SoundStage! Xperience | SoundStageXperience.com

Details: Curator

April 2023

“James Brown was born to lose. He refused to accept that fate.” Those words begin the biography of the Godfather of Soul included in the booklet that accompanied Star Time (1991), a four-CD anthology that presents a comprehensive overview of Brown’s career. Harry Weinger and Cliff White continue the story: “Brown was determined to be Somebody. He called himself ‘Mr. Dynamite’ before his first Pop hit, and ‘The Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ before the business knew his name.”

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March 2023

Ralph Towner: “At First Light”

ECM Records / Universal Music
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV download

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Ralph Alessi Quartet: “It’s Always Now”

ECM Records / Universal Music
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV download

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Although ECM Records has released its share of music by European jazz musicians, the label has also given exposure to American musicians since it was established by Manfred Eicher in 1969. The label’s first release was pianist Mal Waldron’s Free at Last (1970). Keith Jarrett’s solo piano recordings for the label increased his popularity and ensured the label’s financial viability, and his Standards Trio recordings with ECM reaffirmed his place in the jazz pantheon. Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Charles Lloyd, and Peter Erskine all made fine recordings for ECM.

Details: Pulse!

March 2023

I’m on the email list for the writer Ted Gioia, who maintains a Substack blog publication called The Honest Broker. Gioia’s list of accomplishments is long—he is a music historian whose many books, including The History of Jazz (in its third edition as of 2021) and Music: A Subversive History (2019), are well regarded. Gioia has also written many music reviews, and, for a time, owned a record label. His fiction reviews are also well worth reading, but they seem to have migrated to The Honest Broker, which is a pay site.

Details: Art+Tech

March 2023

This is a story about creativity, power, and choice. It’s also about breaking from what’s expected and taking a risk in new territory.

Details: CD music

February 2023

Palmetto Records PM2208CD
Format: CD

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Esperanza Spalding is a genre-defying musician with a strong foundation in jazz. Fred Hersch is a pianist and composer with an extensive discography as leader and sideman. His playing shows great sensitivity and beauty, and he brings a unique interpretive touch to the work of other composers. He asked Spalding to join him at the Village Vanguard for four nights in October 2018. He assumed she would be playing bass, but instead Spalding chose to focus on singing, with Hersch accompanying.

Details: Pulse!

February 2023

Music is the reason for high-end audio. I still recall the first time I heard music on something that was better quality than the stereo console my parents owned. When I was in high school, I knew a keyboard player who worked part-time in an electronics supply shop. He convinced the owner, who might have been his dad—we’re going back quite a few years so the details are a bit fuzzy—to let him set up an audio shop in a section of the store.

Details: Art+Tech

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

February 2023

When the user’s manual for a desktop DAC has 68 pages—68 pages of very small type—you know you’re not dealing with just another digital-to-analog converter. At $1299 (all prices in USD), RME’s ADI-2 DAC FS isn’t priced like most of its competitors, either. I slid it into the place normally filled by my $199 iFi Audio Zen DAC V2, between my iPad Pro and my Focal Alpha Evo 50 studio monitors.

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January 2023

Curation Records
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC download

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Uni Boys is a rock’n’roll quartet from Southern California whose crunchy, guitar-based power pop combines sophisticated songwriting with garage-band edginess. The group recorded two DIY albums that gained a following and impressed Los Angeles label Curation Records, which intended to give those recordings an official release. The group instead persuaded the label to release an album of new recordings, and Do It All Next Week hit streaming services a couple of months ago. Vinyl and CD releases will follow this month.

Details: Pulse!

January 2023

Harrisonburg, Virginia, is a city of 52,000 in the Shenandoah Valley, about two hours from Washington, DC. Roughly an hour from Charlottesville, Virginia, where you can visit Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and another Jeffersonian attraction, the University of Virginia, Harrisonburg itself is home to two well-established colleges: James Madison University and Eastern Mennonite University. James Madison is a public university of over 21,000 students, while EMU is private and has about 1200 students.

Details: Art+Tech

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

January 2023

If there’s a psychiatrist out there who wants to delve into the connection between weather and music, I’d be happy to lie on your couch. Deep in my Canadian psyche is the need to hear extremely buoyant–yet-meditative instrumental jazz on late-autumn days. Pianist Keith Jarrett’s 1973 album Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne is the ideal way to scratch that itch. That stems from the first time I saw Jarrett in concert: a crisp, fall night in 1975, which gave way to an exceptionally snowy morning. I woke to it with his music still in my head.

Details: Pulse!

December 2022

It was the year live music was supposed to be back. And it was, in some senses—although pandemic-related restrictions continued to play havoc with musicians’ travel and festival schedules, and artists continued to reflect on the theme of “What the hell just happened?”

Details: Curator

December 2022

Andy Partridge, the chief songwriter and coleader of the band XTC, has a chip on his shoulder about being from Swindon, a city of 233,000 in Wiltshire, about 70 miles west of London, England. In 2016, he explained why to an interviewer from Louder: “To the English, anything that comes from Swindon must have comedic value. And I think it’s held us back terribly.” He went on to say that if the band had been American, or even came from the northern city of Manchester, birthplace of many great English groups, it would have been held in higher esteem. “We were f**king brilliant,” he asserted: “One of the greats.”

Details: SoundStage! Encore

November 2022

Dolby Atmos is a new surround-sound format that uses objects instead of channels to place sounds around the listener. The result is a far more immersive listening experience that can scale from small to large systems far better compared to what traditional surround-sound formats can provide. In this video, PMC chief technical officer Oliver Thomas describes the Dolby Atmos mixing studio the company has set up in London, then brand ambassador and mix engineer Heff Moraes describes what Dolby Atmos is, how it works, and why he’s so excited by the potential it provides. As Moraes says in this video, “Dolby Atmos is a really exciting, new way for consumers to hear and experience music in a completely different way.” Watch and find out what the fuss is about.

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November 2022

Out of Your Head Records OOYH 017
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV download

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Indigenous culture of all forms is gaining prominence, particularly in Canada—a country that is in the midst of a process of “truth and reconciliation” with its Indigenous Peoples. In the past, Indigenous musicians from the continent many call Turtle Island, like Link Wray and the members of Redbone, were rare; today, young artists like The Halluci Nation, DJ Shub, and others are receiving widespread exposure.