Art+Tech

Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.

March 2025

The history of recorded blues and jazz has abounded with legendary figures in the decades since Mamie Smith cut “Crazy Blues” in August 1920, but few artists have been connected to as broad a range of other musicians, and as many seminal events, as 82-year-old John Paul Hammond. Also known as John Hammond Jr.—to differentiate him from his father, a renowned record producer who shepherded budding artists ranging from Benny Goodman to Bruce Springsteen during his long tenure with Columbia Records—he was a veritable Zelig during the 1960s.

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January 2025

Having worked with artists as diverse as Bon Jovi and Wynton Marsalis and helped define the musical signatures of late-career Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter as a member of their bands, bassist John Patitucci has cachet that few other rhythm-section players achieve. His tone, technique, and imagination are all exceptional.

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December 2024

I spent 1964 obsessed with becoming a drummer. Unfortunately, my inspiration was Dave Clark when it should have been Tony Williams. While Clark was already a veteran at 24 when his quintet caught the big wave the Beatles had started, Williams was a mere 17 when he burst out as the new drummer in Miles Davis’s quintet around the same time.

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October 2024

It’s easy to fall into the trap of returning again and again to the artists who have already caught your ear. Take, for example, saxophonists Chris Potter, Charles Lloyd, and Miguel Zenón. When these endlessly expressive musicians release new albums, which they do at least once a year, I feel compelled to listen to them. Dozens upon dozens of other great musicians I follow, across a wide spectrum of instruments and music genres, also release albums regularly, and as a professional critic, I receive an average of 400 unsolicited recordings a year too, mostly as digital files. As much as I’d love to, I can’t possibly listen to them all.

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Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.

August 2024

For the three years following late September, 1970, not a day passed without me listening to Jimi Hendrix. For various reasons, I had missed most of the guitarist’s supercharged, stratospheric rise to fame. I only began seriously listening to his music with the release of Hendrix’s final official album, Band of Gypsys (1970), and then I couldn’t get enough. I’d begun buying LPs—just $3.33 each for the stereo versions at my local discount store—in 1965. Within the year I had a small stack of vinyl: Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited; the Rolling Stones’ 12 × 5 and The Rolling Stones, Now!; the Dave Clark Five’s Glad All Over; and Beach Boys Concert. Ironically, it was the lovable Monkees—whose 1967 US tour had featured the newly formed Jimi Hendrix Experience as an unlikely opening act—that led me to overlook the guitarist’s earlier work.

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Note: for the full suite of measurements for the PSB Imagine B50 loudspeaker performed in the anechoic chamber at Canada’s National Research Council, click this link.

July 2024

In last month’s column, I looked at two jazz recordings released in the early ’60s and how they represented part of the last wave of releases before the onslaught of the British Invasion. If anyone took that as my agreement with the “jazz is dead” trope, this column should serve as a spirited rebuttal.

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Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.

June 2024

At the beginning of 1961, four decades after the dawn of the so-called Jazz Age, it seemed like the art form would continue to dominate American popular music for the foreseeable future. Despite the commercial hiccup that accompanied the rise of artists like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard in the mid-’50s, jazz had weathered the storm and appeared well positioned to be the soundtrack of the ’60s. Youth culture was on the rise, jazz was the music of choice at US universities, and as a handsome young president took the oath of office on January 20, what was becoming known as “America’s classical music” seemed primed to continue its dominance.

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Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.

April 2024

Across the five-plus decades I’ve been discovering new artists—beginning auspiciously with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan—the breakthroughs have waxed and waned. While the mid-’60s remain the benchmark, thanks to the rise of electrified popular music in both Britain and the US, exciting young artists have continued to bloom, both singularly and in bunches.

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February 2024

After a slow start, typical winter weather finally arrived on the river south of Ottawa, Canada, sending me looking for some suitably restful music. Just as summer calls for songs related to open roads, surf, and sun, winter days demand ethereal sounds that carry me away.

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December 2023

I recently visited a twentysomething relative who works as a lawyer in a large city. Like many young professionals, she lives in a compact one-bedroom apartment, sacrificing living space for the downtown location. She has a large-screen TV, a small desk, and little room for anything else. One thing she does have is a vintage turntable, but it isn’t hooked up. For music, she streams through a Sonos speaker.

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