Issue 139

These boots were made for walking. Cowgirl, Sonoita, Arizona.

Now that my digital music system has been hitting on all cylinders for several months, I’ve suddenly become interested in high-resolution releases of Yes albums again, and have been on a buying spree of sorts since January. I had previously purchased several digital downloads of classic Yes titles from HDtracks that had begun to appear a couple of years ago; I grabbed 24-bit/192 kHz versions of Close To The Edge, Yessongs, and Going For The One. At the time, my digital playback system featured a Sonore microRendu streamer that was network-connected to my audio system; it streamed my files to my PS Audio GainCell DAC. I used Roon as my library organizer and music player; my Roon core was located on my laptop (which is also hardwired to my network), and my music was located on an SSD attached to my laptop. I was very happy with the overall sound quality I was getting from digital playback – but felt the sound of the high-res Yes downloads was maybe lackluster at best, maybe only marginally better than the 44.1 kHz CD versions. After shelling out about $30 each for the three titles, they’ve languished in my music server library virtually unlistened to for almost two years.

Fast forward to now. The Euphony Summus dual-computer setup that currently occupies my system (yeah, I know, I’ve been raving about it for several issues now) offers several key advantages over my previous setup. First of all, the music player/media server Euphony unit has the Roon core internal to the device; Roon isn’t streaming across my network to my stereo, so there’s no latency. My Samsung EVO SSDs are directly connected to the Euphony Summus – also minimizing any possibility of any latency issues. Separating the server and streaming functions between the two high-powered Euphony boxes offers a shocking level of improvement in the sound quality I’m experiencing. And with the Euphony setup, I’m able to make a selection from a multitude of music player choices. Euphony offers seamless integration with Roon, HQ Player, Logitech Media Server, Apple AirPlay, and there’s also an HQ Player workaround option through Roon that gives you much of HQ Player’s sound quality (just minus some of the functionality, like upsampling). After playing about with all these options for months, it’s become abundantly clear to me that Euphony’s own Stylus playback system trumps all of them in terms of sound quality. For about a month now, I’ve been using Roon as my library organizer, with Euphony’s Stylus player feeding Euphony’s Summus Endpoint (which streams to my DAC), and it’s a match made in musical heaven.

My company (at my day job) has a raffle every year at Christmas, and this past December, I won $100 – which shocked me, as I’ve been there 30-plus years and have never won anything. My wife told me to spend it on myself, and I made several purchases; I bought the Steven Wilson Blu-ray/CD remix/remasters of both Fragile and Close To The Edge, which were available on Amazon for $30 each. While browsing the Acoustic Sounds website, I noticed that they had the Audio Fidelity SACD of Going For The One for $30, and also pulled the trigger on that purchase. At that point, I ripped the CD layers of each to my music server, but was mostly enjoying 24/96 file playback via my Yamaha BD-A1060 universal player, which I thought was pretty good. I also had gotten some additional cash from my family at Christmas, and a couple of weeks later, I went back to Amazon’s website to order Blu-ray/CD Steven Wilson-remastered versions of The Yes Album, Relayer, and Tales From Topographic Oceans…only to find that they were no longer available, anywhere. I combed the internet and no one had them – but I was able to get the DVD-Audio/CD sets of each at about the same price from Amazon UK. I have little interest in the surround-sound component of any of the discs, and was perfectly happy with the 24/96 stereo versions available on the DVD-Audio releases.

I’ve mentioned recently about how very spoiled I’ve become with streaming digital music via my server. And with the uptick in sound quality I’ve been experiencing as of late, streamed music – even CD-quality – has been pretty impressive; the CD rips of the Steven Wilson Yes discs are miles beyond the standard catalog issues. Same thing with the CD layer rip of the Going For The One SACD, which was remastered by Steve Hoffman – its sound is exemplary compared to the catalog CD. So I soon found myself most often listening to the CD-quality rips of the high-res discs, mostly based on convenience, but also because they sounded pretty remarkable.

Not long after my explorations of the joys of listening to my Yes high-res BD, DVD-Audio, and SACD discs via the Yamaha universal player, I got heavily involved in ripping SACD discs using a Blu-ray player – you can read about that in Issue 135. I got pretty wrapped up in the experience, and over the last couple of months, I’ve ripped almost 400 SACDs to my music server. Loooooving the sound quality of all the DSD files playing natively to my DAC got me really thinking – I have the necessary equipment, so why not rip the high-res layers of all the BD and DVD-Audio discs for playback over the server, as well? That only took one afternoon, and I also wrote about my enjoyment of the elevated level of playback of high-res files without the need of a disc player in Issue 137.

I mentioned in the first part of this survey that the prices of BD, DVD-Audio, and SACD discs have spiraled, and their availability has become very limited. It’s almost like every Yes fan all at once realized how badly they wanted them, and it reached a critical mass – and now what’s still out there is harder to find, and the prices have gotten stupid crazy. I do a daily web search for SACD discs I might be interested in and bookmark them, revisiting them as funds become available to see if they’re still up for grabs. That’s how I recently acquired the Audio Fidelity Close To The Edge SACD disc; I looked at it every day for over a week, and finally pulled the trigger – with taxes and shipping, it ended up costing me over $80. Which is more than double the original $30 price tag!

Hi Res Yes on BD and DVD-Audio

I’m a big fan of the Steven Wilson remasters of just about everything he’s touched, especially the Jethro Tull and King Crimson discs, so I didn’t hesitate to purchase the Yes titles. Maybe this sounds crazy, but I feel a certain kinship to him through his work; everything he’s done in my library is in my regular rotation and sounds pretty magnificent over my system. Even though the only high-resolution, two-channel files available on any of the BD and DVD-Audio discs are 24-bit/96 kHz, I very strongly believe that 24/96 files are good enough in most cases. Also, that a really great remaster/remix is much more important than the bit-rate or sampling rate. In general, I give these five Yes albums, The Yes Album, Fragile, Close To The Edge, Tales From Topographic Oceans, and Relayer my highest recommendation. I feel they’re a tremendous improvement over the catalog releases, although I do have a few minor quibbles here and there.

 

 

One of my biggest complaints always with every version of The Yes Album has been track 2, “The Clap,” Steve Howe’s perennially sunny guitar solo that was taken from a live recording. The performance is great, but there’s a continual thumping that runs almost the entire length of the song. I’ve never been able to determine if it’s Steve Howe tapping on the body of his acoustic guitar, or if he’s stomping his foot in time to the music. I’m pretty sure it’s the former, but it’s always been annoying as hell – once you hear it, you can’t ignore it. Steven Wilson has managed in his remix to minimize the distraction – it’s still there, just waaaay less present, and less annoying.

 

 

On every catalog CD release of Close To The Edge, on track 2, “And You And I,” following Steve Howe’s acoustic guitar intro, there’s a bad edit/rough tape splice at the point where Chris Squire’s Rickenbacker bass first appears that’s always struck me as disjointed and jarring. It’s way less noticeable on any of my LP versions, and the transition is much better on the Steven Wilson remix, although the bass here seems a bit bloated to me. This album has never seemed to me to have an abundance of deep bass (whether LP or CD), so maybe if Wilson goosed the bass levels a tad, you’d think I’d be appreciative, if anything. Here, it just sounds a touch bloated. Any complaint I have is easily countered by a much greater level of clarity throughout the album’s myriad of complex passages; it improves the listening experience exponentially. That level of improved transparency spills over to Fragile, which sounds impressively better here than in any of the previous catalog versions.

 

 

My complaint with Tales From Topographic Oceans comes on the first track, “The Revealing Science of God.” I noted last issue that the 2003 catalog reissue (handled by Bill Inglot) added back in a two-minute intro at the beginning of the tune that had been trimmed from the original LP and every subsequent release. I’ve gotten really comfortable with the addition, and hoped that Steven Wilson would include it with his remix/remaster, especially since it was on the original tapes. Unfortunately, it’s not there, but since I’m hearing the truncated version of this track I’ve basically heard most of my adult life, I’m okay with it.

Relayer is another remix/remaster that shows a tremendous improvement in transparency and definition over any previous release. There are a lot of online complaints, however, about the central “battle” section of “The Gates Of Delirium.” On the Steven Wilson remix, some of the jarring sounds in the “battle” section apparently were not present on the master tapes, and could not be located; there’s a note in the album credits about Wilson’s decision to proceed without them. A lot of people seem to be really miffed, but I think it’s pretty much a non-issue – you still get 99% of the big picture. As the central section crescendo begins to fade into the “Soon” segment, there’s a tremendous gong crash that mostly gets obscured on the catalog CDs. On the Steven Wilson version, that gong crash just absolutely hangs forever; it’s another incredibly stunning moment on an extraordinary album.

I’d normally recommend listening to the 24/96 files for the Steven Wilson remix/remasters on Qobuz, but they’re not available on the service. You can listen to the CD-quality versions, and you can even buy the 24/96 versions for download, but for some reason, you can’t listen to them. Having versions of these discs from both BD and DVD-A sources, I can’t hear any differences between the two options, so if you’re at all interested, I’d definitely grab whichever you can get your hands on while they can still be had. And let’s hope that Steven Wilson continues with remix/remasters for Yessongs, Going For The One, Tormato, Drama, and 90125.

Hi Res Yes on SACD

Unfortunately, the pickings are slim here, but the two currently-available titles are well worth grabbing, even at their inflated prices. Both are on the now-defunct Audio Fidelity label, and both were remastered by the legendary Steve Hoffman. Close To The Edge and Going For The One are the only two Yes SACDs that Audio Fidelity produced; by my estimates, about a third of the AF titles that were produced are SACDs. Based on my experience with these two titles, I already have multiple AF SACDs bookmarked on eBay and Discogs that I’m waiting to pull the trigger on!

 

 

Close To The Edge is easily my favorite Yes album. The CTTE SACD wasn’t cheap, but after only a few listens, I’m already convinced that it was money well spent, and definitely among the best musical purchases I’ve ever made. It’s far and away the finest digital version of the album that exists, and is a perfect, textbook example of the artistry of Steve Hoffman. The overall improvement in transparency and improved definition on the SACD has to be heard to be believed; from the opening intro of the title track, there’s a much greater separation of instruments and voices that got homogenized on the catalog issues. There’s also a greater level of hiss on the catalog CDs; the Audio Fidelity SACD is almost perfectly silent in the really quiet parts of the album. That transition between Steve Howe’s opening acoustic guitar figure and Chris Squire’s first bass notes is sheer perfection, and is closer to the presentation found on my original LP than any other digital version I’ve yet heard. Steve Hoffman achieves the ideal balance of musical and tuneful bass, and Rick Wakeman’s end-of-song Mellotron fade-out is also spot on, while on the catalog reissues, that synth note drops off much too quickly. The closer, “Siberian Khatru” – which opened their concerts for a decade in the seventies – has so very much going on simultaneously, it’s always seemed congested on the catalog CDs. Here, the clarity of Hoffman’s remaster makes this version the gold standard!

 

 

Going For The One has always been one of my favorite late classic-period Yes albums. That said, it’s never sounded particularly good as a catalog CD release. I remember reading in Rolling Stone back in the day about the recording process for the album; Rick Wakeman had found a church organ at Vevey, Switzerland he’d absolutely fallen in love with. But it was so far from the site of the studio, the tech crew had to arrange for miles of cable to get a microphone feed to the church. That added some electrical noise to the proceedings, and in the songs with the organ (“Parallels,” “Awaken”), you can definitely hear a near-constant low-level electrical buzz in the background. The Steve Hoffman remaster has astonishingly low levels of noise; that electrical buzz is virtually gone, and the improved resolution and definition greatly benefits all the tunes. Hearing “Awaken” on the SACD is like hearing it for the first time; its delicate central section with chiming bells, percussion, and the aforementioned organ has never sounded better.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the High Vibrations 16-SACD Japanese limited edition box set, which sold for about $900 new and can be had on Discogs for about $1,200. Its arrival set off a firestorm online – it has the most excellent packaging of any box set ever, but the general consensus is that the sound quality sucks. And I mentioned in my last column that I’ve acquired a few of the Japanese import SHM SACDs (artists other than Yes), and the discs are pretty fantastic, if expensive (about $60 each). There are currently SHM CD versions of most of the Yes catalog albums available, and while they’re not inexpensive either, I’ll probably just camp out and see if SHM eventually produces any Yes SACDs. Which would definitely be worth the wait!

Yes Via High-Res Digital Downloads

As I mentioned above, I purchased three of the 24/192 digital downloads of Yes catalog titles when they first became available. My experience with 24/192 files is that they tend to offer an uptick in sound quality that justifies the increased cost. But with regard to the Yes titles, someone obviously didn’t get the memo about improved sound; it’s highly variable even among the handful of titles I downloaded. The general consensus seems to be that the variability I’ve experienced spreads across the entire lot. Shortly after downloading them, I basically abandoned them after deciding that the sound quality was less than superb. With the recent improvements to my digital playback system, I thought it might be instructive to take another listen and see if my impressions would change at all via the Euphony setup.

I can easily say that the HDtracks digital downloads benefit from the Euphony setup; they’re less sterile and clinical-sounding than through the previous system. The two studio albums have elevated levels of hiss when the downloads are compared to their high-res disc counterparts I recently acquired. The hiss on Yessongs doesn’t really bother me, especially when you take into consideration that it’s a live album from 1973, and there’s no other high-res version currently to compare it to. That bad edit/bass transition on “And You And I” from Close To The Edge – it’s just as bad here as on the catalog CDs. That’s compounded by the download’s lack of appreciable bass content throughout the whole album. Going For The One sounds just about awful – it gains absolutely nothing from being presented in higher resolution. I will admit that Yessongs, which I originally deemed the worst of the bunch, actually sounds significantly better now than through the previous system; it seems to have taken on more warmth and clarity. And it’s an essential title in the Yes catalog, where some of the songs benefit greatly from the live performances – particularly “Starship Trooper” – where Steve Howe absolutely rocks the ending and Rick Wakeman’s synth turn elevates the live version to epic proportions. It’s in very stark comparison to the fairly tame studio album track.

I’ll still hold off on acquiring any more of the high-res HDtracks downloads; it’s obviously a really mixed bag, and just too big of a crapshoot, especially at the price. And some of the titles aren’t even available at the current highest-available resolution; Fragile (for example) can only be purchased as a 24/96 download. It’s probably the file that was used for the DVD-Audio disc from the early 2000s, and WEA/Rhino was too lazy (or didn’t expect any financial incentive) to produce a 24/192 version. You can always counter that assessment with my praise for the 24/96 Wilson version of Fragile; and from most reports online, most everybody loves the 24/96 DVD-Audio version. It’s not always the bit rate; the body at the control panel (hopefully Steve Hoffman, Steven Wilson, or Kevin Gray!) has a lot to do with whether a remix/remaster is a success or not.

There’s always been an undercurrent of distrust with regard to digital downloads: the record companies generally provide zero information regarding the provenance of the source material. And until you shell out your hard-earned dough and take a listen, you just don’t know whether you’ve been had or not. With regard to the Yes high-res downloads, I’d definitely take a pass.

Header image: present-day Yes. From Yesworld.com.

Although they are not as well remembered as their male counterparts, there were a number of female-only bands in the early decades of jazz. Harlem musician Lil Hardin had her All-Girl Band in the 1920s. The Ingenues toured the vaudeville circuits in the 1930s. But the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, who wowed audiences throughout the 1940s, were special for a couple of reasons. For one thing, they were the first racially-integrated women’s band. But just as important was the opportunity this organization afforded dozens of talented women to play some of the hottest swing jazz in America.

In 1937, a group of girls at the Piney Woods Country Life School in Rankin County, Mississippi, started playing music together. They were coached by the school’s principal, Laurence C. Jones, who was also the adoptive father of the girl who would become the Sweethearts’ most famous instrumentalist, trombone player Helen Jones. After a few years of committed rehearsing and local gigs, they set off on tour in 1941. That year, the band found a wealthy patron in Arlington, Virginia, and made that city their base of operations.

They used the word “International” in their band name because, although the majority of the musicians were Black, there were also several white members and a couple of Latina and Asian players. This fact led to serious challenges during tours, since segregation laws in the South prohibited all the women from staying in the same hotel or eating together in restaurants. Often the band slept on the bus. They were also limited in the kind of venues where they could perform.

The band worked with Jesse Stone as their composer and arranger. He brought in some “ringers,” professionally trained musicians from New York, to bolster the group’s overall quality. Among them were trumpeter/singer Ernestine “Tiny” Davis, trombonist Vi Burnside, and singer Big Maybelle Smith. The band’s conductor was Anna Mae Winburn, who also sang and played guitar.

In the mid to late 1940s, the band used movie theaters to promote its work, producing “soundies,” one-song performance videos to be shown before a feature film. We are fortunate that several of those still exist, as do a handful of other tracks. Some of those were recorded for release on 10-inch singles, while other were broadcast live on radio shows.

Enjoy these eight great tracks by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

1. Track: “Jump Children”
   Year: 1946

Meet Anna Mae Winburn, who led the Sweethearts. Once she brings in the horns, she turns around and sings the heck out of a tune first recorded by Count Basie, better known as “Do You Wanna Jump, Children?” The trumpet section behind her is as powerful as any in the business at the time. They really pull off the energetic two-feel in the “jump” part of the title, referring to “jump blues,” or an up-tempo swing style structured like the blues. It was a favorite form and style for Basie, who also recorded other jumps by the songwriting team of Donahue, Van Heusen, Bryant, and Selsman.

 

2. Track: “She’s Crazy with the Heat”
   Year: 1946

Here’s an all-instrumental soundie, featuring Anna Mae Winburn and her idiosyncratic but effective conducting technique. This song is credited to Maurice King, who was one of the band’s go-to custom composers. At the piano is Johnnie Mae Rice, one of the original members from back at the Piney Woods school.

Over time, ten different women played trumpet in this band, and I have not been able to determine which of them has the solo in this film. (By the way, whoever posted the video on YouTube identified it as 1945, but the Library of Congress, which catalogs soundies, says 1946.)

 

3. Track: “How ’Bout That Jive”
   Year: 1947

Ernestine “Tiny” Davis was one of the New York pros that the band’s arranger hired to help out the Sweethearts. Her lion of a voice lays down this blues so hard that it won’t be getting up again. The horns have a lively conversation with her as she sings “I’m a queen-size mama with a king-size appetite.” And then she picks up her trumpet and lets it sing the last verse. Unfortunately, the end of her solo is cut off on this video, and this is not one of the tunes included on the best-of audio compilation that came out in 2013 on Rosetta Records.

Interestingly, Davis started her own group in the late 1940s, which recorded this song at a faster tempo, more like a jump.

 

4. Track: “Lady Be Good”
   Year: 1944

No jazz band or artist made it through the 1940s without recording some Gershwin. This hot! hot! hot! rendition of “Lady Be Good” was preserved from a live radio broadcast. A bunch of the band’s radio tracks were collected and released in 2007 on an album called Hot Licks put out by Sounds of Yesteryear.

The wildly imaginative drumming is by Pauline Braddy, another of the Sweathearts’ original members and always an audience favorite.

 

5. Track: “Swing Shift”
   Year: 1944

“Swing Shift” is another tune that the Sweethearts borrowed from Count Basie. It was written by trumpeter Buck Clayton, and offers plenty of close harmony and syncopated energy for the horns. These women have real power.

It’s also worth mentioning that the song “Swing Shift” gave its name to an interesting scholarly book by Sherrie Tucker (Duke University Press, 2000) on the all-girl bands of the 1940s.

 

6. Track: “One O’Clock Jump”
   Year: 1946

More Basie, and maybe the best of his famous jump blues numbers, one that he co-wrote with Eddie Durham and Buster Smith. The recording, from a live broadcast, is especially fun because it’s a heavy-hitting two-band combo featuring both the Sweethearts and the Armed Forces Radio Orchestra.

 

7. Track: “Tuxedo Junction”
   Year: 1945

Many people think of “Tuxedo Junction” as a Glenn Miller tune from 1940, but although his band made it famous, it was written by Erskine Hawkins for his Savoy Ballroom orchestra in the 1930s.

Forget what you’ve heard from Glenn Miller. This recording by the “buoyant bevy of beautiful babes” (as the radio host describes the Sweethearts) takes the tempo slow, and the arrangement focuses on the lower horns as accompaniment to Jean Starr’s trumpet solo.

 

8. Track: “Galvanizing”
   Year: 1945

Maurice King wrote this Basie-style swing number. Although the sound from the radio broadcast isn’t the best, the arrangement shows the even quality among all of the band’s sections. Trumpets pass an idea to the saxophones, who move it along to the trombones, who swing it over to the piano. Meanwhile, the drum acts like the glue for all these disparate parts.

Much as it would be nice to think that an all-female orchestra was valued only on its own merits, the fact of the music industry is that they probably would not have gotten nearly as much exposure and accolades if it had not been wartime. Their work on Armed Forces Radio, such as the source of this track, was central to their success.

In the previous episode, we talked about the merits of the MCI JH-110 professional studio tape recorder. Now it’s time to have a look at its not-so-strong points.

Despite its many innovative features and excellent performance, the JH-110, in any of its variants, was not exactly the most long-lasting tape machine out there. The IC (integrated circuit) sockets go bad, the capacitors go bad, the multi-pin connectors used throughout the machine go bad, and so on…

Fortunately, parts are still easy to find (at least in the US), and the JH-110’s modular design makes it easy to get to where you need to when doing repairs. But, make no mistake about it: if you come across one of these machines in someone’s damp basement, housing a family of spiders, rats, dinosaurs or worse, you will certainly need to completely rebuild it. Of all the machines covered in this series, this one is the least likely to still work, or to only need a little bit of work, if found somewhere collecting rare species of dust mites for the past few decades.

There’s also good news though. Given the frequent need for complete restoration of these units, Chris Mara of Mara Machines in Nashville, Tennessee, does exactly that: he completely rebuilds MCI tape machines (and he also runs the Welcome to 1979 recording studio complex in Nashville, just in case you were about to complain about your hectic work schedule), allowing your time to be better spent using the tape machine rather than fixing it.

I recently asked Chris how he chose the MCI machines as his main focus, and this is his reply: “What first drew me to MCI machines was their sound while using them in the studio. I grew to appreciate the simple design and logical layout of electronics and transport. They are “bolt-on” upgradeable, to [accommodate] all kinds of formats and configurations, and have compatible parts across different models. This has allowed Mara Machines to restore them in a very cost-effective way and offer new add-ons such as transformer I/O [input-output] cards and wireless remote control. This is just the beginning!”

 

The JH-110 was equally popular in recording and mastering facilities as it was in the broadcasting sector. As MCI was also offering multitrack tape machines, mixing consoles, and even specialized products for use in broadcasting facilities, such as video tape recorders (VTRs) that were popular with film and television broadcasting studios, it was not uncommon to find multiple different MCI products in the same facility. As such, the JH-110 could be found in use as the stereo mixdown recorder, alongside the JH-16 or the JH-24 16- and 24-track multitrack tape machines and a JH-500 or JH-600 Series mixing console.

A JH-45 autolock could also be used to synchronize two JH-24 multitrack recorders, to increase the number of channels available, thereby starting the trend of recording a drum kit using 23 microphones, each recorded on a separate channel so that it could subsequently be processed individually, before being mixed together with the remaining 22 drum tracks. This capability provided the necessary technical background for the development of such anti-audiophile recording techniques as recording a single vocalist using six microphones, or placing five microphones around a guitar amplifier. It was clearly the end of an era, of the ideal of using a pair of good microphones to record an entire symphony orchestra, in a manner which would still be deemed excellent-sounding five or more decades after the fact, and countless shifts in recording industry trends later, on the other hand being largely dismissed as archaic, in favor of a brave new world, enabled through such technological “advances.” More recently and along the same lines, digital audio workstations (DAW’s) have enabled anyone to record 56 channels of drums, 28 channels of guitar, seven layered basslines, and 205 vocal overdubs, edited and Auto-Tuned, all at a very minimal cost and taking up only a keyboard and a mouse’s worth of desk space, dwarfing the capabilities of any tape-based system and analog mixing console. Curiously, this development came at around the same time that the music industry stopped making any serious money out of recordings, although many will maintain that there is absolutely no connection there!

 

MCI was also known for pricing their products attractively, which undoubtedly contributed to their success. While they clearly were not built to last 100 years, the products were certainly built to last a good few decades and were easily field-serviceable, with a network of dealers and service engineers around the United States readily available to promptly deal with any issues and avoid prolonged downtime.

In view of that, there was nothing really wrong with the reliability of the JH-110 when it was new; in fact, it did much better than what most people consider acceptable nowadays (just think about how fast your smartphone will be considered obsolete). However, few people at the time could imagine that 46 years down the line, these machines would still be found in regular commercial service. The fact that other tape decks tended to survive even longer prior to needing restoration simply proves how differently the world worked back then.

The economic realities of our times would not permit such excesses of engineering to be produced in quantity, as the market for such long-lasting items (not those who would want them, but those who could actually afford them) would be vanishingly small. It is worth comparing the cost of a new tape machine back in the 1970s with the cost of a house, a car, or your salary at the time, to fully appreciate what it took to own one back then. What you will pay for one of these over-engineered professional tape machines nowadays is really just a nominal amount. Yet, in a world accustomed to short-lived, disposable plastic trash, there are people who publicly opine all over the internet that they find tape machines overpriced nowadays. I find that a lot of things are overpriced nowadays, in terms of what kind of quality you will get for your money, but by comparison, audio equipment tends to be more on the underpriced end of the spectrum, considering how much effort and specialized knowledge goes into creating it. Especially when it comes to vintage audio equipment from the era of “built to last forever” – most of it is an unbelievable bargain.

If the world ever goes back to reasonable again, I don’t think such items will remain as cheap for very long.

These are interesting times to purchase equipment, both new and old, that under normal circumstances would only be seen in the most high-profile professional establishments. Nowadays, a lot of it is even viable for home entertainment.

In fully restored and working condition, an MCI JH-110 is also one of the machines with the most bells and whistles built in.

 

As with Ampex tape decks and many other American products, the JH-110 was very popular in the US but relatively rare in Europe, due to the persistent tendency of the Old World to overcomplicate and overtax imports. As such, knowledgeable techs and parts will usually be found on the US side of the pond, although I do know of a couple of MCI tape machines in European studios.

Prices for a working JH-110 range from $3,500 to $12,000, depending on configuration and the extent of the restoration. Low-cost unrestored offerings on popular online auction websites should be considered only as major restoration projects for experienced persons.

A fully restored JH-110 in a tall, high-profile cabinet will certainly be an impressive statement in your studio or listening room. In most cases, though, the smaller variable-profile cabinet will have less of a detrimental impact on the room acoustics. The electronics and transport were designed so that you could easily do away with the industrial-looking trolley cabinet altogether, and build the machine into custom-made studio furniture, possibly made of mahogany, hand-carved by a master craftsman and designed to complement the studio’s room acoustics.

If it would have been a bit more indestructible, the JH-110 might have been my favorite tape machine. But it isn’t.

In the next episode, I’m going to tell you which one is my all-time-favorite tape machine…or not! You’ll have to wait and see.

 

Header image: The JH-110 in the variable profile cabinet. Photo courtesy of Sabik Chaparro.

In the early 1970s, some young musicians in London were getting tired of the fancy productions being pawned off as rock music. They made an effort to get back to the harmonic and structural roots of rock, in defiance of the hifalutin synth arrangements that the record industry was backing. Thus was pub rock born, and Declan MacManus, soon to change his name to Elvis Costello, jumped right into the scene.

It was not a big leap to the burgeoning punk attitude that convinced folks like the Sex Pistols and the Clash that absolutely anyone could play music, even without the establishment’s blessing. While Costello was punk at his heart, he had a sardonic wit and poetic bent that made his songs stand apart from the usual punk fare. These characteristics placed him in the New Wave school.

While playing in a band called The Flips and working as a data entry clerk, Costello landed himself a solo contract with the indie label Stiff Records. That company released My Aim Is True (1977), his debut album. It was the first of five records to be produced by fellow songwriter Nick Lowe. The album itself did well, entering the Top 40 in the U.S., although neither single made much of a splash. Time has changed that, however: “Alison” is now one of Costello’s best-known songs.

“I’m Not Angry” is a good example of Costello’s unique blending of old-fashioned rockabilly style with the wildness of punk and the humorous societal criticism of the likes of Oscar Wilde. The raunchy lead guitar line is by John McFee, who was soon to join the Doobie Brothers.

 

Solo Costello was off to a strong start, but he needed a backing band. The Attractions were formed in time for his second album, This Year’s Model (1978). Steve Nieve played ukulele, piano, and organ, Bruce Thomas covered bass guitar, and Pete Thomas was on drums. That trio would make nine albums with Costello. The reception to This Year’s Model was similar to that of the debut: decent album sales but no successful singles. That situation started to change, at least in Britain, with Armed Forces (1979), whose single “Oliver’s Army,” about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, reached the No. 14 spot on the UK charts.

Armed Forces also includes the rumbling, intense, and grimly sarcastic “Goon Squad.” Costello uses interrupted and asymmetrical rhythmic phrases to express the narrator’s fury at the hopeless fate society forces on him. Thomas’ drumming is a distinctive feature of this track.

 

With Get Happy!! in 1980, Costello introduced into his music the laconic backbeat of ska and the bluesy harmony of soul. Fans’ reacted well to the change: the biggest UK single off this album, and one of the biggest in Costello’s career, was his cover of the Sam and Dave R&B hit “I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down.”

The rock star lifestyle was starting to affect Costello’s health when he made Trust in 1981. In interviews he has admitted to being “close to a self-induced nervous collapse” because of drug use and drinking. He was also angry. The UK had elected conservative Margaret Thatcher, and Costello despaired for the future of his country. Another song-inspiring social irritant was the rise of Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer, whose misandry is believed to have sparked the lyrics to Costello’s “You’ll Never Be a Man.” The syncopated, rolling piano part from Steve Nieve is right out of Motown.

 

In spite of his physical and mental condition (or maybe because of it), Costello was tremendously prolific in the early to mid 1980s. And he was as musically adventurous as he was productive. Almost Blue (1981) embraced Nashville to such a degree that it featured a label warning potential buyers to expect a significant helping of country music. For Imperial Bedroom (1982), Costello wanted a producer who would push the boundaries of studio technology, so he turned to former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. He brought in female backup singers and a horn section on Punch the Clock (1983), which garnered him his first US Top 40 single, “Everyday I Write the Book.”

Goodbye Cruel World came out in 1984, colored by the fashionable electronic sounds of the day. The writing and recording of that album was arduous due to dissent among bandmembers, particularly bass player Bruce Thomas. Still, there are some good tracks in the collection, including “Room with No Number,” amusing for being a bit deranged harmonically, rhythmically, and lyrically.

 

While some tracks on King of America (1986) featured the Attractions, other songs are accompanied by a pickup band dubbed the Confederates. The record’s Americana feel is in part inspired by producer T-Bone Burnett, who had recently toured with Costello.

During that same year, Blood and Chocolate was released, which would be the last collaboration between Costello and the Attractions for ten years. “I Hope You’re Happy Now” features an organ-backed, Phil Spector-style wall of sound. It also contains some classic Costello lyric snarls, such as “You make him sound like frozen food, his love will last forever.”

 

After the Attractions split up, Costello struck out on his own for several years, relying on session musicians. He then rounded up a “new” backing band, the Imposters, for All This Useless Beauty (1996). But the Imposters were actually the Attractions, with Davey Faragher replacing Thomas on bass. They have stuck with him for the past 25 years, with especially intensive output in the early 2000s: When I Was Cruel (2002), North (2003), Il Sogno (2004), and The Delivery Man (2004). 

Costello made the 2008 record Momofuku so quickly that he named it after the man who invented instant ramen. He was helped out by Jenny Lewis, whose band Rilo Kiley had recently hit international fame with their album Under the Blacklight. Lewis sings backup on many tracks, including the heavy metal-inspired “Stella Hurt.”

 

Although he took an eight-year break from releasing albums following Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (2009) and National Ransom (2010), Costello is back at work in the studio. 2018’s Look Now uses a full orchestra in addition to the Imposters. His latest offering is Hey Clockface (2020), a solo venture and his 31^st studio album. Nor does he ever stop seeking new styles to embrace. The title song is a delightful cover-cum-modernization of an old Fats Waller/Andy Razaf tune with a New Orleans-flavored horn arrangement.

 

I have no doubt that album number 32 is just around the corner.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Robman94.

Wouldn’t you hate it if you went to the theatre and had purchased your higher-tier seats with guaranteed optimal views of everyone on stage, the sets and even a glimpse of the musicians in the pit below, only to find that your seat had been taken, or worse still, there were no seats in the house! When you pay for a good seat, you don’t want to be left hanging with standing room only.

Similarly, when you invest in high-quality musical equipment for your home, the last thing you want is a compromise in seating. Not because your listening chair or couch is uncomfortable, but because you have discovered that you can hear a better sound somewhere in the room other than in your main seating position. It can be frustrating to say the least. You could liken it to the awkwardness of asking that person who took your seat to move, in a polite yet firm way; “I’m sorry, I think you are sitting in my seat.” But what you’re really thinking is, “Just what do you think you are doing there? Get out of the way!”

Likewise, a sonic imposter is likely invading your listening room right now, except that this one is not brazen enough to impede your listening experience by making itself visibly known. Oh no, this interloper is invisible, but nonetheless is discernibly detracting from the enjoyment of your musical performance. We are talking about the presence of a standing wave (or waves).

Just what is a standing wave, what does it do to our sound, is it really that bad, and more important, what should you do about it?

In physics, a standing wave is one that varies in amplitude over time, but its peak amplitude profile doesn’t move in space. Standing waves are formed by the combination of two waves of the same amplitude and frequency moving in opposite directions.

 

Why does this matter in acoustics, and in our listening rooms? Standing waves may create areas of undesirable resonances within a room and so produce some notes that will be louder than others in those areas, especially in the bass. (Conversely, there may be areas of cancellation, where certain frequencies may be attenuated in specific locations in the room. We touched on this in “Subliminal or Sublime Bass?” in Issue 138.)

Standing waves happen because the dimensions of a room are the same or multiples of the wavelength of the sound at a particular frequency. The room dimensions, speaker position and listening position are what determine the amplitude of a sound waveform at a given frequency. Rather than decaying quickly, that sound wave is emphasised, and you hear it as an unwanted resonance or volume peak. Other frequencies are less prominent from where the same sound wave reflects back on itself over time, leaving a null or a part of the frequency response where there is little sound pressure, and a volume “suck out.”

What is the overall result? You have sound wave energy which is emphasized in some frequencies and nulled in others, which causes an in-room frequency response that is uneven and measurably imbalanced. If you think of a butterfly, the body part is where there is no change in movement is the null sound, and the wings represent the sweep of the amplitude of the sound wave, where there are changes in movement – and peaks in the standing wave.

If you are a bass guitar player like me, you may have heard such resonances when trying out different-sized speaker cabinets. Depending on the note you play (the sound waveform) and the size of the cabinet (the “room dimensions”), you may notice that at certain frequencies the sound is no longer even and smooth, but instead, uneven in volume. I have even seen some smaller bass cabinets (a 1 x 10-inch model, for example) actually move around the floor because the cabinet wasn’t sturdy enough to compete with the standing waves created by the cabinet and floor and the note being played.

Standing waves can really mess with the low-frequency response in our music. This is part of the reason why, as you move around your room, some areas sound fuller and richer in bass, while others are lacking. The practical problem is that for most of us with “smaller” rooms (i.e., up to hundreds of square feet and not concert halls or stadiums), the bass, which comprises about 30 percent of what people like in an audio system, sets the context for our midrange and treble – and that in most home listening rooms, the bass is adversely affected up to and including about 150 Hz – right where our low end “lives.” The range of frequencies which are impacted decrease as the room size increases. Bigger rooms are affected up to about 90 Hz, and much bigger rooms are affected up until about 60 Hz.

 

If there is any compensation in this, some of us can take consolation in the fact that we have listening rooms that are less than ideal in their shape and lack of symmetry. However, those “flawed” room shapes, like an “L”-shaped room, or a room which is open on one side or is asymmetrical, can help break up standing waves rather than reinforce them.

Standing waves are a fact of life. You can’t eliminate them, unless you plan to listen to music in an anechoic chamber, or outside, where there are no room boundaries that would create standing waves. (One interesting solution would be a listening room that opens out to the great outdoors on one side.) The bigger issue is how much control you have over them. In fact, to complain that you have standing waves is a bit like complaining that you have walls.

OK, rooms may not be perfect or even close, but the very fact that the room has such a massive influence over your sound means that you can do more to change your room’s behaviour, by addressing standing waves and correctly aligning your low frequencies, than swapping out your equipment or loudspeakers.

In a following article we will look into how we can tailor our room to taste by addressing standing waves, in our hunt for that sound – the sonic ideal we all strive for.

 

Header illustration of a standing wave courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Vegar Ottesen.

The Montreux Jazz Festival has been home to some of modern music’s most memorable live performances. Across its fifty-year history, what has really set the festival apart has been its commitment to documenting every concert they have hosted. This has created a living, breathing articulation of founder Claude Nobs’ vision. Today the archive that sits at the center of the Claude Nobs Foundation, which boasts over 5,000 recordings. In total they tell a remarkable story and chart a journey that’s truly like no other in music.

Now in partnership with BMG, the festival will begin to release these recordings on CD and vinyl through a series they are calling The Montreux Years. The first two compilations celebrate the multiple appearances that Nina Simone and Etta James made to the festival over the years. They were mastered by Tony Cousins at London’s iconic Metropolis Studios, where he incorporated the MQA process with the goal of better capturing the original sound of these very special live performances. Both collections include expansive liner notes and previously unseen photography.

When Nina Simone took to the Montreux stage for the first time on June 16, 1968 she built a lasting relationship with Claude Nobs. Known to be volatile at times on stage, the trust she placed in Nobs created an energy that clearly comes across on the recordings in Nina Simone: The Montreux Years. The album features selections from all five of Simone’s Montreux concerts: 1968, 1976, 1981, 1987 and 1990, with Simone’s 1968 landmark concert presented in full.

 

Etta James: The Montreux Years features recordings from her Montreux performances in 1977, 1978, 1989, 1990 and 1993, and reflects Etta’s dynamic artistry and long-lasting impact. Spanning three decades, the James collection includes nods to her earliest hits through medleys like “At Last” and “Trust in Me,” and moves to the raw and emotional “I’d Rather Go Blind” and soulful horn-driven “Tell Mama.” The collection closes with “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” James’ homage to Jimmy Reed and the encore of her 1978 concert.

Together these are powerful musical packages from two of the strongest voices in jazz and blues to ever take a stage. We had the opportunity to talk about these collections with Thierry Amsallem, film director and Claude Nobs’ universal legatee, chair/CEO of Montreux Sounds and chair of the Claude Nobs Foundation. In our discussions we also learned more about Nina Simone’s history with Montreux and what lies ahead as the festival takes to the stage next month for the first time since 2019.

 

Ray Chelstowski: What prompted you to release these two records together?

Thierry Amsallem: They both played the festival four or five times. Nina herself played four times in Montreux. She was living in Switzerland at the time and she was a good friend of Claude Nobs, who was a kind of godfather to her daughter. Etta James was also a good friend of Claude’s. [These records are] a compilation of all of their appearances at Montreux. While they both have passed away, one [I would consider] the queen of jazz while the other was the queen of soul and blues. They were both particularly important for Montreux. I only met Etta James in 1993. But Nina Simone was coming to Montreux quite often to see Claude. As you may know she was a classical musician at the beginning but she suffered because of racism, with people suggesting she wasn’t really that good. So she moved to jazz and became quite an artist. Even today as you know she is remixed by the biggest DJs in the world.

 

RC: Nina Simone was known at times to have a somewhat hostile presence on stage. That comes across just a bit here but it’s relatively tame. Were her performances at Montreux challenged by the audience, with the audience giving her a hard time, like they were elsewhere?

TA: She had a beautiful voice but I remember Claude telling me the stories of how in 1976 he had to take care of her. She was like a grenade without the pin and could explode at any time. The goal was to [get] her onto [the] stage. They had to take care of her and that required switching off [with different people taking shifts] every two hours because she was unmanageable. For example, she went to buy some black socks at a store in Montreux and she was served by a blonde woman. Nina said to her, “I’m sure that you won’t serve me because I’m Black!” The lady responded, “Don’t worry. I actually work for a Black family!” Then once in the middle of a song in 1976 she told a lady who was standing to sit down. She was frightening the audience. It was always like this.

 

I think that she actually fell in love with Claude. She would say on stage that Claude “treats her like a queen because she is a queen.” At the end, she had a fight with Claude because she discovered he was gay. She was also claiming rights to the production (recordings). So, she came to his place with a kitchen knife asking everyone, “where is he? Where is he?” She wanted to cut him in pieces and at the time Claude was actually hiding under the table. That was the worst time with her, the most complicated.

RC: These are compilations of both artists’ time at the festival. How did you select the songs, and is there a volume two for Nina Simone and Etta James in the works?

TA: The decision was quite complicated because the first time that I saw the compilations of songs I thought that [they were] missing everything in between [most of the performances], that [they weren’t] the same as a full concert. But is really an approach more for people who don’t know Nina Simone or Etta James. Then one by one we will be releasing the full concerts for each. Not just another compilation. With artists like this the music has a longer life and you can continue to work on it so that they are understood by future generations.

 

RC: How involved were the estates of Nina Simone and Etta James in these releases?

TA: Before Claude passed away it was said that he told Nina Simone’s estate that if we were to publish the 1976 concerts the estate would be compensated. I respected that because I preferred that the estate continue to publish concerts as opposed to having them remain in the books. So I gave my co-producing rights to the estate of Nina Simone. It’s always an issue of connection. Now, in working with BMG, they manage all of the deals directly with the artists.

RC: Both Nina Simone and Etta James took the stage in July 1990, five days apart. Did they see each other perform that year?

TA: That’s a good question. They might have. Unfortunately it would have been Claude who would have known and he’s passed away. I’m not sure. As I remember in the 1990s Nina Simone was very discreet and didn’t appear in public often. She led a very quiet life.

 

RC: Please tell our readers more about the Claude Nobs Foundation.

TA: Montreux is a small city, very quiet, and at the time the festival began it was filled with older women from the UK. Claude had the great idea of shaking it up and decided to organize concerts. He started with the Rolling Stones directly in 1964, which was their first time performing outside of the UK. He followed that with Pink Floyd. Then he had the idea of starting a jazz festival because he had been listening to jazz since he was a kid. He was very interested in this kind of music, and he recognized that there was no video to be found of the jazzmen he enjoyed listening to. That prompted him to begin the recording and broadcasting of each concert he organized.

Since then we have always recorded with the very latest technology and now have over 5,000 recordings. Claude would always ask the artists, “What are you going to show your grandchildren if you aren’t recorded?” Before this, there were of course live musical recordings. But rarely were there any with video of the performance. So it was a fantastic idea he had and I have now worked on those archives for 35 years.

It’s been a lot of work. My goal is to preserve it for not only the next generations but for the next millennium. We digitized the entire thing. Years ago we began with over 18,000 tapes. Now it’s all digitized and is an active archive on a server. We did this with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. I had 250 people working on the project for 13 years –  students, professors, and researchers. In 2013 the archive was inscribed to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register. We continue to work on many projects, improving the sound and the picture to have the most metadata around each [performing] group. We are also working on the musical sociology to help explain what happened [in these festivals] because it wasn’t only about jazz. It was jazz and blues and everything in between, even rap.

For the first time, we put two songs onto DNA. You can record now on synthetic DNA, which is a very low-cost energy process that allows you to keep the content [archived safely] for thousands of years. With this technology you could put the memory of the entire web into a shoebox.

 

RC: What do the festival and the Foundation have planned next for release?

TA: Across our 50 years we have actually published over 450 concerts. Each artist has an audience. It could be two people to twenty million. Together they have driven a billion views of our content online. CDs are different. With CDs you own your music. You have the physical product. Very soon we should release many more because of our partnership with BMG.

RC: Who are you most excited to see hit the stage next month at this year’s festival?

TA: You know it’s [going to be] a big surprise, because the festival will be the same size as it was when it began in 1967. It’s small. A stage is being built on the lake but there will only be seats for 600 people. That’s all we can do today. So for me it’s a rediscovery of what the festival was like in its early years. Although the production this time will be made on the lake stage using drones [for filming] – which should be interesting. I am excited though because we have newcomers, Arlo Parks and Nubya Garcia. If you don’t know their music you should check it out. There’s more of a focus on Swiss artists because of the travel limits. It’s going to be very good for Swiss artists.

Header image of Nina Simone © 1976 by Georges Braunschweig.

In our first installment of this series, we looked at Cal Tjader’s first body of work on the Fantasy Records label. Our story picks up at the point where Tjader moved to a larger, better label to release his music.

In a letter to brothers Max and Sol Weiss, who owned Fantasy Records, Tjader noted that he would be taking up an offer to record for Verve Records, which had recently been acquired by MGM, and working under producer Creed Taylor. Tjader’s polite letter did not relay his disappointment and distrust in the label – his pals Dave Brubeck and Vince Guaraldi had both suffered at the hands of Fantasy, by selling records but having been cheated out of a lot of money they were owed for royalties. Brubeck, in fact, was led to believe that he was a 50 percent owner of the label (as he had joined the label when it was founded), only to find out that he was instead 50 percent owner of only his recorded works, not the entire label.

In addition, the Weiss brothers had no clue how to run a record label, and possessed no musical sense. Fantasy started life as Circle Record Co., a record pressing plant – the brothers’ background was based more in manufacturing than in music. It took Saul Zaentz joining Fantasy to bring some structure to the company and in 1967, after becoming president of the label, Zaentz and a group of investors purchased the label from the Weiss brothers.

Cal Tjader’s Verve-era recordings were occasionally a mixed bag but nonetheless, most were noteworthy projects that brought him added success. Stylistically, he would broaden his horizons and explore new musical genres while simultaneously continuing his interest in Latin jazz. Not that his groundbreaking Fantasy recordings fell short by any means, but now he had more room to expand musically under his tenure at Verve.

His first album with Verve, in the Latin jazz style he was known for, picked up right where he left off at Fantasy. In A Latin Bag would cover a few standards and originals, with “Triste” being one of Tjader’s more memorable compositions.  (He would re-record this a few albums later under the title “Fuji.”)

 

One long-forgotten Verve album deserves a mention: Saturday Night, Sunday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco. This is a straight-ahead gig at the legendary jazz club featuring Freddie Schreiber (bass), Johnny Rae (drums) and Lonnie Hewitt (piano). If you ever find a copy in the bins, grab it! This also appeared on a two-on-one CD with In a Latin Bag issued by Él/Cherry Red Records that is similarly difficult to find (it marks the first CD release of both albums, and was not widely distributed).

Another of Tjader’s early albums for Verve was a pairing with Anita O’Day on the album Time for Two. This lively album features both enjoying each other’s performance. Here is “Under a Blanket of Blue.”

 

In 1962, bossa nova was just beginning to make inroads in the US. Tjader recorded The Contemporary Music of Mexico and Brazil, featuring arrangements by Clare Fischer and highlighting the compositions of Mario Ruiz Armengol (of Mexico) and a handful of Brazilian tunes. Laurindo Almeida contributed his guitar to the latter tunes, along with the thoughtful album closer “Choro e Batuque.”

Teaming up again with Clare Fischer on piano and organ several months later, Tjader recorded Soña Libré, featuring a couple more Brazilian tunes (“O Barquinho,” “Manha de Carnaval”), an overlooked Henry Mancini tune, “Sally’s Tomato,” a 6/8 arrangement of Claude Debussy’s “Rêverie,” and originals by Tjader and the group. “Insight” was penned by this group’s conguero, Bill Fitch.

 

Tjader’s biggest success on the charts was his album Soul Sauce – it sold over 150,000 copies and received a Grammy nomination. The title track was the hit from the album, a new performance of the Chano Pozo tune “Guarachi Guaro” (pronounced “Wachi Wara”) which Tjader had performed on one of his Fantasy albums several years prior. “Soul Sauce” was one of his signature tunes and a crowd favorite, and the album itself was chock-full of Latin jazz goodness. The CD adds a few notable bonus tracks, including a remake of “Mamblues” (from his first Fantasy 12-inch LP) as well as a straight-ahead jazz tune named “Ming.” Here’s the big hit from the record:

 

The word “soul” would be used on other Tjader Verve albums. The follow-up album to Soul Sauce was Soul Bird: Whiffenpoof, later followed by Soul Burst, another highlight in the Verve catalog, featuring a young Chick Corea on piano and arrangements by Oliver Nelson. Tjader and company put a new spin on the Dizzy Gillespie classic “Manteca” by dialing it down a few notches, tackled a Cuban descarga from an old Panart record head-on, and featured one of Corea’s tunes, “Oran.” Here is the title track:

 

On some of these albums, it feels as though Verve and/or Creed Taylor didn’t quite know what to do with Cal Tjader. On one hand, Several Shades of Jade was a successful collaboration with Argentinian pianist, composer and arranger Lalo Schifrin, “Jade” referring to Eastern/Asian themes through suggestion and, of course, as a nod to “Tjade(r)” the musician. Years later, Schifrin clarified that he based his arrangements on the scales used by different musical cultures and adapted them for jazz, versus using Asian instruments or directly borrowing musical styles. (No kotos or gong crashes peppering every tune, in other words.) Example: Schifrin makes good use of Middle Eastern scales in the driving tune “The Fakir.” Here is Schifrin’s adaptation of the Horace Silver tune “Tokyo Blues,” which cleverly picks up a few cues from Silver’s performance.

 

On the other hand, the similarly-themed album Breeze from the East didn’t so much suggest the East as hit us over the head with it. Verve wanted a follow-up to Jade, and arranger Stan Applebaum was recruited for the task. The ill-fated result is a kitschy mix of lounge music with faux Asian themes. (If you really want to hear how bad this is, the track “Cha” wraps up several dated Asian clichés in one convenient package.) Tjader expressed his distaste for the album, suggesting it should have been titled “Breeze from the Men’s Room” in an interview with his San Francisco DJ pal Herb Wong. In a Down Beat interview, he mentioned it was “a dumb album,” and that after hearing the recording, he “went outside and vomited – figuratively, not literally.” Despite that, he still rescues the album with a couple of tracks where he is featured with his quintet, including the Latin classic “Poinciana,” and a Tjader-penned classic, “Black Orchid,” that dates back to his earlier Fantasy days.

 

The album Along Comes Cal has a curious history. A gig at El Matador was recorded with the intention of releasing it on LP but apparently, the pianist Al Zulaica did not get along well with Tjader at the time; feeling that his work was being overly scrutinized, he was nervous and did not perform well on the gig. The only track salvaged from the session was “Los Bandidos,” which catches a Tjader outfit that is on fire. The rest of the album was recorded in the studio, with arrangements by Cuban bandleader and arranger Chico O’Farrill. While this album is atypical in that it features primarily shorter tracks with a handful of popular tracks of the day (“Along Comes Mary,” “Our Day Will Come,” and “Green Peppers” from the Tijuana Brass catalog), O’Farrill’s arrangements make these energetic tunes a lot of fun to listen to. Sadly, this was never released digitally, aside from stray tracks issued on numerous CD compilations. Here is “Los Bandidos.”

 

While this album might seem to be a misfire, Tjader recorded a collection of standards, Warm Wave, featuring the strings of Claus Ogerman. He occasionally liked to record a melodic, easygoing album such as this one, and it’s another that has been overlooked throughout the years.

Another questionable Verve album was Hip Vibrations, the last Tjader recorded for Verve. This was more of a big band-flavored outing with charts by Benny Golson and Bobby Bryant, again featuring a few pop/rock tracks in a mixed bag of styles. Even the cover art was odd – clearly aimed at the youth market, among other images it features pictures of surfers, motorcyclists, and a stylized marijuana leaf.  Herbie Hancock’s soloing on a couple of the tracks is notable, but otherwise it’s an interesting but non-essential recording in Tjader’s catalog.

The Prophet was Tjader’s final album released on Verve, recorded just prior to Hip Vibrations.  Per his biography, this was an album he wanted to make. He felt refreshed working with producer Esmond Edwards, and enjoyed the participation of João Donato as both keyboardist and composer of three of the album’s tunes. Don Sebesky would later arrange and overdub strings for the album. The album features some memorable tunes, including a haunting take on Donato’s tune “Aquarius,” and the Tjader-penned album opener, “Souled Out,” featured here.

 

Verve has had a spotty release history of the Cal Tjader catalog, and this includes their various compilations. A handful of his albums remain unreleased digitally, or were available only as imports. The compilations feel arbitrarily assembled, without much rhyme or reason beyond some half-baked ideas like Roots of Acid Jazz or Jazz ‘Round Midnight.

Due to the poor sequencing of these compilations, I’ve created two of my own with Qobuz and YouTube Music. The first is a CD’s worth of the pick of his most memorable tunes with the label.  The second is an expanded version that doubles down on running time. Both are annotated with a note indicating which albums the tracks were originally released on, as many had to be pulled from existing compilations.

Qobuz playlist, Cal Tjader on Verve (Short Version):
https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/6210372

Qobuz playlist, Cal Tjader on Verve (Full Version):
https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/6209827

YouTube Music playlist, Cal Tjader on Verve (Short Version):
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqXkJPkOFzFmOr9iBsK4UZRSAFf4kS6AJ

YouTube Music playlist, Cal Tjader on Verve (Full Version):
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqXkJPkOFzFmd2SFhPoEKMkUEk-fLG6QM

In our next installment, we’ll look at one final Verve album, examine his short-lived label venture, and include a couple of one-off odds and ends Tjader has recorded over the years.

I am sitting in Trax, a music biz hangout club that is a few steps below street level. Trax was a pretty good-sized space located in a pre-War building on West 72^nd Street just west of Columbus Avenue. At the table is Jonny Podell, Mick Jagger, Jessica (my then-wife) and me. We are drinking and partying, It is a weekday night but the big basement club is packed with famous and near-famous folks.

At the time my wife worked for Jonny, and I think they are still long-standing friends. Jonny is an independent rock and roll booking agent. He has represented Alice Cooper, George Harrison, David Blaine, The Beastie Boys, Blondie and quite a few other big-name acts. The thing is, he works alone, and in fact is the most successful solo agent or might I say solo agency in the rock business. Oh, there are bigger agencies, but they have numerous agents on staff, and they use the leverage of their big acts to help break new and up-and-coming artists. Jonny does it all alone. He is a good guy but a wild man. Charming and smart, he does well by his acts.

Blondie was changing managers and Jonny was their booking agent. With a new manager they would also need a new road manager, so Jonny arranged an interview for me with the band. At the time they lived in a prewar Art Deco building on the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 58^th Street. I was to show up at 2 pm. The elevator opened right into their apartment. I think it was the penthouse. The band was there and one of them went into a room and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein came out. Debbie had some serious bed head, and both were looking like they just woke up. Of course, they were a little grumpy, rubbing their sleepy eyes. The interview, if one could call it that, was short. Just Hi, hello and Debbie said, “I need to make some coffee,” and walked out of the large living room to her kitchen. I never heard anything about it again and when I met Debbie years later, she had no memory of our meeting. She remembered Jonny of course.

A few years later I was in England for the UK Stranglers tour (see “Pond Hopping With the Stranglers,” Issue 111).When that tour ended there were a few days I spent in London winding up the tour details. Expense reports, rental returns and other odds ’n ends. I stayed at the Portobello Hotel near the Marble Arch. The rooms were incredibly small, and the television hung over the bed like those in a hospital. Still, it was a cool hotel with 24-hour kitchen service.

The day I flew home from England. I was informed by my wife that she had to attend a show at the Bottom Line. Kid Creole and the Coconuts, a client of the agency she worked for, were performing at the club that night and it was a must-go for all agency employees. The Bottom Line was a prominent New York music venue run by Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky, located at 15 West Fourth Street between Mercer and Green Streets. Just a few short blocks east of Washington Square Park in the West Village (Greenwich Village). The Bottom Line was a must-play stop on many tours and a serious showcase spot for rock acts. (It was open from 1974 to 2004.)

 

Jessica was working for Norby Walters Associates. Walters was rumored to have mob ties. In the beginning he owned clubs in New York. The last one he owned lost its liquor license for what a New York State Liquor Authority report described as ”a highly adverse police and license history due to assaults and prostitution.” Despite that, the club stayed open for three more months, appealing the allegations in the report, but during that period, two mobsters were shot to death at the bar by a third man, and the club closed in 1968.

As a booking agent Walters was representing entertainers Luther Vandross, Patti LaBelle, Kool and the Gang, Ben Vereen and Miles Davis. Like most of these agencies, they worked with any talent that was bookable. Later in the mid-1980s Walters and a partner formed World Sports & Entertainment Inc., a sports agency whose business caught the attention of law enforcement. A grand jury was convened and an FBI investigation was launched to look into tampering with college athletes.

Kid Creole (August Darnell) a Zoot-suited performer, and the Coconuts had a lot of stuff happening on stage, combining a mixture of disco and Latin American, Caribbean, and Cab Calloway styles inspired by the big band era. An amalgam of bygone outsized personas, the musicians and the music moved between disco, calypso, show tunes, soul, big band, pop, funk, and New Wave. They were the kind of act that might have played the Copacabana along with Desi Arnaz (Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy). A real throwback with a lot of people on stage. They had dancing background singers, musicians and you name it. They were a fun, enjoyable act but due to the large amount of people they had on stage I must assume that their nut (overhead) was large. This is an economic reality that kills or at least limits many a new musical innovation.

 

They went on at 11 o’clock which was almost dawn in the UK, and I was tired. We were sitting at the agency’s table that seated 12 or so. Kid Creole and the Coconuts killed it. They put on a great show, but me? I was barely hanging in there. The hours and the flight had caught up with me. At a quiet moment I said to the table, “I woke up in London this morning.” Everyone turned and looked at me with “I am not impressed, so what” looks.

This was one of the many times when there were a few weeks or even a month or two between various touring gigs. It was unusual for me to have tours that went back-to-back. If we were not going out to concerts and events, then people dropped by. One afternoon Leslie West and a few folks stopped over to party. Leslie, in his raspy voice, told me he was supposed to be in the recording studio but did not want to go. I advised him to go. I said studio time was expensive, and it seemed to me that he should show up. He did not and was mum on his reasoning. He just said, “f*ck em,” and went to the can. Apparently, Leslie was no shrinking violet.

The Allman Brothers Band were in town and there was an impromptu party, hanging out at a suite in their hotel. We came with Jonny, and it was a nice easy atmosphere. Everyone knew and liked Jonny Podell and he was welcomed everywhere. He was kinda a star in his own right, fun and charismatic.

 

We all were just drinking, partying, and talking. Geraldo Rivera was there, and I went over to talk with him. He was into the early stages of his career, though already a rising star. When I went back to Jonny, my wife Jessica and Greg Allman, I could see that Greg was hitting on Jessica. In the nicest way possible I let him know she was my wife and whatever he might have had in mind was not gonna happen. He was a little surprised, but acquiesced. The mood lightened up quickly and the four of us were all back to having a good time, when in a quiet moment from across the room we hear a loud voice. “I am Dickie Betts; what the hell do you mean you won’t take my check!” “The whole room roared with laughter.

One of the “Two Jims” (Kellem) at CMA (Creative Management Associates), knew my birthday was coming up so he invited me, Jessica, and my sister Ellen (the famous rock writer) to a performance of Saturday Night Live. It was October 30, 1976, and this was SNL’s second season. Their normal studio at 30 Rock was being used for presidential election coverage so the show was moved to NBC’s studio complex in Brooklyn. The Band was the musical guest. The audience was platformed, slightly raised so we were a few feet above where the Band was set up. It seemed like we were maybe 20 feet away and looking downward toward them. Immediately after the Band was introduced, they started with a bang. Up and running in an instant, Ellen said to me, that is when you know a group is really good. They went from zero to 100 MPH in less than a second; they were rocking.

Buck Henry was the host that week and in one of the early skits, he was cut on his forehead by John Belushi’s out of control sword during the “Samurai Stockbroker” sketch. Henry continued the show with a bandaged head. As the show went on, more and more cast members appeared with bandaged heads. A sign of solidarity, I assume. The cast that week was Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase (his final episode due to injury, though he returned in a wheelchair for “Weekend Update” for three segments], Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner. It was a good show.

We went to the after party at One Fifth Avenue, an upscale restaurant in the building of said address. Of course, the restaurant was closed to the public and most people arrived between 1:30 and 2 am.  There were about 60 of us, cast, NBC executives and certain guests, seated at a long cast table and a few satellite tables. We were sitting at one of the smaller ones near the cast table. The food was great.

John Belushi stands up and says a couple of words and kinda apologizes to Buck Henry for gashing his forehead with the sword. Buck was all, “no problem, no problem.” At this time the only one wearing a bandage was Buck Henry. Belushi is wearing a big puffer jacket, and, not being the skinniest dude, looked like the Michelin Man dressed in a reddish-orange coat. As he is moving around the table talking with various cast members, he backs up into my chair. He almost knocked me over but didn’t seem to notice.

It has been pointed out to me that I have gotten to mingle with extraordinary people while they were doing un-extraordinary things. That certainly is one point of view.

 

A MAC Audio Company MAC-1900 receiver. Made by McIntosh in the 1970s at a time when Frank McIntosh would not put his name on a receiver. Photo courtesy of Howard Kneller. From The Audio Classics Collection.

Can someone tell us what "pure Svea metal" is? Taylor Tubes ad, 1941.

So it's not home audio gear, but how cool are these Silvertone guitars (which look like Harmony and Kay instruments) and tube amps? Circa 1960s ad.

Ad for the Fisher Allegro system, 1964. Nice looking components...too bad about the speakers.

Octave Records is honored to announce its latest release, The Nature of Things by Foxfeather. It’s a compelling blend of rock, pop, acoustic-electric roots music, blues and more, led by singer Carly Ricks Smith and acoustic guitarist/keyboardist and backing vocalist Laura Stratton. The Nature of Things was recorded in pure Direct Stream Digital (DSD) using the Sonoma system in PS Audio’s Boulder, Colorado studio, Animal Lane in Lyons, CO, and Vernon Barn in Longmont, CO. Like other Octave Records releases, it was recorded and mastered using Octave Records’ exclusive DSDDirect Mastered recording system.

 

FD: Do songs just just pop into your head, or do you have a bad relationship, say, or see something happening in the world and then write about it?

Laura Stratton: Everything and anything can be an inspiration. Musically, it just the most random things where for some reason, the way two chords sound together or even one chord can evoke a feeling. It doesn’t always have to be a complicated chord progression; it can be something really simple, but just the way that it’s played, the rhythm or the guitar finger picking, evokes emotion. I think Carly and I are almost always on the same page with that.

I’m a music teacher, and sometimes I’ll be in between lessons and just strumming something. I’ll [record it on my phone] or jot it down and show it to Carly later. I’ll take these little passages and go back and reference them later when we’re trying to build a story.

Carly and Laura.

CRS: The thing I like about lyric writing is you can go anywhere you want, though I like to have a story line in place.

FD: Was a lot of The Nature of Things done “live” in the studio?

CRS: We tried keep it live as much as we could. We recorded some of it in the Vernon Barn, which is a cool venue near where we live that has a great [room] sound. We got the whole band together and there was a little bit of bleed [into the mics] and Laura ended up having to go back and overdub her rhythm guitar, but everything we recorded there (like “Lonely Feeling”) was mostly done live. On other tracks in other studios, we overdubbed vocals and some other parts.

Vernon Barn, one of the recording locations for The Nature of Things.

FD: Who are some of your influences?

CRS: I love older musicians and singers like Patsy Cline, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt and people like that. And a little bit of that classic sort of Seventies and Eighties age, mixed in with some of the darker themes of today and people like Lucy Dacus and Margaret Glaspy. I love Lake Street Dive.

FD: Rock a side pony!

CRS: Doing the album has been a really fun process, aside from that extra hiccup from COVID. Getting studio time safely was difficult. We had to take a two-month break because a couple of the band members actually got sick. It took about nine months to record the album.

LS: The album is a time capsule of what we went through.

FD: Are you going to be getting back to playing live gigs? Are you apprehensive about it?

CRS: We’re getting back into it. It’s not going to be the same as in 2019 when we were playing two, three gigs a week. I’m excited. Our band’s awesome and tight. Everybody’s still got it.

The Sonoma remote recording and monitoring setup at Vernon Barn.

Click here to order Foxfeather's The Nature of Things.

Modern-day troubadour and acoustic-guitar pioneer since the 1960s, Gordon Giltrap, MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) is one of the finest guitarists of his generation. The English musician and composer has released more than 30 albums that blend folk, classical, progressive rock and other genres. He has collaborated with and earned the admiration of musicians like Sir Cliff Richard, Brian May, Richie Blackmore, Rick Wakeman, Pete Townshend and many others.

In our interview, Giltrap talks about his approach to music and composition, recording the acoustic guitar while maintaining the all-important emotion and transparency of the instrument, and much more.

Russ Welton: Could you tell us about your favorite composers and how you are inspired by them?

Gordon Giltrap: My favorite composers are without doubt Ralph Vaughan Williams and Samuel Barber. I’m inspired by the great melodic content of both these composers. I must have read Vaughan Williams’ biography at least six times and am equally impressed by the man as well as his music. Although I am a self-taught, untrained musician, I very much relate to the fact that his skills didn’t come easy and were the fruits of years of sheer hard graft and determination. He comes across as such a grounded person and completely unpretentious about his gifts. Although a professed atheist, there is so much spirituality in his music, especially the Tallis Fantasia and of course The Lark Ascending. The music is so English which of course I can relate to 100 percent.

With Regard to Samuel Barber, his Violin Concerto just raises the hairs on the back of my neck. A good sign!

RW: What are the great challenges in recording your different guitar playing styles within a single piece of music?

GG: The main challenges are not so much technical but emotional. [It’s in] trying to capture a piece that is as near technically perfect [as possible] as well as trying to infuse the piece with as much deep emotion as one can muster in that moment of recording. Of course, the other main problem is lapse of memory. When I have completed a new tune and need to get it recorded, I have to get it down piecemeal and hope that when done, the piece has a natural flow and feels like a complete performance.

RW: When writing a new piece of music, which comes to you first, rhythm or melodies? I understand you like to sing along when composing melodic lines.

GG: I always draw my inspiration straight from the guitar; that’s where it all begins. Then I build it slowly bar by bar until eventually, it hopefully becomes a cohesive whole. Once I get a melodic idea, I try to sing in my head, but usually out loud, where I think the next part of the tune will go. Anyone listening I’m sure would find it amusing, hearing these vocal outbursts that sound like a strangled cat! The process isn’t rocket science, but for me the real mystery is where the ideas come from in the first place.

Gordon Giltrap.

I firmly believe the good stuff comes when the ego drops away and the tune virtually writes itself. It certainly comes from a higher consciousness, that’s for sure. I have a friend who is a world famous and legendary rock musician who disagrees entirely with that statement. He says that it’s my fingers, my muscle memory; I have been doing it for a long time and I’m good at my job! On the one hand that is quite a compliment, but on the other hand I know in my heart that is not always the case.

RW: Which piece of your music do you get asked how to play the most?

GG: Heartsong has got to be the tune that most guitar players are interested in. I guess that’s because it was a minor hit back in the day and achieved the highest profile.

 

 

 

RW: What advice would you give to acoustic guitarists in seeking sonic transparency in their recordings?

GG: When recording, keep it simple. I’m still old school and work on an old 24-track hard disk recorder. I know its basic functions well and therefore it doesn’t get in the way of the recording process. I use a single small-capsule, top-quality Schoeps microphone connected to an ExplorAudio-H-Clamp that allows the mic to be anchored to the body of the guitar for a nice close-miked sound. Once I have found the sweet spot, it remains rigid and doesn’t move. I use a Gold Mike valve (tube) pre-amp into the hard disk recorder. I then transfer the track on to a small Zoom 8-track machine with a memory card so I can transfer the data across to my musical partner Paul Ward for him to do pretty much as he wishes with it. We have a great working relationship. He’s a fine sound engineer, musician, composer and arranger. He understands my music so well. I am very fortunate in that area.

RW: Do you recall what was your first hi-fi equipment, and where it came from?

GG: Sadly, I have no memory of my first hi-fi equipment. All I can tell you is it wasn’t expensive!

RW: What equipment do you enjoy using today for music listening, and how do you like to set it up?

GG: When listening to music in my studio at home, everything goes [through] an ancient Mackie SR24.4 [analog mixing console] that belonged to my late son Jamie who was a highly respected Drum and Bass artist (known professionally as DJ Tango). It is of great sentimental value. I have a pair of Alesis M1 powered monitors. I was recently gifted a [vintage] Ariston turntable which [connected to] a simple Behringer MicroAMP and once again is put through one of the channels of the mixing desk. I also have a Bose Wave [music system] in the kitchen along with a lovely ancient but beautifully-made Sony ZS-2000 CD/radio.

 

 

 

RW: Has your choice of equipment for music listening been influenced by your requirements as a musician and performance artist, and how so?

GG: I can’t confess to being a hi-fi fanatic, and truth be told I spend a lot of my time creating music more than spending time listening, which really, I should do, because it would be good for me to switch off at times and chill out, listening deeply to the music I love.

RW: Please tell us about your current projects and how you have kept inspired during the lockdown.

GG: Lockdown for me has been a blessing because I have devoted more of my time composing, instead of preparing for concerts. Paul Ward and I have a serious project ready to be launched later this year, but I can’t really say too much about it as yet. It will probably be my most satisfying project to date. I would love to chat about it towards the end of the year, by which time it should be fully formed!

One special project that has come to fruition this year is the limited-edition vinyl release of my 1997 CD Troubadour. I wanted this to be a fitting tribute to my dear late friend Del Newman, who produced and arranged the album. Del had worked pretty much with all the greats in the rock world including Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), Paul Simon, Elton John, George Harrison and so many more. He was like a father figure to me and I felt privileged to know him and call him friend.

Other projects have included putting together a CD with 12-string virtuoso and guitar designer Paul Brett to promote one of his wonderful instruments called The Raven, a distinctive guitar based on one of Paul’s pre-War guitars. It looks fabulous, has a unique sound and represents incredible value for money. I have recorded six tracks and Paul the same. The instrument is marketed under the Vintage brand, as are my own signature range, and created by the company John Hornby Skewes. Each guitar sold will come with the CD. The collection of pieces shows off perfectly the guitar’s sonic features, and it does record remarkably well.

 

 

 

I have been involved with the company for many years and although I am the proud owner of several high-end handmade Fylde guitars, I have always loved the idea of putting into the hands of players with a limited budget, instruments that sound great and are affordable. To prove that fact I use these Chinese-made instruments on stage and in the studio! Players cannot believe how good these guitars are, and to a degree they are still little-known within the industry.

Players still want the hallowed names of Gibson or Martin to adorn the headstocks of their guitars, which is fine because nothing sounds quite like a guitar from either of those companies. I myself own a Gibson J-200 gifted to me by Pete Townshend and it is a beautiful instrument, but as I said earlier, if your budget can’t stretch that far, Paul’s range and mine are amazing alternatives. It really is a no-brainer, and this isn’t a sales pitch, I promise you.

RW: What have been some of your personal favorite live performances to date?

GG: There is one venue here in the UK which is a personal favorite. It’s the Stables Theatre in Wavendon, Bucks. A beautiful theatre run pretty much by volunteers. They look after you so well and the audience always turn out for me and make me feel welcome.

RW: Who would you put together for your ultimate supergroup to play with?

GG: I have had the privilege to work with some of the finest musicians in the world. My wish list would be Rod Edwards and Paul Ward on keyboards. Ian Mosley of Marillion on drums. Pino Palladino on Bass. Robin Ashe-Roy on flute. Davy Spillane on Uilleann pipes. John Etheridge on electric guitar. Anne-Sophie Mutter on violin.

 

 

 

RW: What musical plans do you have for 2021 and onwards?

GG: At 73 I try to avoid making plans. The only plan I have right now is to stay COVID- free and for my family and friends the same. Some rescheduled dates are in the diary for next year, but in all honesty I’m quite nervous about treading the boards again after such a long layoff, but we shall see when the time comes.

A Selected Gordon Giltrap Discography

Early iconic and progressive albums:

Visionary (1976)
Perilous Journey (1977)
Fear of the Dark (1978)

Further recommended listening:

On a Summer’s Night (1992)
Troubadour (2001)
Janschology (2014, tribute to Bert Jansch)
The Last of England (2017)
One to One (2021)

 

I firmly believe the good stuff comes when the ego drops away and the tune virtually writes itself. It certainly comes from a higher consciousness, that’s for sure. I have a friend who is a world famous and legendary rock musician who disagrees entirely with that statement. He says that it’s my fingers, my muscle memory; I have been doing it for a long time and I’m good at my job! On the one hand that is quite a compliment, but on the other hand I know in my heart that is not always the case.

RW: Which piece of your music do you get asked how to play the most?

GG: Heartsong has got to be the tune that most guitar players are interested in. I guess that’s because it was a minor hit back in the day and achieved the highest profile.

 

 

 

RW: What advice would you give to acoustic guitarists in seeking sonic transparency in their recordings?

GG: When recording, keep it simple. I’m still old school and work on an old 24-track hard disk recorder. I know its basic functions well and therefore it doesn’t get in the way of the recording process. I use a single small-capsule, top-quality Schoeps microphone connected to an ExplorAudio-H-Clamp that allows the mic to be anchored to the body of the guitar for a nice close-miked sound. Once I have found the sweet spot, it remains rigid and doesn’t move. I use a Gold Mike valve (tube) pre-amp into the hard disk recorder. I then transfer the track on to a small Zoom 8-track machine with a memory card so I can transfer the data across to my musical partner Paul Ward for him to do pretty much as he wishes with it. We have a great working relationship. He’s a fine sound engineer, musician, composer and arranger. He understands my music so well. I am very fortunate in that area.

RW: Do you recall what was your first hi-fi equipment, and where it came from?

GG: Sadly, I have no memory of my first hi-fi equipment. All I can tell you is it wasn’t expensive!

RW: What equipment do you enjoy using today for music listening, and how do you like to set it up?

GG: When listening to music in my studio at home, everything goes [through] an ancient Mackie SR24.4 [analog mixing console] that belonged to my late son Jamie who was a highly respected Drum and Bass artist (known professionally as DJ Tango). It is of great sentimental value. I have a pair of Alesis M1 powered monitors. I was recently gifted a [vintage] Ariston turntable which [connected to] a simple Behringer MicroAMP and once again is put through one of the channels of the mixing desk. I also have a Bose Wave [music system] in the kitchen along with a lovely ancient but beautifully-made Sony ZS-2000 CD/radio.

 

 

 

RW: Has your choice of equipment for music listening been influenced by your requirements as a musician and performance artist, and how so?

GG: I can’t confess to being a hi-fi fanatic, and truth be told I spend a lot of my time creating music more than spending time listening, which really, I should do, because it would be good for me to switch off at times and chill out, listening deeply to the music I love.

RW: Please tell us about your current projects and how you have kept inspired during the lockdown.

GG: Lockdown for me has been a blessing because I have devoted more of my time composing, instead of preparing for concerts. Paul Ward and I have a serious project ready to be launched later this year, but I can’t really say too much about it as yet. It will probably be my most satisfying project to date. I would love to chat about it towards the end of the year, by which time it should be fully formed!

One special project that has come to fruition this year is the limited-edition vinyl release of my 1997 CD Troubadour. I wanted this to be a fitting tribute to my dear late friend Del Newman, who produced and arranged the album. Del had worked pretty much with all the greats in the rock world including Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), Paul Simon, Elton John, George Harrison and so many more. He was like a father figure to me and I felt privileged to know him and call him friend.

Other projects have included putting together a CD with 12-string virtuoso and guitar designer Paul Brett to promote one of his wonderful instruments called The Raven, a distinctive guitar based on one of Paul’s pre-War guitars. It looks fabulous, has a unique sound and represents incredible value for money. I have recorded six tracks and Paul the same. The instrument is marketed under the Vintage brand, as are my own signature range, and created by the company John Hornby Skewes. Each guitar sold will come with the CD. The collection of pieces shows off perfectly the guitar’s sonic features, and it does record remarkably well.

 

 

 

I have been involved with the company for many years and although I am the proud owner of several high-end handmade Fylde guitars, I have always loved the idea of putting into the hands of players with a limited budget, instruments that sound great and are affordable. To prove that fact I use these Chinese-made instruments on stage and in the studio! Players cannot believe how good these guitars are, and to a degree they are still little-known within the industry.

Players still want the hallowed names of Gibson or Martin to adorn the headstocks of their guitars, which is fine because nothing sounds quite like a guitar from either of those companies. I myself own a Gibson J-200 gifted to me by Pete Townshend and it is a beautiful instrument, but as I said earlier, if your budget can’t stretch that far, Paul’s range and mine are amazing alternatives. It really is a no-brainer, and this isn’t a sales pitch, I promise you.

RW: What have been some of your personal favorite live performances to date?

GG: There is one venue here in the UK which is a personal favorite. It’s the Stables Theatre in Wavendon, Bucks. A beautiful theatre run pretty much by volunteers. They look after you so well and the audience always turn out for me and make me feel welcome.

RW: Who would you put together for your ultimate supergroup to play with?

GG: I have had the privilege to work with some of the finest musicians in the world. My wish list would be Rod Edwards and Paul Ward on keyboards. Ian Mosley of Marillion on drums. Pino Palladino on Bass. Robin Ashe-Roy on flute. Davy Spillane on Uilleann pipes. John Etheridge on electric guitar. Anne-Sophie Mutter on violin.

 

 

 

RW: What musical plans do you have for 2021 and onwards?

GG: At 73 I try to avoid making plans. The only plan I have right now is to stay COVID- free and for my family and friends the same. Some rescheduled dates are in the diary for next year, but in all honesty I’m quite nervous about treading the boards again after such a long layoff, but we shall see when the time comes.

A Selected Gordon Giltrap Discography

Early iconic and progressive albums:

Visionary (1976)
Perilous Journey (1977)
Fear of the Dark (1978)

Further recommended listening:

On a Summer’s Night (1992)
Troubadour (2001)
Janschology (2014, tribute to Bert Jansch)
The Last of England (2017)
One to One (2021)

 

Kids used to go to the carnival to have fun. They didn’t go there to make a living, network, or scope out the competition. For me, audio shows are like a carnival. I’ve always attended for one reason only – to have fun. I love meeting old friends, making new ones, and sharing music, opinions, and scotch. By that standard, The Home Entertainment (T.H.E.) Show for 2021 was a huge success. It started at noon on Friday, June 11 at the Hilton Long Beach Hotel in Los Angeles, and I was surprised to see a line at registration in the middle of a weekday. Doesn’t anybody work anymore?

 

While perusing the signage that showed where exhibitors were located, there looked to be only 35 demo rooms or so in total, which made me wonder if we should have booked hotel rooms. Perhaps we could have seen the whole show in a day. I drove down with a couple of buddies from the San Diego Music and Audio Guild in a Maserati Quatroporte. The thing goes like hell when there’s space, but in gridlocked traffic, it’s slower than my vintage airhead motorcycle (which can split lanes).

The folks at registration had no problem finding my press pass, but they couldn’t find the extra registration I’d bought for my friend, so after a lot of searching and waiting, we ended up having to pay twice in order to get him in. Bit of a downer right at the start of the event. Unfortunately, I didn’t see Kyle Robertson anywhere (the former event organizer). He’d have sorted this problem out in a few minutes. I missed his constant supervision and monitoring of the event, which seemed to make everything go smoother.

It had been two years since we attended an audio show at this hotel and the place was as attractive, clean, and friendly as I remembered. Like last time, I asked for a room with a view of the Queen Mary, but this time, the field of vision had changed (note the header image at the top of the article). Long Beach is growing up.

I’ve spent the last 20 years explaining to audiophiles that a listening room’s acoustics are as important as their equipment in determining the final sound. It’s a hard sell. They seem to prefer spending money on more equipment (or expensive tweaks) over using EQ devices or disturbing the aesthetics of their listening rooms with room treatment (even after I show them their skewed in-room response on my frequency analyzer).

So I’m particularly sensitive to the problems of exhibitors. They have to demo their equipment in long, narrow rooms that resemble a hallway more than a living room. This was a disaster for some exhibitors, and having heard their products sound great in better environments, I’ve declined to review them here. Furthermore, exhibitors were asked to limit their volume to 84 dB – fine for stand-mount monitors but hardly loud enough to exercise large speakers. This makes the job of a reviewer like me difficult. I’m asked to judge the sound of a system in an environment for which it was not designed. It’s like testing a Maserati in gridlocked traffic. Any old motorcycle will work better.

It was nice to see some younger people starting to enjoy these shows as they move up from EarPods and headphones. This shot was taken from a considerable distance so as not to disturb the conversation.

Cultural diversity was also in evidence. This interview was conducted in Spanish.

Merryl Jaye (left) was back with the latest collection of her remarkable paintings of musicians. Her website address is merryljaye.com.

Rick Schultz from High Fidelity Cables presented a series of fascinating lectures on the theories surrounding electromagnetism, quantum physics, and how they might be related. He got off topic and suggested that the more he learns about quantum physics, the more he’s coming to understand the Bible. I approached him after his lecture to suggest that I was finding the same thing, but not just for the Bible, for Eastern philosophies as well. He responded with a comment on the irony of science is making us more religious – the opposite of the split Descartes formulated.

Part of the lecture was the demonstration of a Tesla coil. The noise and visuals these things produce always gets attention. They even got it to play a tune (with dramatic graphics), but no one volunteered to get near the coil’s terminals to demonstrate the body’s conductivity. For years, a giant Tesla coil was part of The Burning Man Experience (slated to resume in 2022). A victim would stand about ten feet away clothed in a wired suit and conduct the high voltage/low current energy to the ground, appearing to be conducting it through his body. This night display was breathtaking.

Those torpedo-looking things on the ground are High Fidelity's top cables. They cost $100,000 each but we were told they are not for sale – they were merely an experiment taken to extremes (something to do with induction; I didn’t really understand Schultz’ theory). He did make an interesting comment on cables in general. He suggested that they were often used as tone controls. That might explain why cables which sound good on one system don’t on another.

High Fidelity’s loudspeakers are dipoles designed by Rick Schultz. This 3-way system features top-of-the-line drivers from Audio Nirvana and the excellent Aurum Cantus tweeters – a great match. They list for somewhere around $100,000. The big metal boxes are dipole subs. I was afraid to ask for the price on those. The whole system was in a very large room and I enjoyed the sound. Embarrassingly, the guy disturbing the audition was from the San Diego Music and Audio Guild. His phone was confiscated for the balance of T.H.E. Show and he was required to pay for lunch.

An amiable chap named Oz Turan from Virginia was in the Cake Audio room, featuring Alsyvox planar magnetic speakers ($92,000 per pair). They are claimed to be 94 dB efficient and were powered by a 50-watt Class A amp from Vitus Audio. This 3-way system had a sparkling top end, Magnepan-like midrange, and is claimed to produce 22 Hz fundamentals, though I didn’t hear anything approaching that. Oz invited us to return that evening for a private audition, which we were happy to do. Oz is a real music enthusiast and introduced us to some new ethnic music. I was reminded why we chose to book rooms for the evening. I’m sorry I didn’t get a photo of Oz – perhaps because he kept moving around so much. The room included other equipment from retailer Cake Audio, including Purist Audio Design cables, a Computer Audio Design server and DAC, Kuzma turntables and Dynavector cartridges.

This flash-less shot was taken in almost total darkness. With an ISO of 51,200, my Pentax K-S1 sees more than I do. It has a Night Scene HDR setting which takes three consecutive images at three different exposure levels to create a single composite image! Not great clarity, but I’m printing it anyway because I was so impressed with the appearance of Oz’ turntable. It’s a Kuzma XL DC with VTA adjustment. There are some arguments about the efficacy of VTA adjustment among audiophiles, but on the occasion I’ve heard it demonstrated, it made a significant improvement to the mid-bass.

Wayne Carter (of Wayne Carter Audio) set up this room featuring vintage equipment for only one purpose – to have fun. He reminded me of the doctors who sponsored the “Déjà Vu" room so popular at the CES for many years. These classic Waveform Research speakers sounded bright to my ears, as they did 25 years ago when I first heard them. The box on the right is a giant JBL Professional subwoofer.

Here’s a shot of the vintage electronic equipment Wayne was using. The Nikko amplifier evoked many memories from listeners.

T.H.E. Show offered a preponderance of fine stand-mount monitors. These Spendor-like Graham Audio LS/58 speakers ($16,000 per pair) in the Voss room were dynamic and produced a great soundstage.

The reel to reel tape player behind the Grahams is a Revox PR99. Power is supplied by Vitra. The Gryphon speaker cables list for $4,000 more than the speakers.

These Heavenly Soundworks FIVE17 speakers produced a natural, full, uncolored sound for $10,000 per pair. It’s an active, 3-way system with two 8-inch passive radiators. No system matching or expensive speaker cables required.

The best deal of the show might have been these Tonian Labs Oriaco G6 monitors. Paired with mid-fi electronics, these dynamic, ported speakers exhibited superb resolution, great bass, and a clean, neutral midrange for $3,500 per pair. They made the highly reviewed KEF LS50 monitors next to them sound like a table radio covered with a blanket – admittedly, at over twice the price. It’s hard to imagine any stand-mount speaker fans not being pleased with these.

I’ve liked every Ocean Way Audio speaker I’ve heard over the years. Alan Sides’ owns five recording studios across the country, and started Ocean Way in order to produce loudspeakers in search of the perfect studio monitor. I heard his first product at a CES over a decade ago, a large 3-way horn system, and still feel it’s the best system I’ve ever heard. It’s WAF (wife acceptance factor) was zero, and its price has skyrocketed, but I’ve yet to hear dynamics as life-like. This stand-mount Eureka monitor is built in that tradition. It seems to have the bass of a full-range system, the mids and highs are flawless, and the dynamics are unbelievable for a speaker this size. It was powered by 85-watt AGD Productions Audion monoblocks (on top of each speaker) which feature what they call their GaNTube, a gallium nitride MOSFET power stage that is fully enclosed in a vacuum tube. The amps and speakers were offered for $17,500 per pair, with stands – one of the best audiophile deals at the show in my opinion (retail for the package is $23,350).

The gallium nitride tubes are packed with components, but barely get warm to the touch, even at high volumes.

The marketplace area was busy every time we entered the room.

Gentleman Peter Noerbaek of PBN Audio is just too darn polite. Every time we entered the huge room in which he had his giant MR!777 speakers, he was playing them at 84 dB, the volume requested by the show organizers. “You can sit in the Maserati sir, you can idle the engine, but that’s as far as we can allow you to test drive this vehicle.” What good is that? It’s not that they don’t sound right at low volumes, they do. But they are capable of so much more. At concert hall volumes, these speakers are about as close as one can get to a live orchestra without buying tickets. I know, I’ve heard them in Peter’s studio. However, I’d never felt that way about Peter’s speakers till he upgraded them with Dutch-made Stage Accompany tweeters (shown). They were designed to reinforce the sound of European concert halls, but Peter took the path less travelled and incorporated them into his speaker systems – and that made all the difference. They seemed impossible to overdrive or compress (Peter crosses them over at 1,200 Hz). Finally, a tweeter to match the rest of the system. I was so impressed, I bought the company. Sorry, I meant, I bought a pair of these tweeters for my home system. Peter is the importer for these exceptional units. The speaker system shown retails for $85,000 per pair and sounds far cleaner and more “live” to my ears than another pair of popular, well-known speakers that retail for just over $200,000 per pair.

The guys at Wyred 4 Sound weren’t nearly as constrained as Peter. They were at the end of the hall and took liberties with their volume control. These $32,000K per pair prototype speakers rocked. Nowhere in the show did I hear dynamics as startling as I did in their hotel room. The bass was deep and tight, thanks to a powered, down-facing woofer. These are thrilling speakers for rock fans, but classical listeners need not apply. Ironically, they were using Kimber speaker cables, not their own.

The Margules complete audio system from Mexico City was also remarkably dynamic and exhibited an excellent soundstage. The sound was neutral, natural, and strain-free. The amps and speakers sell for $10,000 per pair, and I could easily live with them as my main system.

The elegant Margules turntable sells for $4,000.

This system from Laughlin, Nevada dealer Audio Limits also featured speakers with a down-firing woofer and powerful bass – along with great imaging and a natural, non-fatiguing sound signature. The large room was exceptionally well set up; these guys know what they are doing. The components were Audiovector R8 speakers with Thrax electronics. The fit and finish of the equipment was several steps above the Margules system, but at over $200K for the amps, pre-amp and speakers, it ought to be. I’m sure this system would have killed the Margules, or most systems at the show had it been allowed to flex its wings, but Audio Limits (like Peter Noerbaek) were too polite to subject their neighbors to any disruption. I’d hoped they would be available for an audition after hours when the rules were relaxed, but that was not to be. Despite the small size of the show, the attendees I talked to from the San Diego Music and Audio Guild agreed that it was well worth attending. Had one arrived when it opened on Saturday morning, they could have covered T.H.E. Show in a single day. However, we really enjoyed the unadvertised after-hours events, which we accessed by simply wandering the halls. I’ve got to bring more single malt next time.

 

At the film mixing stage, engineers generally mix at a reference of 85 dB/C and under acoustic conditions akin to what the sound would be like in a theater. On occasion, mixers with foresight will use actual TV speakers in the dubbing stage as a separate reference. Film genres can also influence mixes, with comedies having louder dialog and subtler background music and wild sounds. Horror or sci-fi genres will frequently amplify sound effects much more prevalently, with music cues often being heavily compressed for maximum impact level in building climaxes.

At the mastering stage, streaming and broadcast video distributors have delivery specs with loudness targets, peak limits and gate requirements to comply with regional or national telecom regulations.

Gelby conducted surveys from home viewers as well as professional engineers to get data points on listening habits and preferences. Surprisingly, a majority of engineers cited a preference for reducing the volume of sound effects and music in programming, while, as expected, the bulk of viewers who watched at home also preferred louder dialog, especially those who used the built-in speakers in their televisions.

A significant discrepancy was that most mixers listened within a short distance from their near-field monitors when mixing in rooms that averaged between 1,500-5,000 square feet, and did not compensate for dialog intelligibility in domestic listening conditions. Given that the increasing majority of films are viewed at home, especially since the pandemic, cross-reference monitoring on actual TV speakers for dialog clarity can now be considered a crucially essential component of the monitoring mix chain for film and video.

A number of mixers did comment that they were aware that their mixes translated differently between theatrical, Blu-ray/DVD and streaming platforms, but had no control over how audio dynamic range compression or other elements within streaming protocols between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, et al. might vary.

 

 

In the “roughness” and “sharpness” timbre categories, Western hip-hop also appeared to be “busier,” with more layers of abrupt sounds going on, than the comparatively smoother Chinese and Taiwanese hip-hop.

In the “centroid” category, Western hip-hop contained a greater degree of variation with its musical format themes, key changes, and had heavier bass and lower-midrange content, and other aspects compared to Chinese/Taiwanese hip-hop, which was more focused on a single theme with perhaps one alternate part and a greater degree of theme repetition in each piece. Tonally, it sometimes exhibited larger fluctuations in brightness (high-frequency response).

AES Spring 2021 Europe definitely emphasized a stronger academic perspective than what was found in New York’s AES Show Fall 2020. In Part Two, we will review other presentations dealing with psychoacoustics, streaming technology, and other topics.

Header image: Garrard 301 turntable ad, 1958.

Have you ever wondered how we learned to do things (repair/install/build/develop skills, etc.) before smartphones and YouTube came along? Well, back in ancient times, before “there’s an app for that,” there were records for that (and I mean LPs).

I worked in record stores for nearly 30 years, and after a while I owned most of the music that I wanted, so I began to collect non-music albums – the weirder, the better. The thought was (in part) that I could cull some interesting snippets to throw in between songs on mix tapes. I ended up with hundreds of LPs filed under headings such as “Lectures,” “Children’s Stories,” “Historical,” “Old Radio Shows,” “Literature” (readings from classic books), and “Instructional.”

Let’s take a look at some of the entries in that latter category, some of which are actually on YouTube.

Serbo-Croatian Language Record Course

Conversa-Phone was a leader in language instruction records. I can confidently say I will never learn Serbo-Croatian, but I couldn’t resist the relative obscurity of the subject. I have a few others in my collection – Irish (Gaelic), Norwegian, and Swedish – all destined to remain under-utilized.

The YouTube video of this one has some of the worst audio I’ve ever encountered. It sounds like the record was played in a room where the microphone was right up against the speaker and constantly overloaded.

Steno>Booster

Except for court reporters, is stenography even a thing anymore? Have you ever seen the stenography “alphabet”? The symbols are little more than squiggles, lines, arcs, and loops. It makes Arabic look like block printing. But back in the day, being able to take dictation efficiently was often a plus when trying to land a secretarial job. (Another Conversa-Phone production)

Hear How to Touch Type

I must confess I didn’t listen to this one – I still type with two fingers (sometimes I use as many as four) and I have to look at the keys. My girlfriend is a speed demon on the keyboard (she offered to transcribe my interview with Patrick Gleeson because she knew it would take me a month or more).

Personal Golf Instructions From Driver Thru Putter by Arnold Palmer

With narration by noted sportscaster Chris Schenkel, this two-LP set, custom-pressed by Decca Records, came with a 24-page book of instructions with step-by-step photos of Arnie in action. As a bonus, the inside right cover is a full-panel advertisement for the Mercury Monterey S-55 (circa 1963) – “For a beautiful drive – drive Mercury S-55.”

 

Home Study Flight Instruction (3 LPs)

Yes, in the comfort of your easy chair, you can learn to fly a plane! Imagine being able to take over the controls after the flight crew was felled by food poisoning, like in the movie Airplane!

This set opens with this admonition: “Effect of the Controls – in the explanations that follow, it is assumed that the airplane is flying in a normal attitude, and not in inverted flight.” Boy, I’m glad you pointed that out, Sparky!

 

ATC Clears (Air Traffic Control jargon)

Included with the LP were a dictionary of the words and phrases used (along with their shorthand), as well as a sample Los Angeles area flight map (“Not to be used for navigation”).

I wonder if the replacement air traffic controllers who were hired after Reagan fired the existing force in the 1980s were issued this album before donning the headset. (There are lots of ATC videos on YouTube, but I couldn’t find one with this record.)

The How and Why of Hula

This package comes with copious illustrations showing all the movements and meanings of the dance. You’ll have to make your own grass skirt, though. If you search YouTube for this one, you won’t find it (I didn’t), but scrolling down, you will find a ton of Hula Hoop instructions, including one with the suggestive heading, “How to Get It Up.”

Picking Up Girls Made Easy!

Can you say “politically incorrect”? Those of us of a certain age will remember the ads in Playboy and other “men’s magazines” touting this “foolproof” technique. “You’ll listen as a guy just like yourself successfully picks up a gorgeous girl in a string bikini. You’ll actually hear the voices of the people involved:  the guy, as he begins to work his magic…and the girl, as she falls willing victim to his charm.”

There are eight scenarios, set in diverse locations, from the library (“Discover how to turn on a girl who at first is hostile and seemingly unapproachable”) to the beach (“How to get a girl who’s falling out of her bikini to fall into your arms”). It’s creepy, and there’s an unsettling obsession with large breasts. So creepy, in fact, that you may want to take a shower after listening.

 

Let’s Play Bongos

Let’s not and say we did… (Turtleneck and beret not included).

 

On Wine: How to Select and Serve Wine (Vol. 1)

I live in Wine Country (Sonoma, CA), but I am not an aficionado. Hell, I’m not much of a wine drinker, period. But if I were, this would come in handy. The first side has a conversation between wine shipper (!), lecturer, and author Peter Sichel and a “young couple.” As this album was a production of the Columbia Special Products label, the second side consists entirely of “fresh, imaginative arrangements” of classical and semi-classical musical favorites from such orchestral luminaries as Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, Skitch Henderson, and Sammy Kaye.

Secrets of Successful Varmint Calling

How can anyone resist a title like that? Along with pictures of said varmints, the back cover notes proclaim: “Varmint calling with mouth-blown calls or recordings provides the outdoorsman with many exciting hours of off-season pleasure. The thrill of seeing a fox, coyote, wolf or bobcat coming to you as you call can be enjoyed year-round, day or night.” Yeah, that’s what I want – a coyote or bobcat coming at me at night…

Take a listen as ace varmint caller Johnny Stewart presents rabbit and bird distress calls.

Learn Self-Hypnosis

Am I wrong to be a little frightened of this one? The cover is intimidating – Vandermeide, who lectured on hypnosis and had a nightclub act, looks like a mad scientist. I mean, what if I go under before I learn how to snap out of it? The answer can be found in the fine print disclaimer on the back: “The publisher in no way shall be held responsible for any hypnosis, whatever the degree which may be induced by this publication.”

New Dimensions (enlarge your breasts through mind power – I’m not kidding!)

This may be the weirdest one of all. I was working in one of the major San Francisco Bay Area new-and-used record stores, and I got first look at what was being traded in. This one stumped me. The only words on the solid blue cover were in the lower right corner: “NEW DIMENSIONS.” The label was similarly cryptic, reading: “Bio-Imagery Programming/Figure Enhancement System.” It had a note at the bottom saying:  “IMPORTANT: Please read carefully the instruction manual supplied before listening to this recording.” Well, dang, the manual was missing! I had no clue as to what this record was going to be about, but I had to find out.

I bought it, took it home, and began to play it. The album started out like a standard relaxation/visualization record – “turn down the lights, loosen any tight clothing, get comfortable, picture yourself in a boat on a river” (oops, wrong album – sorry), blah, blah, blah. After about ten minutes of semi-hypnotic, mind-numbingly repetitive exhortations to relax and be comfortable, things got interesting.

“Picture in your mind how your body looked when you were about 12 years of age. Picture what your whole body looked like, your breasts, your arms, your legs. Try to see yourself as your body looked – you can see your figure, see your breasts. Remember some of the disappointment you felt when you saw your body? Bio-Imagery can change that. As you look at yourself as you were, begin to see your body changing. In your mind, begin to see your figure developing – developing slowly, but developing beautiful proportions. See your breasts getting larger and firmer…”

I’ll spare you the rest of the program, but, as you might expect, it didn’t work – I still can’t fill out an A cup.

Liz Phair: Soberish (Chrysalis)

Liz Phair: Horror Stories (memoir 2018)

A few weeks ago a new Liz Phair song, “Hey Lou,” came on the radio, and I was smitten. It’s an imagined, one-way conversation between the former royal couple of New York’s downtown: artist Laurie Anderson, and Lou Reed, for whom no descriptor seems adequate, or necessary.

The popular view, never contradicted by Anderson, as far as I know, was that they were a happy couple, late-life soul mates, married from 2008 until Reed’s death from liver failure in 2013. But “Hey Lou” imagines Anderson scolding Reed, drugged and drunk, an antagonistic creep, a boorish man of undeniable talent. That was Reed: on the one hand, a great and groundbreaking musician; on the other, a tormentor to those, like me, who have spent hours in his company trying to interview him amid a fog of bad vibes.

The music has some of Sonic Youth’s breakaway energy, with Phair’s imagined Anderson addressing a phantom Reed who is in a state of offensive semi-consciousness:

Hey Lou, are you on the junk again?
Your eyes look dead
But your mouth keeps moving on and on
We’re losing all of our friends

It takes courage and a little cruelty to attempt to pierce the veil behind Anderson and Reed’s romance. (Both Phair and Anderson are from affluent Chicago suburbs, if that means anything.)

 

Reed was the Picasso of New York’s rock and roll demimonde, and as Jonathan Richman wrote in his song about the illustrious painter: “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole. Not in New York.” But Phair does, through an appropriation of Anderson’s performance-artist voice:

No-one knows what to think
When you’re acting like an asshole
Spilling all the drinks
Talking sh*t about Warhol
Again

The true Picasso of American songwriting, Guy Clark, once wrote a song called “Picasso’s Mandolin,” about the painter nailing one of his masterpieces. Clark wrote of Picasso: “I like to mix the paint with nerve.” In this song, Liz Phair stirs her paint with so much nerve, but it’s also Mean Girls mean kind of nerve. The puppets that represent Reed and Anderson in the video are adorable.

Since her 1993 instant-star debut, Exile in Guyville, Phair has represented the lusty, gutsy, but gorgeous woman rocker for legions of fans. She was part of that women-in-rock renaissance of the 1990s – Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Joan Osborne, Janet Jackson, Courtney Love, Juliana Hatfield, Shirley Manson, Gwen Stefani – where women could perform and tell their truths to festival-size audiences of all genders, with messages that especially resonated with women.

Exile in Guyville was an attempt to take a funhouse mirror to the Rolling Stones’ messy but magisterial 1972 Exile on Main Street. I didn’t get it, entirely, but if its aim was to reveal that a woman could express sexual candor and appetite as well as those British bad boys, the Rolling Stones, then point taken. To be fair to Phair, many women knew this, but none had come out with a song called “F*ck and Run.” In 2018, she told Elle magazine about the song: “I’m trying to fight for women to have authorship in their sexuality and fighting to be a sex subject, not a sex object. That was just totally lost by the jump in audience size.”

Soberish often sounds great, thanks to producer Brad Wood, who also produced the more lo-fi Guyville and who provides fresh settings for each song, distinctive settings that hold together, as pleasurable sound, more than previous Phair albums I’ve heard.

In Soberish she sings about sex, with ardor, ambivalence and regret, about the way relationships turn out for her. Yes, she might miscalculate and leap into the sack for a one night stand, or at least obsess about it. But what she really wants, at age 54, is a boyfriend.

This is where fame has become a trap for her, if I understand both the album and her 2018 memoir, Horror Stories, at all. While the parties in any relationship may complain about wanting more space, in a new song, “The Game,” she wants the opposite: “If you would give me your protection instead of so much space…” The song is beautiful, with harmonies that aim for the complicity of Crosby, Stills and Nash, a throwback to an era when even rock star women would be deferential to their “old man.”

You can’t always get what you want. In the video for “The Game,” there are quick cuts of costume changes, but what stands out is the white jacket and proper-length white skirt, suitable for the ladies who lunch at the country club in Winnetka. (And for whom she expresses contempt in the book.) But the jacket opens to reveal, calibrated down to the centimeter, Phair in a scanty bra. Not too much, not too little. Peek-a-boo.

 

And in these new songs, it’s hard to figure out what Phair wants, which may be why Soberish may be an apt title. The way I understand this recently coined word, it is about a desire to drink less, but not stop completely. To take a timeout from drinking for those who find too much succor in too much wine, and know that needing that glass or three every day is becoming a problem. I’m all for it. But the word reeks of ambivalence, an inability to set boundaries, to make a commitment, whether to one’s relationship with alcohol or with people.

In the title song, Phair, or her character, has a date in a hotel bar, and didn’t plan to drink. But: “I did a shot because I’m terrified,” she sings, in a song in which she insists, “I’m not gonna make the same mistakes over and over.” But that’s what people who are trying to stop drinking often say and for them, the drink is the mistake, in the way that the inability to say the right thing in the relationship is a mistake. If she “meant to be sober, but the bar’s so inviting,” why not arrange the date at a really cool coffee shop?

This thread continues in the next song, “Dosage,” in which she sagely notes, “dosage is everything.” Here she’s at the bar with a friend, and says: “Thanks for the drink, but I think you’re over-served/I’d rather roll you a joint with the weed the bartender sold me.” It’s been my experience that if one is too drunk to have another drink, smoking a joint is the last thing you need: you can spin out, blackout, puke.

 

But Phair, from her own descriptions in Horror Stories, is not always the wisest friend, to others and herself. It’s a collection of essays about her experiences, from a kid climbing trees at her grandparents’ Ohio farm to getting lost taking the subway alone from Brooklyn to Manhattan after a gig in a blinding blizzard. The historic 2010 New York blizzard. She had been warned that the city was shutting down totally, but Phair can’t fathom it snowing on her. She also can’t remember the name of her hotel.

She also had the misfortune of being in New York during the 2003 blackout of the entire Northeast. She’s with one of her bandmates in a 15th floor hotel room. She can’t stop thinking about sex with this guy even though he lives with a girlfriend and it would alter the band chemistry. “If we’re facing Armageddon, I need to be paired up,” she writes. And: “I want to be the girl, I want to be saved.”

The lights go out and they go downstairs, where they and their group meet the band the Dandy Warhols on the street. Phair manufactures a little competition for attention between bandmate and the Dandy Warhols singer. Her guys take notice: the chemistry of her band gets altered anyway.

In other stories, marriages break up, hers and those of the men she has affairs with. “I’m calling Ethan to tell him about what’s happening in my day instead of my husband…I’m addicted to the attention.”

With one California beach hunk, the sex is fantastic, but when he leaves her far out in the waves where she has swum too far, she suspects his adoration for her has its limits. And when she finds out he has had a baby with another woman while they have been together, she takes a timeout from the relationship, and goes on a drive with a girlfriend. Then, coming back, she confronts him to tell him it’s over, but not before they have sex again one last time.

She is aware that her self-centeredness is sometimes a problem. In the introduction to the song “Good Side,” she says, “There are so many ways to f*ck up a life/I try to be original.” For once, she wants a breakup to be clean and kind, but motive is important, and you question whether Phair is doing it because she’s trying to do the right thing for another person, or so she can feel better about herself.

Her struggle permeates the songs, and the book. She says that she feels like a victim, “a captive to my celebrity in need of velvet ropes and special treatment.”

And: “My persona is so fragile it tears like tissue paper in the rain.”

And, finally: “Maybe all I need to do is stop thinking about myself for five minutes.”

She may be onto something here. She would be a wonderful bad girl friend for Michael Douglas in a fourth season of The Kominsky Method, in which Liz Phair could play Sandy Kominsky’s rock star girlfriend, Liz Phair. If only she didn’t take herself so seriously.

 

 Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Raph_PH.