Sumiko Songbird Low Output MC Cartridge Review

My review on the Sumiko Songbird phono cartridge is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

Kosmos G's Elektrik Teke

My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review is now live at Perfect Sound Forever. You can read it here.

Mad Love's Ish

My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

FLAX 2020--Bob Carver, House of Stereo, Wireworld, eXemplar, Wolf Audio Systems

My latest show report from the Florida Audio Expo is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

RMAF 2019--Friday's Highlights

My latest show report from the 2019 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

Daniel Elms' Islandia

My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review, for Daniel Elms' Islandia, is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

T.H.E. Show 2019--Muraudio, TriangleArt

My latest show report from T.H.E. Show 2019 is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This one concerns the beautiful TriangleArt turntables from Tom Vu. You can read it here.

Matt Skellenger Group's Vitality

My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review, of Matt Skellenger Group's Vitality, is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

T.H.E. Show 2019--The Return of the Arion Audio Apollo System

My latest show report from T.H.E. Show 2019 in Long Beach is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This one concerns a unique speaker system that I've heard before from Arion Audio. You can read it here.

T.H.E. Show 2019--Common Wave Hi-Fi, Harbeth

My latest show report for T.H.E. Show 2019 is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This one is about Common Wave Hi-Fi, and how this SoCal dealer was able to create new sound with Harbeth loudspeakers. You can read it here.

T.H.E. Show 2019--PranaFidelity, Helius, E.A.R. and Furutech

My latest show report from T.H.E. Show in Long Beach is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This one is about a new brand--to me, anyway--PranaFidelity! You can read it here.

High End Munich 2019--SoundSmith

My latest show report from High End 2019 in Munich is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This one focuses on the superb analog products from SoundSmith. You can read it here.

High End Munich 2019--Friday Highlights

My summary of Friday at the High End Munich 2019 is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. My first full day of coverage in Germany can be found right here!

Cathy Segal-Garcia's Dreamsville

Cathy Segal-Garcia has been a fixture on the LA jazz scene for many years, as both a singer/songwriter and as an educator. Dreamsville is her twelfth album as a leader--she's enlisted the help of guitarist Larry Koonse and pianist Josh Nelson to create this intimate mix of standards and original compositions that veer a bit from the norm. Perhaps that is due to Segal-Garcia's voice, which is complex and rich and carries a touch of sadness to every song--or, perhaps, to every note. She's adding something specific to all eleven of these tracks, a feeling that these songs are meant for those who have just crawled out from under life and have dusted themselves off and are ready for more of the same because it wasn't really that bad. It's a weariness, it's true, but Segal-Garcia uses her deep and expressive voice to suggest more--not hope, not optimism, but perhaps that faith in our ability to rebound.

Indeed, this album is not your garden-variety female jazz vocal album, nor is it meant to be. The musical interplay between Koonse and Nelson is lush and melodic and can lull you into blankness, but it's the singer's words, so direct and infused with meaning, that compel you to attention, to wondering what really happened in her past. That's how convincing she is at this chosen role.

The mood is the star here, the dark and shadowy world this trio creates consistently from song to song. Even when these three really stretch by performing an absolutely gorgeous take on Scarlatti's Sonata in B minor L.33, it's so connected to the rest of the album that its inclusion avoids novelty and feels downright necessary. These moods are easy to sustain, I believe, because the trio never really uses one musical genre as a springboard over another. There are certainly jazz elements, and obviously classical ones, but Dreamsville reaches into those dark corners and runs on that hard-to-categorize energy from beginning to end.

How does this translate into the average audiophile and his love for well-recorded female voice? Well, Dreamsville is clearly that, a great recording with plenty of space for deep thinking. But this isn't the kind of music you want to absorb passively, as an antidote to a long and difficult day. This album is sad, and it might demand more attention from you. It might trouble you. But the best music always does.

Vinyl Anachronist #126 Now Live at Perfect Sound Forever

My latest Vinyl Anachronist column, #126, is now live at Perfect Sound Forever. This one is about the sheer joy I feel now that I get to review analog components again. You can read it here.

2L Recordings' Ujamaa

There's a time of the year, this time I guess, when the 2L Recordings release schedule quiets down. Most of the year there's a fairly steady flow of music from this Norwegian label, but there's always a point, right around the holidays, where I stop and suddenly wonder if I'm missing anything. But I've grown to expect the gap, and now I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the Grammy Awards. You see, Morten Lindberg gets nominated for Grammy Awards pretty much every year, mostly in tech-slanted awards such as Best Surround Sound Album. See, it's not just me raving about some tiny record label. No, 2L Recordings is a big deal now, something that's slowly carving its way into the mainstream of the US music industry.

They're getting a ton of recognition for both content and the technological advances they employ in the recording studio, but this year's Grammy coverage included a couple of stories about Morten's his dubious new record--most nominations without a win. He's 0-26, and 2L in general is 0-34. Morten and 2L have become the Susan Lucci of Norwegian audiophile record labels, which is absurd. It's more than just sounding the best of course--this year, Ujamaa lost the Grammy to Alan Parson's 35th anniversary tribute to Eye in the Sky. (I'm just laying that out there, with no judgment whatsoever.) If you listened to just a handful of 2L Recordings, random picks out of the proverbial hat, you'd be very surprised to learn that they haven't locked up this category over the last seven or eight years.

It's no longer that time of year. I've received three new releases from 2L Recordings, and they are called Ujamaa, Ljos and Lux. Together, they form a trio of performances of original compositions with similar sizes and scopes as well as similar themes. Also, there's a strong vein of folk music running through these three impressive new releases. That's part of the point, and why I haven't started disassembling Ujamaa yet. These three recordings flow so evenly, even though we're dealing with different composers and arrangers and ensembles. Ujamaa, I suppose, blooms even further once you hear all three CDs in a row.

The title of this album is either Ujamaa & The Iceberg or just Ujamaa, depending where you look. This album, performed by the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Choir, features two cantatas from Henning Sommerro, a Norwegian composer who was born in 1952. Ujamaa, by the way, is Swahili for "coming together in brotherhood," and this suggests a long distance bonding between two very different cultures. The thunderous rhythms in "Ujamaa" do sound less "Scandinavian" than usual until you realize that so much of Norwegian folk music, like Sami, has drumming that will remind you of Native American music. (That's just a loose interpretation, of course, since the links to Africa are clearly drawn here.) Sommerro has done something unusual, however, in placing that small folk ensemble in the middle of a big orchestra. This arrangement allows all the musicians more space to deliver all the history.

Because the approach is so expansive and varied over the course of these two cantatas, you'll hear an incredible amount of those 2L treasures--the ability to map out the walls and the ceilings of the old church where these recordings take place. For some reason this feels like one of the biggest ensembles Morten has put into a single room, except for maybe a couple of the choral recordings, and that flexibility gives this lush, tropical music from Norway a fascinating glow. As I mentioned, I listened to Ujamaa once before I also listened to Lux and Ljos, and then I went back to the start and felt like I was listening to some completely different.

I'll say one thing right now--the release of these three CDs in a row was an inspired decision.

Vinyl Anachronist #124 Is Now Live at Perfect Sound Forever

Vinyl Anachronist #124 is now live at Perfect Sound Forever. This one is my annual wrap-up, with awards for best vinyl releases, turntables and more! You can read it here.

RMAF 2018: Soundsmith ES

Here's another show report from the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, this time from the Soundsmith room where Peter Ledermann was showing off an entire system of Soundsmith's excellent products. You can read it here.

Jeff Rupert & Richard Drexler's R&D

Example #2,776 of how not to judge an album by its cover--I give you saxophonist Jeff Rupert and pianist Richard Drexler's R&D. Maybe it's Drexler's long ZZ Top-style beard, or the dark, smoky black and white photo on the cover, but when I first looked at this CD I thought one thing, and that's blues. You know, rough-and-tumble jazz with an edge, with maybe an all-electric ensemble that included one or more guitar players who really knows how to shred, within the parameters of jazz of course. What I didn't expect was this thoughtful, somewhat introspective live album, recorded at the Timucua Arts White House back in 2015. It's just the two men, veterans in the jazz world, playing a handful of standards with uncommon chemistry. It's an intimate performance, with a small but enthusiastic audience present, and it's one of those crystalline moments in jazz that's not just about a piano and a tenor saxophone. It's about the men behind the instruments and how they interact with each other and the rest of the world.

This is one of those splendid live performances that's so much more than tone. These two men have been playing together since the 1980s, and they are completely comfortable in each other's company. Both have played with the greats--Rupert has worked with Maynard Ferguson, Bob Berg and Kenny Drew Jr., and Drexler has played with Mose Allyson, Tony Bennett, George Benson, Diahann Carroll, Vic Damone, Amy Grant and Al Jarreau. Rupert's better known as the founder of Flying Horse records, and director of the Flying Horse Band from the University of Central Florida. I've reviewed two of their albums: Big Man on Campus and The Bat Swings!. Drexler is also part of the faculty at UCF.

It's a pleasure to hear these two musicians apart from their usual big band surroundings. This is the type of recording I usually hear from the likes of 2L Recordings, that deep sense of being able to walk among these two performers and hear their human presences deliver this wonderful music. Rupert has a soft, breathy way with his sax, full of the personal mechanisms that are usually associated with greats such as Stan Getz. Drexler's piano is lush and emotive, and his reach across the keys is impressive in its agility. They share their space with an enormous amount of vivaciousness, always sensitive to what the other is feeling. In other words, this is an ideal recording for gauging that aforementioned chemistry, that magic that only happens between old friends.

Was I disappointed that this album was so different than what I expected? No, I was delighted. I'm listening to this on a cold, rainy day, that time of the year when we can finally say that summer is gone and now we can look forward to another deep winter in Western New York. This is yet another wonderful and simple recording that begs you to move closer and dig around, to bask in the closeness and yes, the love these two performers have for each other, the music and the audience.

Vinyl Anachronist #123 Now Live at Perfect Sound Forever

My latest Vinyl Anachronist column is now live at Perfect Sound Forever. This column is about tonearms, and how they contribute to the overall analog system--based upon my recent experiences with mounting The Wand tonearm from New Zealand. You can read about it here.