Music and Recording Features

New York Tenor Central

Ken Micallef Oct 04, 2018 First Published: Oct 04, 2018

Even as hypergentrification runs rampant, enriching financial opportunities for some and crushing small-business dreams for others, New York City remains ground zero for jazz and for the small clubs it thrives in. The New York Times may not cover jazz unless someone of the stature of Wynton Marsalis is on the bill, but the music moves ahead undeterred, taking up residence at such iconic venues as the Blue Note, Cornelia Street Café, Fat Cat, 55 Bar, Jazz Gallery, Mezzrow, Smalls, Smoke, the Village Vanguard, and Zinc Bar.

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Van the Man

John Atkinson Aug 21, 2018 First Published: Aug 21, 2018

The dingy green-and-ochre poster on the subway-station wall, advertising events at Queens's Forest Hills Stadium, didn't draw attention to itself. But what else is there to do on a subway platform but look at posters? I looked at it. There, near the bottom of the left column, I read: "SEPT 12: VAN MORRISON AND WILLIE NELSON & FAMILY."

Van Morrison. In concert. In Queens.

Music and Recording Features

Four Outstanding Choral Recordings

Jason Victor Serinus Jul 31, 2018 First Published: Jul 31, 2018

We who love recordings of massed voices have learned the hard way that some succeed in blending vocal clarity with acoustic resonance, while others deliver echo-muddied jumbles. Happily, some very fine choral recordings have come my way in the last six months. Along with John Atkinson's acoustically stunning engineering of recordings by the vocally gifted Portland State Chamber Choir and the all-male ensemble Cantus, these aural documents do composers proud.

Music and Recording Features

John Coltrane's Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album Debuts at Englewood Cliffs

Ken Micallef Jun 27, 2018 First Published: Jun 27, 2018

A stunning jazz discovery presented at a historic citadel of recording technology. That event took place June 11, when the new John Coltrane recording, Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, which will be released June 29, was unveiled at Van Gelder Studio, the fabled location where the celebrated engineer recorded many jazz masterpieces.

Music and Recording Features

Highway 61 Revisited

Jim Austin Jun 19, 2018 First Published: Jun 19, 2018

Photos: Jim Austin

I'm sitting in a rented Nissan just off Highway 61yes, that Highway 61looking out at a Shell station through the bug-stained windshield and across a litter-strewn, not-yet-planted cotton field. It's late March, and I've just left Clarksdale, Mississippi, on my way to Memphis. Leaving Clarksdale made me thoughtful, so I've pulled over to jot down a few notes.

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Steve Albini: Serve The Servants

Robert Baird May 29, 2018 First Published: May 29, 2018

Notoriously opinionated and obstinate Steve Albini, a guy ever vigilant and vocal about the wicked ways of the music business, showing up in Austin, Texas, at the annual South by Southwest festival? This I had to see. After a near-miss at his Austin hotel, we spoke the next morning on the phone.

"It was unspeakable on all levels, as bad as I imagined, and in some ways worse."

Any notion that he'd somehow softened, somehow accepted the music biz as it

Wait. What the hell am I thinking?

Music and Recording Features

National Sawdust: An Artistic Incubator

Robert Baird May 08, 2018 First Published: May 08, 2018

Saturday night in hipster Brooklyn . . . yet there could have been actual sawdust on the floor. Inside National Sawdust, a youngish crowd, many clearly ready to party, were shuffling, some were full-blown jitterbugging, while onstage the Lost Bayou Ramblers, a progressive young Cajun band who'd at first seemed a bit awed by their futuristic surroundings, were slugging beers, sawing a fiddle, squeezing an accordion, and generally finding their groove.

Music and Recording Features

DJ Club Sound Systems of Brooklyn

Sasha Matson Apr 09, 2018 First Published: Apr 09, 2018

There I was, at my son Peter's thirtieth birthday party at Black Flamingo in Brooklyn, staring at a large. floorstanding speaker cabinet. Then it hit meyoung people are gathering in groups to listen and dance to high-quality music playback. Just like we used to do!

Music and Recording Features

Moby: Sound of Mind

Robert Baird Mar 27, 2018 First Published: Mar 27, 2018

The loudness wars are over. The valiant but hopelessly outnumbered forces that stood against squashing the dynamics and life out of recordings, all in the name of almighty loudness, have been vanquished. Scattered across the smoking battlefield are the lifeless bodies of thousands of disappointed listeners, many so young they will never now know what it's like to hear a natural, uncompressed recording.

Music and Recording Features

Book Review: Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan

David Lander Feb 27, 2018 First Published: Feb 27, 2018

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
By Elaine M. Hayes. 419 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017. Hardbound: $27.99. Available in eBook and digital audiobook formats.

This is the second biography of Sarah Vaughan (19241990), whose towering vocal talents took her to the top rung of the jazz ladder, beside Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. The author, trained as a classical musician, puts far more emphasis on the singer's recordings than Leslie Gourse did in Sassy, her 1993 Vaughan biography. Hayes's grasp of music, and her definitions of the musical terms she uses, make this the better account.