I was schooled enough in the history of recorded music and the myriad formats which existed to know that there were two coherent epochs of pre-recorded, commercially-available open-reel tapes.

The first age, the tapes of which caught my ear and to which I am devoted, commenced with the dawn of hi-fi and was concurrent with the birth of domestically-accessible stereo playback, circa 1950 – 1957. It ended, as far as I can determine, in the mid-1980s, after which major labels ceased the release of pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes. As for the second era, it’s the period we’re in now. A number of forces turned open-reel tape into a tiny niche appealing to intrepid enthusiasts: the absence of new affordable, and/or real-world tape decks, the diminution of the number of manufacturers of blank tape, the high costs, the dominance of cassettes for home recording, the vagaries of owning used tape decks. As a result, the pre-recorded titles now on offer are, as far as I can tell, only 1/2-track tapes and with precious few exceptions playing at anything other than 15 ips. This means 10-inch spools swallowing lots of raw tape. It also means big bucks, and I know of no new pre-recorded tapes under $150 – $200. Far more discouraging – and this is really gonna rile those of you who are hyper-sensitive, politically correct, or woke in any way – is the material, which has been discussed before. To reiterate, aside from the few known artists and albums on offer from The Tape Project, Analogue Productions and one or two others, the vast bulk of what is available from current sources certainly doesn't encourage parting with money that otherwise would pay for, say, a Mobile Fidelity One-Step LP by Stevie Ray Vaughan or Charles Mingus or Janis Joplin or Santana. Sorry, but hugely expensive tapes by artists of whom one has never heard, producing music that may or may not be worth hearing – it takes either an open mind or an open credit limit. And I suffer neither. Instead, I have embarked on a period of discovery which surprises and delights me on a weekly basis. It starts with the nostalgia most directly associated with American baby boomers, and, if they’re still so blessed, their surviving parents or relatives. It is a period of mostly forgotten names, or those enjoying rediscovery. As a displaced expat from Maine, even after a half-century I have to remind myself that most of my British friends haven’t a clue as to the existence of Howdy Doody or Captain Kangaroo, any more than US contemporaries have an awareness of the Goons or Muffin the Mule. Occasionally, events shake things up a bit and music I thought hadn’t crossed the Atlantic proves otherwise. For example, a recent TV ad in the UK has a soundtrack supplied by Louis Prima. I still don't know where he fits in the scale of global recognition, but I’m intimately familiar with his music because my father adored him. The younger among you, and for that matter the British of a certain age, might know his music because you or they are fans of David Lee Roth or Brian Setzer, or grew up loving

Disney’s (original animated) The Jungle Book. It is the post-war cultural pool of the initial half of the first reel-to-reel epoch which I find to be yielding so many aural thrills. It’s a litany of names that may or may not trigger bouts of nostalgia, quite irrespective of any seeming audiophilic value – which, as it so happens, they all possess: Steve and Eydie Gormé. Mitch Miller. Rosemary Clooney. Jackie Gleason. Lawrence Welk. Peter Nero. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OdIuXrvR_M What stopped me dead in my tracks was some small print. Although I am old enough to remember all of those named in the above paragraph, primarily via The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, and the like, I was too late to the game to know about the releases from the labels which were the audiophile companies of the day. I discovered Everest, Command, Bel Canto, Audio Fidelity and the rest decades after they established the standards for sound quality in the home. Thus it was a real thrill to find evidence of Mobile Fidelity’s achievements long before it was a source for deluxe pressings from, say, Supertramp or Pink Floyd. Seasoned audiophiles know that Mobile Fidelity’s roots go back to 1958 or so, beginning with Brad Miller’s recordings of steam trains (a curious penchant shared with Audio Fidelity). Most of us are familiar with the later period, from Herb Belkin’s time to its current ownership under Jim Davis and recall how the label made its mark for modern (post-1970s) audio enthusiasts with The Power and the Majesty on both vinyl and CD. What had eluded me was the importance of the Mystic Moods Orchestra due to my own ignorance-cum-snobbery. One of the benefits (or side effects) of over-indulging in pre-1980s open-reel tapes is the appreciation of genres which otherwise one might have ignored or avoided. These included, for me, what sneeringly has been referred to as “Muzak” (no offense to the owners of the trade name), mood music, lounge music, easy listening, middle-of-the-road or any other generic epithet which is the antithesis of anything ranging from Anthrax to ZZ Top, Aretha to ZZ Hill, America to Zebra. Mea culpa. Time for me to grow up, and to realize and understand that every single musician directed by the baton of Lawrence Welk was world-class. That Barney Kessel must be mentioned in the same breath as Jimmy Page. What Brad Miller brought to the (turn)table, via that weird mix of mood music and rainfall and thunder and, yes, steam trains, was sonic worth to rank with the best audiophile-grade sounds ever issued. Among the tapes acquired in my bulk purchases were One Stormy Night (Philips PTX 600205) from 1966 and The Mystic Moods of Love (Philips PTX 6260) recorded in 1968. The former is a 3-3/4 ips tape, the latter 7-1/2 ips. Ordinarily, when curating my tapes, unless it’s something like a Ray Charles or Beach Boys or Youngbloods album, I just let them play out in the background. The magic occurs when, from time to time, the sound is so extraordinary (in the true meaning of that word) that I stop what I am doing and cannot help but concentrate on what is being played.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXQNwcjAoy0&list=OLAK5uy_mxbagl8JhBait-HknVoujLdwKiUnpj2i4

Both of the Mystic Moods Orchestra tapes caused interruptions to my reveries, but it was only when filing them alphabetically that I grasped that the two were from the same performers, and on the same label. It was then that I was driven to study the liner notes, jarred by buzzwords such as “Buffalo Springfield” – enough to cause palpitations, as I rank that band only a whisper behind the Beatles – and that embodiment of superb recording, “Herb Alpert.” My eyes dropped down to see “Brad Miller” and “Mobile Fidelity.” The constraints of this being a family publication prevent me from quoting what I uttered aloud after the word “holy,” but it rhymes with “schmuck,” for that is what I had been. It went on: Lincoln Mayorga. Earl Palmer. Victor Feldman. This was proving to be an unanticipated audiophile goldmine. I was ashamed that the Mystic Moods Orchestra had eluded me, for the musicianship and the sound quality were enough to earn Recordings of the Month, regardless of the publication.

If acquiring humility is a reward – and surely that is a contradiction – consider me confused, enlightened and above all grateful. These two tapes, lost in the mists of time, proved as educational as any experiences I can recall in my 54-year journey as an audiophile. But even if the music wasn’t utterly transcendent, who could resist an album with a track called “Hot Bagel” followed by another aptly dubbed “Local Freight”? The bad news is that my completist nature means a craving for the Mystic Moods Orchestra’s other 20 recordings…

This year The Beatles: Get Back documentary caught the eye of even casual fans. Over last year’s holiday break I found myself interrupting so many people who were watching it midway through the eight-hour long doc (sometimes to interview them for Copper). Those conversations began with the inevitable, “this film is amazing! And, there’s no narration!” The documentary was evidence of how timeless the Beatles’ music and their all-too-short story remain. However, The Beatles and India, a new documentary on the band, offers a different and equally remarkable line of sight into their incredible tale, one that I didn’t see coming. Drawing inspiration from Ajoy Bose’s book Across The Universe – The Beatles in India, the documentary is produced by British/Indian music entrepreneur Reynold D’Silva, and directed by Bose (his directorial debut) and cultural researcher Pete Compton. It was awarded Best Film Audience Choice and Best Music at the 2021 UK Asian Film Festival. httpv://youtu.be/so-AEgMk9OI The Beatles and India, now streaming on BritBox in North America, is a story about how Indian music and a few key figures and moments helped define some of the most important music the band would make.

No other influence except for 1950s American rock and roll had as profound an effect on the creation and outcome of the Beatles’ music than Indian music. As the film begins, we learn that when George Harrison’s mother was pregnant during the World War ll air-to-ground bombings in Liverpool, she’d listen to Indian music to calm her nerves. This continued after she delivered George into the world, and his childhood was colored through a home where that kind of sound would often be heard. It’s an important reference point to how the band discovered the genre at all. From here a remarkable tale unfolds. When the film ends, the Beatles’ journey of discovery no longer seems as strange as it did when I was a child. Then, when I would see photos of them dressed in traditional Indian garments, sitting on the ground, often in a moment of meditation, I’d wonder out loud: “how in the world did this happen?” Now it’s all clear, and as a fan, I’m thankful for the timeout they took to embrace this experience. In the end it would inform much of the music on one of my favorite records of theirs, the White Album. As a band, the Beatles were first introduced to Indian music while filming their 1965 film, Help!, which included a quite controversial scene with Indian musicians in a restaurant. Many Indians took offense to how certain well-respected symbols were used both commercially and comically in the film. That would quickly change as George Harrison would soon become a lifelong impassioned devotee of Indian music. Soon after wrapping the film, he bought his first sitar, befriended and studied under sitar master Ravi Shankar, and began recording with the instrument. It what can only be called a true musical revolution, Harrison linked the worlds of pop and Indian music on the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood,” which appears on the Rubber Soul album. Adding a sitar to that track was a groundbreaking moment from which Harrison would never look back. He fully immersed the Beatles into Indian music, a raga-rock sound that would be later heard on Beatles songs “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Love You To” (Revolver) “Within You Without You” (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) and “The Inner Light” (the B-side of the “Lady Madonna” single). Fast forward to February of 1968, a time that found the Beatles searching for deeper meaning in their lives. Under the spiritual guidance of Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles took a trip to Rishikesh, India to study transcendental meditation and set out on a path of what would hopefully be deep enlightenment. This trip is where the weight of the film resides. During this spiritual sabbatical the band was joined by their respective partners, along with musicians Donovan and Mike Love, as well as actress Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence. Through archival footage, recordings, photographs, and first-hand interviews, The Beatles and India comprehensively documents this remarkable moment in time, where specific Rishikesh experiences would inform the band’s music – and redefine the trajectory of pop culture.

 

To name a few examples: the song “Dear Prudence” was inspired by Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence and her apathy toward what she felt was the entire “camp experience” with famous people. She withdrew from most activities, preferring to instead stay by herself in her quarters. At breakfast one morning, Mike Love heard Paul McCartney playing around with what would become “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and suggested including references to Russian girls, much in the way he had done with the Beach Boys with “California Girls.” The rest is history. After a wealthy mother and her adult son (the Maharishi was prone to inviting guests with deep pockets) returned to the ashram and revealed to everyone that they had just returned from a hunt where they’d killed a tiger, John Lennon wrote the song “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” to chastise them for openly mocking the teachings they had just learned under the Yogi. However, what the film touches on only lightly were the allegations of sexual improprieties against the Maharishi that inspired the song “Sexy Sadie.” John Lennon was apparently so disturbed by the allegations that he wrote the song with original lyrics that called the Yogi out by name. Those lyrics were changed, and so was the nature of the band’s relationship with the Maharishi thereafter.

The film carefully presents how the Beatles managed that delicate messaging with the press, knowing that their relationship with India and its music was much deeper than their time at that retreat. Some material that the retreat inspired lived beyond the White Album and would later appear on Lennon and Harrison solo outings. While at the ashram, Lennon began writing “Jealous Guy” and Harrison birthed “Not Guilty.” The film also captures simple fun facts about the trip and the personal situations of the band members at the time. Both McCartney and Lennon were in relationships that would soon end, and signs of demise are evident in the bored, often distracted looks of their partners. Ringo seemed to be into the trip to India because the band was. But as the living conditions worsened, his interest in heading back home heightened, and he soon left his mates behind to let them sort out their exits. His leaving readies the film for its eventual soft landing (which I won’t give away here).

 

Along with the film comes a soundtrack, Songs Inspired by the Film The Beatles and India, that’s truly delightful. In addition to the film’s original score is a collection of almost twenty Beatles covers by both upcoming and established Indian artists. Karsh Kales presents an energized, completely rethought take on “Back In The U.S.S.R.,” while Tejas and Mali deliver a gorgeous and majestic version of “Across the Universe.” However, for me, the most stunning contribution is the Karsh Kale/Benny Dayal collaboration on “Mother Nature’s Son.” It delivers the perfect balance between the music of the West and the rich heritage of sounds found in India. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-BlW7bgRXM The soundtrack is a reminder of how far-reaching the Beatles’ impact was at the time, and continues to be to this day. From seeing and listening now to the Indian rock bands that were inspired by the Beatles in the day, to hearing the new artists who continue to mine this timeless music and uncover something new, The Beatles and India is an immersion into the magic of this aspect of their music. The ashram where the Beatles stayed is now a tourist destination, and given the attention The Beatles and India and the soundtrack album are receiving, it will no doubt see a rise in visitors. Even through the medium of film, the magical nature of the ashram comes clearly across and in some way seems to remain to this day. 54 years ago to the month, some great things happened that changed the Beatles’ and our perspective on a lot of things, the least of which just might be music.

Images courtesy of Avico.co.uk. Video courtesy of Kayos Productions, Inc.

Created by artist Laura Kimpton as part of her Monumental Word Series, the 36-foot-wide LOVE sculpture resides at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Nancy Burlan of Mac Edition Radio poses in the middle of it during CES 2022. The perforations represent birds in flight.

In Part One (Issue 155), we were introduced to the work of the late San Francisco Chronicle entertainment critic, John Wasserman. In this installment, I’ll tell you more about his life and his writing career. I’ll leave you with another of John’s classic concert reviews.

John Wasserman was born in northern California in 1938. His father, Louis, was a scholar of Jewish ancestry who became a professor at San Francisco State (College). His mother, Caroline, was a Methodist from Minnesota, a pianist, schoolteacher, and puppeteer. He grew up in Mill Valley, which was, at the time, a very small town in Marin County (north of San Francisco). He had two younger siblings, his sister, Abby, and his brother, Richey. Health issues impacted the two boys – John with asthma, and Richey with polio (from which he recovered).

John’s asthma would preclude his joining the Navy, much to his disappointment.

 

In his teenage years, John’s pursuits included poker, bridge, drinking, and bowling. He did not finish college, holding numerous unrelated jobs all the while aspiring to be a newspaperman. He practically begged the Chronicle for a chance at employment, offering to sweep the floor if need be. When an assistant entertainment critic’s position became available, he auditioned by writing a movie review. One of the editors who rated the submissions said that John’s review “was the only one that didn’t bore me.” John ultimately took the mantle of Pop Music Critic following the departure of Ralph J. Gleason, one of the founders of Rolling Stone magazine. It took some years before John’s writing would blossom fully into the humorous, somewhat snarky, and outrageous style for which he would become known (and make his mark). Abby feels his best writing occurred from 1970 until his untimely death in 1979. John wrote a very irreverent five-part series on “How to Be a Critic,” which included gems like: "Arrogance – How to Learn It" "Leaving the Theater Backwards (So As To Appear To Be Walking In)" "Sarcasm, Vilification, Sexual Innuendoes and Other Basic Techniques" In a column that was ostensibly about turning 40, John opened with: “It is Sunday morning, August 13, 1938. In faraway San Rafael, at little Cottage Hospital, a babe is born. His parents beam down at the little nipper.

‘We will call him John,’ they say proudly, ‘in honor of the toilet.’” John also enjoyed a close, but contentious, friendship with promoter Bill Graham. They played ping-pong together and, being frustrated musicians, occasionally sat in with bands – John playing congas and Bill playing the cowbell. When they fought, there was much screaming and slamming of phones at the Chronicle offices.

I remember reading John’s review (which I still have) of a 1972 Winterland concert that I had attended. His headline was “A Shattering Experience.” The opening act was The Blues Project, followed by John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra (on their first tour). The headliner was Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who were, at the time, my favorite band. They had a hard time following McLaughlin’s outfit. Wasserman described the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s music as “a seething maelstrom of high-tension jazz-rock that makes Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago seem about as revolutionary as the Firehouse Five Plus Two.” (He was referring to a Dixieland jazz band from the 1950s and early 1960s that featured members of the Disney animation department!) When he got around to ELP, he called Keith Emerson “the piano and phallus master of the group.” That last descriptor alluded to an electronic instrument that looked to me like a two-by-four with a metal strip that produced oscillating tones through the sliding of fingers along its length. Emerson held it jutting from his crotch as he played, hence the phallic reference. As I wrote in Part One, John could make you laugh even while he was writing uncomplimentary things about your favorite artists (Rod Stewart fans, see below). Here’s another one of my favorite columns of his (I still have the original newspaper clipping on this one, too), a review of a concert by Rod Stewart at the Cow Palace.

How Soon They Disremember December 21, 1977

By golly, to think I had almost forgotten. Thank you, Rod Stewart, for making it happen for me again.

I speak, of course, of that unique event of contemporary American culture – the superstar rock and roll show.

Sometimes, the memories fade. You go to your Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all bundled up in a warm theater, or your Oscar Peterson solo program at the Great American Music Hall, and you forget the raw…how to describe it?...the raw uncooked quality that only superstar rock and roll, executed before 14,000 howling fanatics in an enormous hall, can produce.

Rod Stewart, one of the major stars of pop music, sold out the Cow Palace Monday night and again last night – his first appearances here in some two years.

I was there Monday. And they came flooding back, those misty sensations, in a torrent of rushing currents, a rippling tidal wave of déjà vu, a tsunami of nostalgia, brooking no rivulets of streaming fluoridation.

You forget what rock and roll can be.

You forget that heady aroma of a hundred gallons of cheap red wine, spilled on the pavement, rushing up to embrace you like an old friend as you kick your way through a ton of trash and broken glass left in the parking lot by the swine who happily milled there only hours before.

You forget those fabulous frisks at the outer door, those friendly hands of “special” cops who go through your belongings and pat you down like a very special criminal.

You forget the electricity of those first steps into the lobby, and the comatose faces milling about, so stoned they can’t focus their eyes.

You forget the assault of sound that greets you as you enter the main room, so loud that conversation is shouted or not at all, so distorted that the term “music” is rendered euphemism.

You forget the challenge of picking your way to your seat through bodies slumped on the floor, trying ever so hard not to step on anyone, trying ever so hard not to slip in the rain puddles of soda pop spilled everywhere.

You forget that you don’t have a seat, for this is “festival seating,” which means that all the hassle involved with knowing where you’ll be located is obviated.

You forget how the fireworks go flying through the audience, landing in a crowd of people who have nowhere to go, and maybe, if you’re lucky, seeing some woman’s hair set afire. What a flash.

You forget how truly bad the music is under these circumstances, how unintelligible the lyrics, how drearily sung by truly ordinary talent.

You forget the ritualized, stylized, synthetic spontaneity of the performances, artifice as energy, rehearsed intensity of leaps and bounds so tired and flabby that the entire show has a double chin.

You forget the patter, and the proper answers to questions like: “Hey, are you grooving?”

You forget the skill and timing with which Rod Stewart shakes his red satin-clad buns, or drops his red, gauzy blouse off one shoulder.

You forget how often he does it.

You forget the shrieks and howls that each pathetic spasm engenders.

You forget the songs, and their titles.

You forget the genuine contentment that accompanies the realization that, after 40 minutes, you have seen all there is, if anything.

You forget the inner peace that consumes you as you put on your jacket, fold your notebook, cap your pen and head for the exit.

You forget the skill required to avoid coming in contact with anyone as you leave, and the deep satisfaction which comes from knowing that, once again, you have avoided contracting a communicable disease.

You forget the freshness of the air as you step outside, walk briskly past the Daly City paddy wagon and climb into your car for the intoxicating escape back to civilization.

You forget, if possible, that it ever happened.

If these articles have piqued your interest in reading more of John Wasserman’s writing, used copies of Abby’s out-of-print book are still being offered for sale on Amazon.

All photos and excerpts reprinted by kind permission of Abby Wasserman. Header image photo by Sydney Goldstein.

The last episode in this series (in Issue 156) discussed the technological and aesthetic shifts in the record cutting lathe manufacturing industry that began in the late 1970s and concluded in the 1980s, with the ultimate demise of the industry. (Believe it or not, it has not been possible to purchase a new professional disk mastering lathe, manufactured in large numbers by a company of more than two employees, since the 1980s!) Up until that point, things had been somewhat conservative. In this episode, we will examine what was perhaps the single most well-known, well-remembered, well-documented, widely-used and ridiculously overhyped disk recording lathe of all time! While it was a very capable performer, it was also cleverly marketed. It filled a market gap that had existed for some time, clearly demonstrating the differences in mentality that existed in this industry between the US and Europe. In fact, this market gap had begun to be filled in Europe much earlier, but by the early 1970s, the West was won, and it wasn't by Led Zeppelin this time!

 

The machine in question was the Neumann VMS-70, a complete, turnkey and highly automated system that conveniently eliminated a lot of the guesswork that had traditionally gone into purchasing, setting up, and using a disk mastering system. The VMS-70 set a new standard in the industry, and became the world's most popular lathe. Not the most popular by numbers sold; this would have been one of the primitive monophonic record-cutting machines once found in every radio broadcasting facility. The Neumann VMS-70 did not actually sell anywhere near that many numbers. But it did become the most commonly encountered lathe in commercial disk mastering facilities during the entire stereophonic era. It is probably safe to say that during the stereophonic era and up to the present day, more master lacquer disks have been cut on a VMS-70 than on any other lathe ever made. Still, only about 500 of these were ever produced, with much fewer surviving today. But, this is a lot, considering that the world has never had 500 professional disk mastering facilities operating at any one time! This has made the VMS-70 highly sought after to this day, and perhaps the most widely discussed lathe in the media and on the internet. In fact, its dominance in all mastering-related articles and discussions has led some people to believe that this is the only lathe that can cut "modern" masters, even though the Neumann VMS-80 (see Issue 153 and Issue 154) that superseded it, as well as the competing L.J. Scully LS-76 (covered in Issue 155 and Issue 156) were way more modern in every sense, right down to their aesthetics. As a result, the price for a Neumann VMS-70 in the used market nowadays can easily be mistaken for the telephone number of the person selling it!

 

The origins of the VMS-70 can be traced back to the 1930s, when Georg Neumann developed his first disk recording lathe. The lathe bed was a large aluminum casting, a design that was carried over with very few changes all the way to 1980, when it was finally dropped in favor of the redesigned flat-slab approach of the VMS-80 lathe. That first lathe, introduced in 1931 and named the AM 31, already had many of the key features that established the Neumann lathe in the industry. None of it was that unique, but it was offered as a complete package, and that was the true innovation.

The general approach was very similar to the early Western Electric lathes. The early Neumann lathes had a sturdy machine tool-type bed, a substantial vacuum platter, a horizontal slideway (for the carriage that transported the head across the blank disk surface) that ran under the platter, a carriage arm that held the cutter head and its suspension unit above the platter, and an accurate leadscrew mechanism. The lathe had enough space to allow the mounting of any cutter head of the past, present and future, and a high-performance floor-standing motor (supplied by Lyrec in Denmark), that directly drove the platter via an oil-coupler, to reduce rumble and noise. The latter was inspired by the much more advanced, but also much more expensive to manufacture than the Kingsbury bearing fluid coupler used in the early Western Electric lathes.

 

Neumann, however, did a lot more than just design a lathe. They also developed cutter heads, cutting amplifiers, lathe automation systems, transfer consoles, and even microphones! In doing so, they introduced the concept of the turnkey disk mastering system, which could be ordered from a single one-stop shop and would be guaranteed to work right out of the bag. This would prove to be a major difference between the US and European markets throughout the monophonic era and up until the early stereophonic days.

The US market consisted of various individuals and small companies, who were very much used to making stuff on their own, modifying equipment, mixing and matching and generally using whatever means were at their disposal to set up a sound recording studio that they could work in. It was therefore common for someone interested in building up a disk recording setup to purchase a lathe from Scully, and a cutter head from Presto, Olson, RCA, Western Electric, or Haeco, and drive it with a McIntosh amplifier, while making their own equalizers from scratch. They often had to make custom parts, and they needed to be able to figure out what would work and what wouldn't. There were no guarantees of compatibility or good results with such an approach, and it took considerable skill and knowledge to put together a system that would be capable of competitive sound quality. But, for those who were able to do that, the sky was the limit as to how their system could be set up. This was not limited to disk recording and mastering systems, but was the general approach in sound recording technology, and continued in a very similar manner well into the era of magnetic tape recording. In Europe, this approach was not very popular and in fact was often frowned upon. It was felt that only a well-known manufacturer should have the authority to decide how a disk recording system should be set up, so the manufacturers would either develop all parts of the system in-house, or they would partner with other established manufacturers to supply a complete turnkey system that was guaranteed to deliver a certain performance.

Modifications or any form of tampering by the user were very much discouraged.

To get a better feeling for this, imagine you are looking to purchase a car, but nobody sells complete cars! You need to purchase the frame from one company, the engine from another, the transmission from a third company, the differential from a fourth, suspension from a fifth, steering from a sixth, and the body from elsewhere. However, maybe the body would not necessarily fit the frame, so you might have to do some cutting and welding to get it to bolt up. You would probably have to make your own engine mounts, figure out what torque converter would be a good match for the drivetrain, decide on the appropriate axle ratio, and so on. This is what the disk recording industry looked like in the US up until the 1960s. Europeans tended to prefer an approach similar to how the automotive industry works nowadays: just sell me a car that works. I'll take the red one, thank you. This is exactly what Neumann made possible. Not only did this prove very successful in Europe, but it also won over the US market and gradually shifted it away from the DIY mentality towards the "complete system" philosophy.

 

There are parallels here with consumer audio equipment. In the early days of gramophones, it was common to purchase a complete self-contained unit, with a platter, hand-cranked drive, sound-box, horn and cabinet. When the electrical era arrived, it brought "consoles," which consisted of a radio receiver or record player, with a built-in amplifier and loudspeaker built into the same cabinet. But then the specialist high fidelity market evolved, where "separates" were offered, and the enthusiast could freely mix and match any record player with any preamplifier, power amplifier and loudspeakers they thought would offer better performance. Naturally, not everyone was qualified to put together a good system, and many bad choices have been made through the years, along with many outstanding ones. Besides, even in the realm of automotive technology, imagine wanting to enter competition motorsports, but only being limited to turnkey vehicles as offered by the established manufacturers. It would probably make for a rather boring race...!

Header image: The "pitch box of a Neumann VMS-70 lathe, from where the recording pitch could be monitored and adjusted. A couple of motors and a differential lived under this box, driving the leadscrew of the lathe, which would advance the carriage, suspension box and cutter head across the lacquer disk.

Photo courtesy of Greg Reierson of Rare Form Mastering, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In December of 2021, we lost the effervescent, warrior soul who was Greg Tate. Some know Greg Tate as the chest-beating activist, who solemnly swore to fight for equal rights, which he steadfastly did until the very end of his life, which was cut short when Tate went into cardiac arrest on December 7^th, 2021. Others will remember Tate as the "Godfather of Hip-Hop Journalism,” where his masterful criticism and uber appreciation for the genre, could make or break burgeoning MCs both young and old. As an artist and musician, Tate took listeners on sonic journeys not often seen since the likes of Sun Ra and John Coltrane graced this earth. With his collective, Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, Tate pushed boundaries and expanded listeners' minds to universes previously unknown, and in doing so, intertwined his love for jazz, hip-hop, and rock with his thirst for equal rights. In life, Greg Tate was a pioneer and trendsetter on many levels. In death, his message of hope, unity, and get-down-on-it funk will continue to reverberate throughout the halls of future listeners' minds. Yes, it's true, Tate cast a wide shadow, and from that shadow, gentle dawn will break way to a light which will illuminate the minds, hearts, and souls of generations to come. Greg Tate's overarching career can be boiled down to one simple message: hope. Well, Greg...message received. In what has sadly and unexpectedly amounted to Greg Tate's final interview, among other things, Greg and I chat on his musical origins, the formation of Burnt Sugar, his newest music, his thoughts on the music industry today, and a whole lot more.

Andrew Daly: Hello, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. How have you been holding up over the last year or so? What have you been up to?

Greg Tate: All things considered, I consider myself and my families blessed – both the blood kinfolk and the Burnt Sugar kinfolk. Professionally, I've been doing a lot of Zoom panels and lectures, and a lot of writing for the art world, as usual, these days. I also co-curated an exhibition at MFA [Museum of Fine Arts’ Boston called “Writing The Future: Basquiat and The Hip-Hop Generation,” which, after a delayed spring 2020 opening, ran from October 2020 to July 2021, and was acclaimed for its exhibition experience and its catalog. And of course, I helped prepare Angels Of Oakanda for release.

 

AD: Before we dive into your professional career, let’s go back a bit. What first got you hooked on music?

 

GT: Like everybody who grew up in 1960s Black America, music was everywhere – home stereo, car radio. My mom played her favorites on heavy rotation – Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, the speeches of Malcolm X. Some people don’t know Malcolm was a popular vinyl artist. My big sis was a Motown baby. But the first album I remember digging was adapted from a Disney animated short of Sterling Holloway narrating Peter And The Wolf to the music of the Russian composer Prokofiev. It was quite enchanting. Towards adolescence, I fell in love with The Temptations’ psychedelic period, produced by Norman Whitfield: Cloud Nine, Runaway Child, Running Wild, Message From a Black Man, and , Sly and The Family Stone’s Greatest Hits. Around age 16, I read Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, and became converted by his writing into an avant-garde Jazz vinyl addict, and eventually, a music journalist.

AD: Who were some of your early influences?

GT: The usual suspects: Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Miles Davis, LeRoi Jones, Ralph Ellison, Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, Toni Morrison, Betty Carter, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Wayne Shorter, Jimi Hendrix, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Santana, Mandrill, Earth, Wind & Fire, Cecil Taylor, Betty Davis, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Labelle, Joni Mitchell, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Gil Scott-Heron, and Nikki Giovanni.

AD: Let’s talk about recent events. Tell us about your new release, Angels Over Oakanda. This is your first album of new material since 2017. What can fans expect?

GT: Angels Over Oakanda is a four-song suite that draws on multiple creative sources from within the group. The first song is mostly live in the studio and is an 18-minute conducted Improvisation, with three horns, bass, guitar, keys, drums, and laptop. I say mostly because the original recording was augmented by flute, tenor saxophone, and a second guitar for overdubs. It thumps and kicks like a locomotive furthermucker, with a smooth dynamo of an engine under its hood. It runs hot and cool. Marque Gilmore created his own interpretation of the ethereal liberation theme in his "Oakland Overdrive," which is a free-bopping, freedom-swangin’ transfiguring of the loop by Jared Nickerson and V. Jeffrey Smith that ignites track one. The final track is a collaboration between our very soulful vocalist Lisala Beatty, myself as the lyricist and her choice of a section of Gilmore’s composition. It's very Afro-anthemic and Afro-angelic.

AD: I want to touch on the origins of Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber. Tell us about how things came together, and how the group has evolved to what it is today.

GT: Back in 1999, I was curious about what a modern version of a Bitches Brew-type band would sound like – especially if it deployed our late sensei, Lawrence Butch Morris’ Conduction system for improvisational ensembles. I used Conduction to conceptually push things beyond a jam band scenario. We gave it a test run for a few weeks in a midtown New York rehearsal room, and a short while later, we did our debut gig at CBGB. A month after that, we recorded our debut album, Blood On The Leaf Opus No. 1, which was the first of many at Peter Karl Studios, in Brooklyn. In the early aughts, were given a $75,000 grant from a now-defunct organization called Arts International, which facilitated overseas touring, and more recording. It kinda made the whole thing as official as getting a major label would’ve. Another case of the universe meeting you halfway...if you take a bold step forward into the void. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq7c0VOU1qU

AD: Circling back around to the new record, Marque Gilmore played a significant role here. Tell us about what he brought to the table and his relationship with the group in general.

GT: Marque and his brother David (who’s played with Steve Coleman, Me’Shell , Cassandra Wilson, and Wayne Shorter) go back to the very beginnings of the Black Rock Coalition, which they joined in the mid-’80s while they were students at NYU. Marque was the drummer for my band, Women In Love, in the ’90s, which also contained future Burnt Sugar members vocalist Mikel Banks, trumpeter Lewis Flip Barnes, and bassist Jason Di Matteo (who took over that chair from Me’Shell Ndegeocello when she launched her solo career). He was also in twelve other New York bands – BRC affiliated and non at the same time. From the beginning, we all knew he was one of the most energetic and original voices on the kit. We also peeped there was a mischievous, futuristic, hyper-creative personality behind the kit. One who shed early digital music technology to foment a new kind of fusion between acoustic and digital drumming. Marque was making drum and bass music before it was even a thing, which explains why he was able to move to England and be innovative enough to be the only drummer in ’90s London who could match the Jungle DJ’s software-driven warp-speed tempos on the kit.  Thirty years later, he’s evolved into a formidable composer and arranger in his own right. Angels Over Oakanda is his first opportunity to use a Burnt Sugar album as a blank canvas to paint his own masterpiece in tandem with our crew.

AD: Is there a musical through-line or statement you’re looking to make with Angels Over Oakanda? If so, tell us more about it.

GT: For myself, it's an abstract poetic homage to the five-hundred-year Pan-African liberation movement from the first revolts on slave ships, and onward through to the Black Panther Party – hence "Oakanda," which is in reference to the party’s birthplace – right up to the stalwart and combative young activists of Black Lives Matter.

AD: Easy questions now. What are a few of your favorite albums, and why?

GT: Bitches Brew by Miles Davis is my favorite album of all time, which spawned Burnt Sugar as much conceptually and procedurally as sonically. Miles conducted that album into being with a group of musical geniuses, who said they didn’t know what was happening until they heard the results months later. Bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin, said Miles pulled him inside during the recording and told him to "imagine that the music we're creating is a simmering cauldron and that we're the witches, and bitches stirring the pot." Miles also said, "The only way you get anything new in music is by making the best musicians in the world play beyond what they knew." Burnt Sugar is built on that idea by never playing anything the same way even once. Jimi Hendrix's Axis Bold As Love for the innovative songwriting, and experimentation with the studio as an instrument. Electric Ladyland for its variety and perfect sequencing, and Band Of Gypsys, which proved a rock guitarist could be as epic and ingenious as Coltrane with long-form improvisation. Betty Davis's debut for being so audaciously raunchy, and masterfully funky thanks to her chosen band, which drew from the best of the Bay Area, and included cats from Sly, Graham Central Station, Santana, Tower Of Power, The Pointer Sisters, and Sylvester. Of more a modern vintage, we’d cite everything by OutKast, Radiohead, and Kendrick Lamar for their non-stop commitment to artistic excellence, and introspective self-reckoning. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ925XSwjfs

AD: What other passions do you have? How do those passions inform your music, if at all?

GT: I am a lifetime student of cinema, modernist painting, African sculpture, and dance. I draw upon the hallucinatory, and immersive storytelling qualities of each, while making Burnt Sugar music, live, and in the lab.

AD: In your opinion, what is the state of the music business these days? Should artists be hopeful? Scared? Both?

GT: People have all the tools to make music at home and globally distribute it over the web. Some folks are being well paid through the revenue sources the web provides. The music business has never been a meritocracy or democracy, but it's still the most accessible, democratic entry game in all the arts, and is the best way for young talent to reach the public, and forge a career. My iTunes and Spotify apps tell me there's no shortage of music being made, and sold in vast quantities despite the pandemic. As for the re-(ab)normalization of live gigging, festival, and stadium concert-gigging, let’s see where we’re at next summer before venturing to answer that one. We’re still in unknown uncharted waters when it comes to all that entails moving forward. We gotta see what Ms. Rona and their non-gender-binary discriminating mutant variations have in store for us next.

AD: Last one. What’s next on your docket, Greg? What are you looking forward to most in the post-COVID world?

GT: We’re not getting a post-COVID world. Ain'tcha heard? No more than we’re getting a post-climate-change world. The virus has not only mutated us, and asserted dominance over the seasonal flu, but it's also altered the world as we knew it in the process. Some variation of COVID is going to be with global humanity for a long time to come, and we’re going to have to become riskier, and more adaptive to sustain our love, and support for cultural expression.

Header image of Greg Tate by Nisha Sondhe.

Many years ago, more than I care to admit, my woodwind instructor recommended a handful of records to me as an inspiration for the type of tone he was looking for in my saxophone playing. One of the albums he suggested was John Klemmer’s first record, Involvement, which I purchased soon after.

Coincidentally, I had attended an audio show in our area around the same time, and a lot of fuss was being made over these new records that were half-speed mastered. Klemmer’s Touch was one of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab’s earliest half-speed reissues, and despite this being the same performer, the musical styles of both albums couldn’t be more different. A year or so later, Blowin’ Gold was gifted to me and that, again, was a totally different style from the other two. When I later began seeking out used records, I came across many of Klemmer’s releases, including some I had never seen in the retail record stores. Others remained a mystery – I had seen the album titles listed, but had no clue as to what they sounded like. I explored and eventually collected nearly all of his catalog over subsequent years. Some became favorites, where others were interesting diversions. He also appeared as a featured soloist or sideman with various others – that’s Klemmer’s solo on Steely Dan’s “The Caves of Altamira,” for instance. John Klemmer was born in Chicago in 1946, initially playing guitar and alto saxophone at an early age until switching to the tenor sax in high school. His other interests in art culminated in him attending the Art Institute of Chicago, while he also studied music privately and gigged around the Chicago area. He signed with Chess Records upon graduating from high school, eventually recording five records for the Cadet Concept label. Klemmer’s early groups included such top Chicago musicians as Jodie Christian, Cleveland Eaton and Wilbur Campbell, while he also took gigs as a sideman and arranger for the big bands of Don Ellis, Oliver Nelson and others. During the recording of his third album Blowin’ Gold, Klemmer began using the Echoplex, an effects unit that echoed his notes back on themselves; the Echoplex became one of his trademarks, featured prominently on many of his recordings. Later recordings would feature many session musicians like Dave Grusin, George Duke, Larry Carlton, Emil Richards, Joe Porcaro, Chuck Domanico, Joe Sample, and dozens of others. I will offer a small sampling of John Klemmer’s recordings in this series. Perhaps the most difficult part of Klemmer’s catalog to find are his recordings on the Cadet Concept label. Involvement was released on CD, and Blowin’ Gold made an appearance on CD in Japan, but the remaining three have never been released other than on vinyl, with only selected tracks available on the few compilations of his music that have been released. From Involvement, here is “Stand In The Sun.” Personnel includes Wilbur Campbell (drums), Sam Thomas (guitar) and Melvin Jackson (bass). The album features two quartets – this lineup, plus another configuration substituting Sam Thomas with Jodie Christian on piano.

Klemmer’s second Cadet Concept album, And We Were Lovers, presents us with a side of standards with strings and brass, and another side of more straight-ahead tunes similar to those on Involvement.

Here is “Look To the Sky.”

His third album, Blowin’ Gold, was a full-on collision with rock, making it one of the earliest jazz fusion recordings in 1969. While tracks such as “Excursion #2” and “Children of the Earth: Flames” rocked out hard, the relatively tame track “My Love Has Butterfly Wings” introduced the world to Klemmer’s Echoplex, which, as noted, would become a recurring theme on later recordings.

Around this time, Klemmer performed and arranged briefly for one of the Don Ellis big bands. Perhaps his wildest recording with Ellis, “Excursion II” (from the album Don Ellis at Fillmore) features an arrangement by Les Hooper, and plenty of space for Klemmer to solo…and do whatever else that Klemmer would do during this era (turn up the volume towards the end during Klemmer’s solo). Klemmer led off his Blowin’ Gold album with this same song.

While borrowing a few elements from Blowin’ Gold, Klemmer toned it down just a little for the All The Children Cried album, which drifted into a more spiritual and moody direction. This is the title track from the album.

Further adrift from his earlier albums, Eruptions finds Klemmer rooted in a unique style that pulls together cosmic elements and spirituality with overtones of fusion jazz. This is “Summer Song,” one of the more coherent tracks on the album.

The second part of the series will look at Klemmer’s recordings after moving to the Impulse! record label, and some of the important records that followed.

Regina Carter grew up playing classical music: first piano, then violin, and even a bit of oboe. But while studying at New England Conservatory, she realized she had the jazz bug, so she moved back to her home state of Michigan and delved into a new line of study. This has led to a stellar career as one of the most important female jazz violinists ever. And her sound is unique, as influenced by Yehudi Menuhin as it is by Jean-Luc Ponty. Carter was born in Detroit in 1966. By the time she was 21, she was a member of the all-female jazz-pop quintet, Straight Ahead. In 1991 she moved to New York to try to establish herself in the music scene, which she did by backing visiting artists from a wide variety of genres, from Max Roach to Dolly Parton. No surprise, then, that a seamless blend of styles is a hallmark of her sound. In 1995 Carter made her self-titled debut solo album, and soon after that landed a tour with Wynton Marsalis. At that time, she was also a member of the New York String Trio. Her reputation grew as a player with precise technique, clear tone, and great intelligence. These traits, matched with a courageous approach to improvisation, helped her win a MacArthur Fellow “genius” grant in 2006. Having been trained in the Suzuki violin method as a child, Carter still believes it is an effective way to make music-making accessible to kids. Teaching is one of her passions, so she gives many master classes. It will be interesting to hear her influence in the coming generations of jazz musicians. Enjoy these eight great tracks by Regina Carter.

1. Track: “Daydreamin’ on the Niger” Album: Something for Grace Label: Atlantic Year: 1997

Carter had been with Atlantic Records for ten years, since her time with Straight Ahead, when she made Something for Grace, her second solo album. The “Grace” mentioned in the title is her mother. What you’ll notice immediately in “Daydreamin’ on the Niger,” a composition by Carter and bassist Reggie Washington, is the influence of the jazz fusion sound. There are also touches of Afropop, synth pop, and funk. But the main feature is Carter’s dense, classically-trained tone. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLukOQIAhWc

2. Track: “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” Album: Rhythms of the Heart Label: Verve Year: 1999

Rhythms of the Heart was Carter’s first release with Verve, where she was promised more creative autonomy than she’d had at Atlantic Records. The album is marked by outstanding sound production, particularly in the way producer Richard Seidel and engineer James Nichols capture the depth and complexity of the violin sound. “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” was written in 1955 by Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf and popularized by Ella Fitzgerald. For all her openness to more modern styles and techniques, Carter has a deep love of classic swing, and she understands how to make her violin practically sing the lyrics. The delicate piano accompaniment is by Kenny Barron. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji-Ji-yeHPA

3. Track: “Don’t Get Sassy” Album: Motor City Moments Label: Verve Year: 2000

Carter made Motor City Moments as a love letter to her hometown, choosing tunes by fellow musicians who were either born in the Detroit area or made it their home, like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and saxophonist Lucky Thompson. As an appropriate prelude to a collection that melds jazz and R&B, Carter opens with Thad Jones’ bluesy romp “Don’t Get Sassy.” The charm of her phrasing brings to mind the musical personality of violinist Stéphane Grappelli. (I wrote about him for Copper in Issue 89.) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eX_LEjv_iM

4. Track: “Fragile” Album: Freefall Label: Verve Year: 2001

Freefall is a collaboration by Carter with the wonderful pianist Kenny Barron. The offhandedness of his style, sometimes almost tripping over the keys, is the ideal foil to her precise technique. They’re one of those duos who bring out the best in each other. Perhaps the most surprising choice of tunes here is the song “Fragile” by Sting. The emotional tone of Carter’s violin while she improvises evokes the bowing and vibrato techniques of Isaac Stern or Itzhak Perlman more than any jazz violinist. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7M_oPWal3s

5. Track: “Little Brown Jug” Album: I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey Label: Verve Year: 2006

Carter’s mother passed away in 2005, and this album was her response, interpretations of a dozen songs that her mom particularly loved. “Little Brown Jug” is one of several nods to trombonist and big band leader Glenn Miller, apparently a favorite of Carter’s mother. As if emphasizing her intention to take this silly 19th-century pop tune seriously, Carter brazenly starts her arrangement with figures that sound like a Bach solo violin partita. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGoYu6jJFa0

6. Track: “N’Teri” Album: Reverse Thread Label: E1 Entertainment Year: 2010

On Reverse Thread, Carter traces her biological and musical heritage back to Africa, exploring that continent through folk songs, contemporary African pieces, and her own compositions. Habib Koité is a guitarist and singer-songwriter from Mali. He recorded his song “N’Teri” (“My Friend”) in 2007 with his band, Afriki. In her version, Carter makes a powerful rhythmic and textural impact by interlacing her violin pizzicato with the African kora, played by one of the masters of that instrument, Yacouba Sissoko. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpuJUrNWl1c

7. Track: “Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy” Album: Southern Comfort Label: Masterworks Year: 2014

Displaying yet another of her many musical interests, Carter made Southern Comfort, an album of traditional country and bluegrass tunes. As usual, she surrounds herself with great musicians, including guitarist Adam Rogers and accordionist Will Holshouser. The track list combines several Southern genres, representing a variety of cultures, from Hank Williams singles to African American folk songs. Among the latter group is “Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy.” Carter’s playing is characterized by artful placement of mixed modes and blue notes. It may be a bit brainy for some people; hearing it is like watching an expert mosaic artist create a simple image out of thousands of shards of gemstone. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7aX9M-sBFI

8. Track: “Crying in the Chapel” Album: Ella: Accentuate the Positive Label: Masterworks Year: 2017

The only thing the tunes on Ella: Accentuate the Positive have in common is that the great Ella Fitzgerald recorded and performed them. But the joy of this collection is in its surprises and incongruities. Who would ever expect to find the Elvis Presley hit “Crying in the Chapel” on a jazz album? Sure, it has lost all its country swing and bears no trace of the King’s imprint. Instead, Carter turns the song in to a fascinating jazz fusion voyage. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ9KuYZRZrw Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Brianmcmillen.

In Copper Issue 149 I talked about how my personal circumstances could soon be changing fairly dramatically in about a year and a half (you can read about that here). It’s still unclear which direction we’ll eventually head, but it now appears it won’t be Providence, Rhode Island. It’s looking more like Charleston, South Carolina, which is still a nice coastal town, but without all that snow! And I have a long history with Charleston; I helped a high school friend and his dad rehab a 35-foot sailboat there between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and my wife and I were later married there. I’ve vacationed there many times over a 35-plus-year period. There’s a lot to love about the Low Country. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that I could potentially be downsizing my home stereo system significantly. And I’ve therefore been spending a fair amount of time recently listening to a much smaller, seriously less-expensive system that still (at this point, at least) includes the $449 AudioEngine HD4 Home Music System. If you read my previous piece, you’ll probably remember that the one area I felt the HD4 powered loudspeaker system was lacking in was satisfyingly deep bass; you just couldn’t push them hard enough to get believable bass from their four-inch aramid fiber woofers. The 60 watt per channel (peak power) Class AB internal amps provided plenty of juice to get a very nice midrange and treble presentation, but just didn’t have enough oomph to get those woofers cranking, pretty much under any setup situation I tried. Remember, though, I did much of my listening in a fairly massive 26 by 30-foot living/dining/kitchen area with a 14-foot vaulted ceiling. Which is a challenging environment for a pair of powered loudspeakers with only four-inch woofers – no wonder the bass was a tad underwhelming! Taking them down to my main listening room where they were paired with my REL subwoofer helped a lot, but to be honest, the REL wasn’t a particularly good match with the HD4 speakers. I thought about reaching out to AudioEngine to get one of their powered subs for review, but the only model in their product lineup had been out for several years already, so I resisted that temptation. I fully realized that I’d probably end up just buying one to help confirm that the HD4 was actually going to be fully appropriate for my needs – even my already significantly scaled-back needs. Then two weeks ago, I received an email from Brady at AudioEngine; they had a new powered subwoofer that was now available for review, the S6. Was I interested? You bet – let the rejoicing begin! AudioEngine S6 Powered Subwoofer The S6 is AudioEngine’s smallest sub, with a custom designed 6-inch aramid fiber, long-throw, front-firing woofer. The tuned, sealed-box subwoofer cabinet is made from 15mm thick heavily-braced MDF, and measures 10 x 8.7 x 10 inches – it’s relatively compact as powered subs go, and can be placed unobtrusively just about anywhere. The sub weighs about 15.5 lbs., but its substantial heft surprised me when I picked up the shipping box on my front porch – I would have guessed it was much heavier. The sealed enclosure is tuned to match the woofer, and all internal elements of the amp are custom-designed in the goal of maximum sonic performance. The S6 features an attractive dark gray satin finish and has a detachable black fabric grill that covers the entire front-facing panel. Although it’s virtually invisible in its current surroundings, its styling perfectly fits the mid-century modern aesthetic of my home (translation: my wife doesn’t find it too objectionable). The S6 features a Class D internal amplifier that outputs 140 watts RMS (210 watts of peak power), and has a frequency response of 33 Hz to 132 Hz, ± 1.5 dB. The unit features an A-weighted signal-to-noise rating of 100dB (pretty surprising for a 6-inch woofer!), and the internal amp has circuitry to limit current, temperature extremes, and buffer on/off power transient noise. The S6 features the standard range of line-level inputs and controls for phase (0/180 degrees), crossover frequency (40 – 130 Hz, continuously variable), and also offers a standby switch, which enables the unit to power on when it senses a signal input. It's a very handy feature, which allows you to pretty much place the S6 out of sight and out of mind without having to worry about turning it on and off with each use. Its standby power consumption is less than 1 watt, which is way less than a typical LED light bulb. All cables necessary for connection to the HD 4 speakers are included in the package, which includes a two-meter RCA cable (my preferred connection method) as well as a two-meter stereo cable with 3.5 mm jacks at each end. Either cable is plenty long to connect to the rear panel of the left HD4 unit, and I have the S6 positioned on the floor between that speaker and the room’s side wall. In typical AudioEngine style, the subwoofer comes enclosed in a nice microfiber bag, with an additional one that contains all the necessary cables. It’s a really nice touch that elevates AudioEngine’s product offerings a bit above the norm. Use and Listening Tests The S6 was a snap to set up and get going, and it actually took probably less than an hour for me to arrive at a bass level and balance that I felt significantly enhanced the performance of the HD4 loudspeakers. I ended up placing the S6 in one of my room's corners; this was mainly to allow convenient access to the HD4's output connectors. Yeah, yeah, I know all about the conventional wisdom of not placing a subwoofer in a corner, but that setup works like a charm with my REL sub. And this is a really large room, so any bass reinforcement for the sub provided by corner placement could only be a good thing as far as I was concerned. As is usual with my subwoofer setup experiences, early on I was a bit overenthusiastic and set the level a bit too high. I eventually ended up going back and forth several times and reducing the sub level to a point that I felt offered a better balance with a variety of music. I started out with the crossover frequency set much higher, but as my experimentation went along, I found that the best overall blend with the HD4 was with the crossover set to 40 Hz. I mostly used my Moto G5S cell phone’s Qobuz client for listening via the HD4’s Bluetooth connection. But I also used a pigtail connector to attach an AudioQuest Cobalt DAC to the Moto G5S with a wired connection to the 3.5 mm input on the HD4’s rear panel. The latter setup provided better overall sound; the AudioQuest Cobalt DAC is easily much better-sounding than either the HD4’s internal DAC, or with a straight connection to my Moto G5S. For initial listening and setup, I chose several old favorites from jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut, whose albums uniformly seem to have very deep and well-recorded bass. That proved very useful to get a good baseline for adjusting the S6’s output to the room and to match the output to the HD4 speakers. For the remainder of my listening, I chose selections from Qobuz’s new releases section, including new indie rock from Alt-J’s The Dream, South Korean jazz singer Youn Sun Nah’s Waking World, alternative chanteuse Cat Power’s Covers, and Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov’s new album Bach: The Art of Life. Alt-J has kind of a mid-seventies, Pink Floyd-ish kind of vibe (without all the Roger Waters acerbic angst), and all the tunes feature very deep bass. With this music, the HD4 speakers, which had previously seemed pretty underpowered in this large room, now seemed quite capable, with the added bass from the S6 giving them the much needed lower-octave oomph to make them seem perfectly at home. The same was true of Cat Power’s Covers, which is unsurprisingly an album of cover tunes; Chan Marshall’s voice is quite evocative on her delivery of the opening track, Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion.” Marshall’s vocal range mostly resides in the lower registers, and the HD4’s presentation of this track was absolutely night-and-day different when the S6 was switched out of the loop. The track became instantly more pedestrian-sounding without the S6, but regained its power and was more engaging with the S6 added to the mix. Waking World from jazz chanteuse Youn Sun Nah has been getting a lot of traction recently – but is it really jazz? Regardless, her stark and beautiful vocal on the opening track, “Bird On The Ground,” was punctuated with a deep and effective running electric bass line that made the track more powerful with the S6 added to the mix. And while Daniil Trifonov’s solo piano doesn’t focus on the deepest octaves of the piano’s range, the recording gained a significant level of power and presence with the S6 attached to the HD4 speakers. It just sounded more like an actual piano was in the room with the S6 than without. Conclusion In my previous review, I mentioned more than once that the AudioEngine HD4 was a great-sounding loudspeaker system, but was underpowered and lacking in low bass when compared to their flagship HD6 powered speakers. The HD6 offers more than double the output power of the HD4, and their larger cabinets and more propulsive 6-inch woofers brings them much closer to my personal ideal of what the performance baseline should be for loudspeakers that I’m going to want to be happy with forever. The HD6 is definitely that loudspeaker – it's as close to a forever loudspeaker as I’ve ever heard in this category. The HD6 is priced at $250 more in overall MSRP than the $449 HD4 – but when you add to that the extra $299 for the S6, that takes the HD4/S6 package price beyond that of the HD6. That makes this a very tough call for me; I like what the extra power provided by the HD6 adds to the big picture in the overall sound of the loudspeaker. And the HD6 will play with more realism and with a scale that the HD4 alone can’t touch. But when you add the 210 total watts brought by the S6 to the equation, even though it only employs a 6-inch woofer, the long-throw bass performance from the S6 is indeed impressive. So it boils down to what do I really want – great bass and acceptably great performance from the S6/HD4 combo, or more impressive overall performance with less bass from the HD6? The HD6 has the same complement of inputs as the HD4; so adding an S6 to the HD6 would make a compelling system that's priced just south of $1K, which is still very inexpensive in comparison to my current system. And would offer an impressive level of performance across the frequency spectrum. But hey, it’s always great to have choices, right? Regardless, the AudioEngine S6, whether in a solely AudioEngine system or augmenting any other powered loudspeakers, comes very highly recommended. AudioEngine HD4 Powered Loudspeakers: $449.00 MSRP, S6 Powered Subwoofer: $299.00 MSRP, www.audioengineusa.com All images courtesy of AudioEngine and the author

It’s impossible to deny that country music has changed drastically since the days of Hank Williams and George Jones. But not every successful country artist plows ahead into the new trends without acknowledging the giants whose shoulders they stand on. As part of the movement known as neotraditional country, singer Patty Loveless manages to move forward and cherish the past at the same time. She’s also one of the best-selling female performers in country music history. Born Patty Ramey in 1957, she certainly has music in her Kentucky blood: Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle are her cousins. Her brother and sister were musicians, too, and it was her brother Roger who first talked Loveless into singing in public when she was 12. Soon they headed to Nashville, and she got her break at the Grand Ole Opry in 1973, as a replacement when Jean Shepard didn’t show up. While still a teen, Loveless regularly performed with Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, and Doyle Wilburn. She married Wilburn’s drummer, Terry Lovelace, in 1976, but changed the spelling of her last name because of Linda Lovelace the adult film star. The couple moved to North Carolina and played rock shows at clubs. When their 10-year marriage came to an end, Loveless decided to get back into country music and return to Nashville. Her decision led to a wildly successful career, fueled by the combination of rock and classic country elements in her music. Starting in 1986, she’s made 16 studio albums and had five number-one hit singles. She’s not a songwriter, but MCA Records had that in mind when they signed her. The executives there collected and commissioned plenty of songs for her. Patty Loveless was her debut in 1987. Almost half of the tracks were released as singles, and while none was a big hit, they flooded the radio waves and got her name and voice out there. “Blue Is Not a Word” was composed by country and Cajun musician Jo-El Sonnier; it had already been recorded by George Strait two years before.

Loveless released two albums in 1988. The second of them, Honky Tonk Angel, began a prolific and lucrative collaboration between her and the songwriter Kostas, the pen name of Greek-American hitmaker Kostas Lazarides. He also created chart-toppers for Strait, Dwight Yoakam, and others. Kostas contributed three songs to Honky Tonk Angel, including “Timber, I’m Falling in Love,” Loveless’ first No. 1 single. Besides tapping into commercially mainstream classic country sounds, Loveless was not afraid to sing in arrangements that were unapologetically bluegrass. “I Won’t Gamble with Your Love” is a good example, with both the acoustic instrumentation and her vocal ornaments sticking to the traditional style.

Loveless and Kostas kept making top-ten hits, including “On Down the Line” in 1990. The following year’s Up Against My Heart still featured songs by Kostas, but its biggest single was “Hurt Me Bad (In a Real Good Way),” by fellow country star Deborah Allen. Maybe the best song choice on this album is the closer, Lyle Lovett’s “God Will.” The melody takes advantage of Loveless’ strong, clear voice; she never overuses vibrato, and her intonation is always precise. The dobro player is Nashville session stalwart Jerry Douglas.

In 1992, Loveless left MCA for Epic Records, and she started there with a bang. Only What I Feel produced four top-20 hits, including the No. 1 “Blame It on Your Heart.” But Loveless was enjoying more than popular success. Her next album, When Fallen Angels Fly (1994), won the Country Music Awards Album of the Year award. This was only the third time a woman had won that prize. While the album’s bestseller was the humorous rockabilly “I Try to Think about Elvis,” there’s a range of styles here. “Ships” is an old-fashioned country story song that dives deep into the characters of a guy named Eddie, a woman named Lily, and their unexpected romance.

As is true of most successful country singers, Loveless’ meal ticket was her ability to sell a love song, whether happy or sad. There are some on both ends of the emotional spectrum on 1997’s Long Stretch of Lonesome. But in country music, sentimental torch songs are the real stock in trade. Therefore, it’s fun to hear Loveless step slightly out of her comfort zone and do a song with a different grit and energy (don’t worry, it’s still about love). The contemporary openness of “That’s Exactly What I Mean” reflects the style of its two successful Nashville songwriters, Kim Richey and Tia Sillers.

In 2001, Loveless embarked on a project concentrating on the music of her youth in Kentucky. Mountain Soul ended up being a pair of albums, with the second coming out in 2009, her last solo studio recording. Loveless takes the “mountain” part of the album’s title seriously, giving the songs a traditional sound, eschewing the slickness of pop-based country. Needless to say, she has amassed a top-notch crew of musicians who really know the style she’s after. And her singing is gorgeously elemental. Listen to the high-lonesome ornaments in “The Richest Fool Alive.”

For her fifteenth album, Sleepless Nights (2008), Loveless delved into the past of country music, covering songs made famous by a pantheon of greats. There’s the Conway Twitty hit, “Next in Line,” the Hank Williams classic “Cold, Cold Heart,” and “The Pain of Loving You,” by Wagoner and Parton. While the track “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” clearly borrows from the mountain gospel tradition, the lyrics are about trying to stay strong in the face of romantic temptation. It was a No. 1 hit in 1962 for the husband-and-wife country duo Carl Butler and Pearl. “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” was written by another important female songwriter, Decca Records house composer Penny Jay, who supplied Nashville with material for a couple of decades.

Although Loveless hasn’t made a new album in 13 years and has stopped touring, she still keeps her hand in with annual appearances at the Grand Ole Opry.

This gifted artist has more than paid her dues and deserves a long, pleasant rest on her laurels.