Nagra today announced the release of a new "Compact Phono" phono preamplifier now available in The United States for $4950. Here's the Word Doc that somehow didn't make it into our "in-box":Romanel, Switzerland – 25th March 2025 —Perpetuating a long legacy of excellence in phono stages since the Nagra PL-P, the new Nagra Compact Phono offers the greater part of its predecessors’ quality and performance in a compact and elegant housing.... Read More

In just under ten years, songwriter/instrumentalist/vocalist Kevin Barnes transformed Of Montreal from a unified collective to a one-person operation. Having churned out whimsical baroque pop albums like Cherry Peel and The Gay Parade within the confinements of a band, Barnes took to working solo by dabbling in sonic experimentation and, inspired by their first marriage to Nina Grøttland, started writing in a more personal style. The initial fruits of this new... Read More

Teamwork - as they say - makes the dream work. Over the last several years, Org Music has been quietly amassing a catalog of well-produced reissues and original recordings in all genres. On the reissue front, however, the label has reached its goals by employing a select group of audio specialists all working toward the same goal: to find forgotten music deserving of a second chance to reach an audience, and to approach its restoration with straightforward respect and... Read More

Here are my reviews of three new Resonance Records offerings: Charles Mingus’s In Argentina: The Buenos Aires Concerts, Kenny Dorham’s Blue Bossa in the Bronx: Live from the Blue Morocco, and Freddie Hubbard’s On Fire: Live from the Blue Morocco. All three are due out on Record Store Day, April 12; you can pre-order them now.It’s not Charles’ Mingus’s final set of performances, but it’s close. On June 2 and 3, 1977, the Angry Man of Jazz was nearing the end of the... Read More

This latest batch of Original Source releases shows that Deutsche Grammophon has been listening to collectors of this series who have been clamoring for more chamber and instrumental music.  Here we have two such peaks of the 70s catalogue in superb performances, plus two blockbuster orchestral releases that will seriously put your system through its paces.  All in all it’s a list of releases I am salivating over - and you should be too!

This is a good time to be alive if you are a Neil Young fan. For years, Neil Young, an archivist like few others, has saved everything. And when I mean everything, take a gander at the Neil Young Archives. Here we find photographs, original lyric sheets, ephemera, videos, and all the music. The music quality, it goes without saying, is also presented in a similarly archival manner. For those who stream, you are treated to a digital source that is as close as you can... Read More

Recorded in stereo at the Saal Studio 3, RBB, Berlin, The Lost Recordings claims "These recordings were captured in the iconic Studio 3 of the RBB in Berlin, the first recording hall in music history to feature adjustable acoustics. These state-of-the-art settings enabled extraordinary recordings, preserving every nuance of her sound and intonations with remarkable fidelity."Yes, these tapes were digitized, "restored" and cut by Kevin Gray.... Read More

In Greenwich Village, directly across from The Red Lion on Bleecker Street, an unremarkable mixed-use building conceals an extraordinary legacy.From 1964 to 1970, the basement of the defunct Garrick Theatre housed the Café Au Go Go — a pivotal New York club that welcomed legends ranging from Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King to the Grateful Dead. It opened with a bang: in its first year, comedic groundbreaker Lenny Bruce was arrested by undercover police after a performance... Read More

Tracking Angle contributors Michael Johnson and Mark Ward sit down to discuss the music of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) in anticipation of the upcoming DG Original Source box set release of the composer’s Complete Orchestral Works performed by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Read More

To Nick Finzer, the pioneering trombonist J.J. Johnson is often taken for granted. A standout among the new generation of trombonists, Finzer released Legacy — a full-album tribute to his hero, last year — “He’s one of those figures where people know and are familiar with his name,” he told me. “But when you start to dig a little deeper below the surface, people don’t realize how transformative he was.”Transformative indeed: in retrieving the trombone from its... Read More

The third volume of the Blue Note Review, limited to 2,000 copies and entitled Truly Madly DeepLee Morgan is devoted to the music of the trumpeter Lee Morgan. Included in the box set is a Tone Poet style reissue of his 1967 recording, Sonic Boom, a reissue of a 45 RPM single of two tunes from his Charisma album, here 3 LP sides, also on a CD, of contemporary, artists playing Morgan compositions or music associated with him and a "never before released... Read More

I don't believe anyone has ever before done this! Using the Sonic Presence binaural microphone system—it creates a "dummy head" with a microphone adjacent to each ear—I recorded the room sounds at the Florida International Audio Expo. You will experience a remarkably close facsimile of what I and other attendees heard at the show in each of the rooms.You must wear headphones to appreciate the binaural effect and to fully hear the tonal balance. The... Read More

At last year's Southwest Audio Fest I was impressed with Genesis Advanced Technology's introduction of its new G7 Foxtrot loudspeaker. I recognized it as one of the notable products in my 2024 SWAF report and quickly made arrangements with Genesis owner and designer Gary Koh to review it. Genesis History The late Arnie Nudell, a renowned figure in high-end audio founded Genesis Advanced Technologies in 1991. Before establishing Genesis, Nudell co-founded... Read More

Get your headphones ready because at around 44 minutes into the video embedded below, there's a binaural recording using Sonic Presence "on the ear" microphones, in the Vienna Acoustics, Java Hifi, Esoteric Playback Distribution room in which I had them play a 96/24 file I brought of the Classic Records special 78rpm pressing of part of Reiner/CSO "Pictures at an Exhibition". You'll really get to hear the room sound and why I thought it... Read More

When was the last time you saw an offer for a collection of early-1960s Beatles Parlophone 78rpm singles? Every so often one or two appears (including cracked unplayable ones that still fetch decent dollars) but this auction is for thirteen of them!The advents of the long-playing 33rpm phonograph record (1948), the 45rpm single (1949), and the stereo LP (1957) did not immediately end 78rpm production. Even by 1952 78s still accounted for slightly more than half the... Read More

(Press Release): Art Pepper An Afternoon in Norway: The Kongsberg Concert, a blazing, previously unreleased live recording by the great alto saxophonist captured at the titular 1980 festival in Norway, will be issued LP on May 9 by Elemental Music.Co-produced by Zev Feldman, the award-winning “Jazz Detective,” and Elemental partner Jordi Soley, the hard-hitting 1980 quartet date features Pepper, then in the middle of a late-career renaissance, backed sympathetically... Read More

MARCH 14, 2025 — Today, the fantastically prolific and endlessly ambitious Berkeley-born jazz star David Murray announces his new album. Nearly five decades into his storied career in jazz and improvised music, the saxophonist, bass clarinetist, composer and bandleader is making his Impulse! Records debut with Birdly Serenade, a collection of new compositions inspired by the original improvisors: birds. If the outdoorsy inspiration is new for the veteran player, the... Read More