Music and Recording Features

Being There: Reflections on Ways of Experiencing Jazz

Thomas Conrad Apr 07, 2020 First Published: Apr 07, 2020

I remember the only time i ever saw Chet Baker. It was at Parnell's, a jazz club in Pioneer Square in Seattle, long since defunct. It was a few years before Baker died under mysterious circumstances, in Amsterdam in 1988, after a life of creativity, notorious dissipation, and addiction.

Emaciated, with a caved-in face, he already looked near death. He played like an angel. I remember something that happened to me toward the end of the night. Sometimes last sets in jazz clubs, when the crowd has thinned, seem to exist outside of time.

Music and Recording Features

When Britain Went Postal: a Post-Punk Survey

Phil Brett Mar 12, 2020 First Published: Mar 12, 2020

Few would have predicted that the Sex Pistols' first gigin November 1975, at the Saint Martin's School of Art in central Londonwould be the start of an explosion of music. Not many even knew it was happening. That soon changed. Punk would create a space that other bands rushed to fill. Inspired by the DIY ethos and the rejection of the notion that pop music had to be a 30-minute conceptual track on the lives of elves, punk was just grab an instrument and form a band.

Music and Recording Features Revinylized!

Revinylization #3: Analogue Productions, Blue Rose Music, Mobile Fidelity

Art Dudley Mar 11, 2020 First Published: Mar 11, 2020

In the January 2020 Stereophile, I described my transformation from John Fahey skeptic to John Fahey fan; suffice it to say, the late guitarist was far from the only musical artist whose work I came to enjoy only after a number of failed attempts. Another was the English band Yes, which I saw in concert in 1977, at New York's Madison Square Garden: I was so bored by the many lengthy instrumental solos, each one remarkable only for the sheer number of notes being squirted at me, that I literally nodded off. (In my defense, it was also very warm in there.)

Music and Recording Features

Welcome to the EDM Jungle

Ken Micallef Mar 05, 2020 First Published: Mar 05, 2020

In the mid-1990s, record labels were cash-flush and music magazines plentiful. Warner Bros., Capitol, Universal, Mercury, RCA, Arista, Mute, and Astralwerks shuttled US-based music journalists across the Atlantic to cover England's burgeoning Britpop, trip hop, drum and bass, and techno music scenes. The latter three genres were hailed by the press as the "electronic dance music revolution."

Music and Recording Features Revinylized!

Revinylization #2: Frog Pad Records, Electric Recording Company, Blue Note Tone Poet

Art Dudley Feb 05, 2020 First Published: Feb 05, 2020

Next to Christmas carols, Sousa marches, and the collected works of Bobby "Boris" Pickett, there's no more seasonal music than bluegrass, which comes to life at the 30 or so major outdoor festivals and scores of smaller events that take place every summer throughout the US. As I write this, on the day after Thanksgiving, 2019's bluegrass season is only a memory, and the 2020 season is more than a half a year away.

Interviews Music and Recording Features

Bill Frisell: New Ideas in Old Songs

Ken Micallef Jan 07, 2020 First Published: Jan 07, 2020

Of the celebrated triumvirate of John Scofield, Pat Metheny, and Bill Frisellthe most original and influential jazz guitarists of the past 50 yearsnone is more distinctive, or self-effacing, than Frisell, a true changeling of the guitar. Frisell is a jazz-based musician, but his music crisscrosses genres, and his guitar playing isn't bound to or limited by a specific technique. He's a master illusionist, able to alter a song's meaning far beyond its original intent with the aid of a Telecaster guitar, a modest effects chain, and, most importantly, his rich imagination.

Music and Recording Features Revinylized!

Revinylization #1: The Burrito Brothers Fly Again

Art Dudley Dec 17, 2019 First Published: Dec 17, 2019

Think of the greatest commercial LPs made during the past 72 years: the Solti-Culshaw recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Magda Tagliaferro's D'ombre et de lumiere, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, John Lennon's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and a thousand or so others.

Music and Recording Features

The Clash: Still Calling

Phil Brett Dec 06, 2019 First Published: Dec 06, 2019

It's not just the gray hairs or the expanding waistline that suggest one is getting old: it's also when the albums you love so much, and so vividly remember hearing for the first time, have become a part of the rock heritage industry. So it is with London Calling by the Clash, which celebrates its 40th birthday in December 2019.

Music and Recording Features

Adrian Sherwood's Dub Trip

Ken Micallef Nov 26, 2019 First Published: Nov 26, 2019

Following in the lineage of such iconic dub music masters as Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock and Lee "Scratch" Perry, producer Adrian Sherwood is the UK's contemporary pioneer of dub: the reverb-filled, beats-rattling, bass-thick music that erupted from "sound system" parties in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1960s.

Interviews Music and Recording Features

Manfred Eicher: "You Can't Record Everybody"

Fred Kaplan Oct 31, 2019 First Published: Oct 31, 2019

There has never been a record producer like Manfred Eicher, founder and sole proprietor of ECM records, the German-based jazz (and sometimes classical) label that celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.

Eicher doesn't quite win the all-time prize for longevity. Edward Lewis started Decca (UK) in 1929 and owned it until 1980. David Sarnoff controlled RCA from 19191970. William Paley did the same at Columbia from 1938-1988. But unlike those other, financially heftier titans, who deferred to department heads and studio producers, Eicher has supervised every single one of ECM's albumsmore than 1600 of them.