Sasha Matson

When I read the news that songwriter and guitarist Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson had passed, I forwarded a link to the obituary in the New York Times to my friends Doug and Jon. They were with me in the balcony of the Berkeley Community Theater on the evening of January 31, 1970, to hear a performance by The Band. We were juniors at Berkeley High School that year and lived and breathed that music every day. I recall sitting around with them outdoors, singing songs from The Band's first two albums.

As I was talking with an audio-retailer friend recently, he reached for a Rolls-Royce metaphor to describe the McIntosh brand. Expensive? Sure, but not as expensive as some boutique high-end products. Fast? Sure, but there are faster things—also bigger things, smaller things, wackier things, and cheaper things.

But when you look at a Rolls or a Bentley, you immediately recognize it for what it is, and you want to sit down in it. And so it is with McIntosh, except you don't want to sit down in it; you want to sit down in front of it, between the speakers of the hi-fi system it occupies.

The C12000 is McIntosh's current flagship preamplifier. It's part of McIntosh's Hybrid Drive series of products that combine tubes and transistors in interesting ways.

Wynton Marsalis: Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives Hot Sevens
Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; eight band members
Blue Engine Records (auditioned as 24/48 FLAC). 2023. Marsalis, exec. prod.; Saundra Palmer-Grassi, Todd Whitelock, engs.
Performance *****
Sonics ****

Recorded in 2006 but not released until now, Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives Hot Sevens was recorded live at the Rose Theater, the largest of three performance rooms at the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility. House label Blue Engine Records has now released this concert for streaming.

In the 1960s, my dad gave me a Panasonic receiver with two cube speakers, just in time for the advent of FM stereo radio in the San Francisco Bay Area. Out of the blue one night, he just walked in with it. The receiver allowed me to plug in a record player, though I only had a few LPs. Later, when I went off to college, my mom took me shopping for a new stereo. I chose a Kenwood integrated amplifier—without a tuner but with the capability to plug in a tape deck, which I did. During my undergrad years, it served me well. Later, I switched to an NAD receiver, which allowed me to listen to the radio again.

Barbra Streisand: Live at the Bon Soir
Streisand, vocals; Tiger Haynes, guitar; Peter Daniels, piano; Averill Pollard, bass; John Cresci, drums
Legacy/Columbia 19658713762 (reviewed as 24/96 WAV, also available on CD, Gold CD, SACD, 2LP). 2022/23. Barbra Streisand, Jay Landers, Martin Erlichman, prods.; Roy Halee, Adjutor Theroux, Paul Blakemore, Jochem van der Saag, engs.
Performance *****
Sonics ***

Columbia Records continues to extend its Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, which began in 1991. The latest edition in this complex warren of burrows brings us to Volume 17, Bob Dylan—Fragments—Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996–1997).

Fragments—the title—feels inaccurate; these recordings are not shards of some missing whole. Rather, they form a single large, varied portrait. To borrow an analogy from art history, what we have here is the result of cleaning and restoring a large canvas, removing layers of varnish and dirt that had obscured the true colors and textures that were there when it was first painted. Now we can experience this masterpiece in a new way.

Hygge might not be the first word that comes to mind when contemplating the Primare PRE35 Prisma preamplifier, but in Limhamn, Sweden, that is how Primare likes to describe their products. It means "cozy," and it's a very important concept in the Nordic countries, almost a way of life. Another term that appears in Primare's product descriptions is lagom, which loosely translates as "not too little, not too much—just right."