October 1st, 2022
"Creed Taylor: The Music Came First" Now Available For Streaming Tracking Angle editor has some FaceTime in doc along with Taylor, Ron Carter, Ashley Kahn, Herb Alpert and many othersBy: Michael Fremer
Creed Taylor produced records are no doubt among your most treasured, whether on CTI, which he founded in 1967, or Verve or other labels in which he was involved. Taylor passed away Augusts 22nd, 2022 at age 93. The recently released documentary "Creed Taylor, The Music Came First" is now available as a free, high resolution stream on the Snapshots Music and Arts Foundation website. If you click on "Vimeo" from that site you can watch full screen... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
The Latest (and Last) "Kind of Blue" The best-ever pressing of the best jazz albumBy: Fred Kaplan
(Revised Sept 17, 2022)Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: “What’s this now, another audiophile reissue of Kind of fu*king Blue?!” But here’s the thing: not only is this new one—pressed by Acoustic Sounds at 45rpm across two slabs of 200-gram UHQR Clarity vinyl—the best of the bunch; there almost certainly won’t be a better one for the foreseeable future.Not much need be said at this point about the 1959 Miles Davis classic: the best-selling jazz album of all time;... Read More
Comments: 1October 1st, 2022
The Editor Has Made an "Executive Decision" moves original content to the front of the queueBy: Michael Fremer
Dear Tracking Angle reader: the site has been live for a few weeks now with both new and "vintage" content. We hope you are enjoying both. However, as we post more "vintage" content and new readers arrive, they have to "dig" to find the new content, so, I've decided to move all of the new content to the front of the line and push the old (but equally interesting and useful) content to the back. This is a onetime move but for now... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
John Lennon Once Put A Shitty Pressing Of His Music on Trial-- And Won! Years before the Mofi scandal, Jay Bergen's "Lennon, the Mobster, & the Lawyer" tells how the former Beatle used the good ol' shoot-out to show a federal judge how a shitty pressing hurt his reputation as an artist.By: Joshua Smith
The year was 1976, long before "hot stampers" were even a thing. John Lennon presided over a good old-fashioned record pressing shoot-out-- in federal court, no less. The pressings played in the Southern District of New York's federal courthouse had songs familiar to lovers of Lennon's ROCK 'N' ROLL album, his beautiful homage to early rock and roll, but the two albums' quality couldn't have been farther apart. The first... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
Ry Cooder & Taj Mahal Pay Tribute To Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee's Folkways LP Get On Board And Have A Great Time Doing It!By: Joseph W. Washek
Ry Cooder, in 1959, when he was 12 bought a copy of a ten inch record on an odd label with an amateurish paste-on cover and mimeographed liner notes tucked inside. The record was Get On Board by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two middle aged Black men who had been playing blues for Black audiences for more than two decades, but now, probably to their own surprise, were becoming popular with young white people. Cooder began listening and woodshedding and we know the... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
Uhuru Afrika---Randy Weston's Forgotten 1960 Masterpiece The Records You Didn't Know You Needed #12By: Joseph W. Washek
In 1960, often referred to as “The Year of Africa,” seventeen former French and British colonies in Africa became free, independent nations. In the U.S., in February 1960, the struggle of Black Americans to attain the civil rights which had been promised them by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, entered a more aggressive, confrontational phase when in Greenville, North Carolina Black students, frustrated and angered by the slow progress in ending segregation,... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
Every Audiophile Needs This Lou Reed Live Album! Lou Reed talks, and talks, and talks... in glorious binaural sound!By: Malachi Lui
As I paid $25 for an original US copy of Lou Reed’s 1978 live album Take No Prisoners, my local record shop owner said, “Enjoy it, man, I’ve never seen this record before. Plus it’s a promo.” Indeed it is: not only is there a sticker from Arista denoting it a DJ copy originally loaned for promotional use only, but there’s also a bold red hype sticker reading “SPECIALLY PRICED TWO-RECORD SET—All the raw excitement of Lou Reed-Live,” with quotes from the Chicago... Read More
Comments: 1October 1st, 2022
Royal Trux, David Briggs, Burn Rock and Roll To a Crisp with Thank You The Final Album from Legendary Producer and Neil Young Cohort David Briggs is Giant and PerfectBy: Joshua Smith
Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, the duo that formed Royal Trux in the late '80s, don't look or sound like one of the smartest bands of all time. I saw them open for Pavement at the Roxy Theater in Atlanta in 1997. The two looked like they had escaped from the pages of an R. Crumb comic book. Singer Jennifer Herrema 's long pale arm was wrapped with black leather straps like some kind of profane arm-tefillah. Neal Hagerty had his back toward the... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
The Lush Glory of Charles Lloyd The West Coast Coltrane's new balladeering trioBy: Fred Kaplan
Charles Lloyd is a force of nature. At 84, he’s not only active but very nearly at the top of his game, blowing blues, ballads, and up-tempo rousers—holding whole notes and raining sheets of sound—with grace, verve, and beauty. He has also been a superb gatherer of talent over the decades. His breakthrough album as a leader, Dream Weaver, featured Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee, and Jack DeJohnette, in 1966, before any of them were known. In the past decade, unlike some... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
A Guide to Collecting Japanese Imports the secret grooves of the rising sun have never been so accessibleBy: Michael Johnson
Readers on this website might be most familiar with me for my classical music reviews, but the breadth of music I enjoy and collect spans far beyond the purview of Bartok and Brahms. Japanese popular music has long been one of my particular interests. I tracked down my first Dir en grey CDs way back in middle school, and since that time over the last 15 or so years, I’ve been steadily importing physical media from the land of the rising sun. My journey has been long... Read More
Comments: 0Blue Train is old enough to be on Social Security, yet this reissue (with an additional album of alternative takes) seems to have created a stir probably greater than when it was first released January, 1958. Rudy Van Gelder recorded it in his Hackensack, New Jersey home studio, September, 15th 1957, 65 years ago to the day I’m writing this.Blue Train is the only album Coltrane recorded for Blue Note. He’d signed with Prestige and did this “one off” built upon a... Read More
Comments: 0October 1st, 2022
Tyshawn Sorey Goes Deep into Jazz The avant-garde experimental drummer-composer puts his stamp on standardsBy: Fred Kaplan
The drummer Tyshawn Sorey has made his mark mainly as an experimental musician, composer, and conductor—a McArthur Genius Grant winner who spans the gamut between contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz, with stints as sideman to the likes of Marilyn Crispell, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton. But lately he’s taken small steps toward the mainstream, playing in Vijay Iyer’s trio and now, with Mesmerism, leading his own trio on an album of standards. Except for... Read More
Comments: 1September 29th, 2022
Coolio's Hit 'Gangsta's Paradise' From the archives: Coolio's new collection of intelligent, positive, smoothly gliding, retro soul/R&B, hip-hop is impressively varied and wide-rangingBy: Tracking Angle
(This review, written by Carl E. Baugher, originally appeared in Issue 5/6, Winter 1995/96.)If Coolio ain’t careful, he's gonna give gangsta rap a good name. ‘Course, he’d be the first to tell you he’s not a gangsta rapper anyway and, despite the album title, that’s a fact. This collection of intelligent, positive, smoothly gliding, retro soul/R&B, hip-hop is impressively varied and wide-ranging.It all adds up to way more than one normally gets in... Read More
Comments: 0September 28th, 2022
Funk Firm's Houdini Cartridge Decoupler Is it a worthwhile "tweak" for your tonearm?By: Michael Fremer
"The last thing I'd want to do is decouple my cartridge from the tonearm's headshell!", I barked at Funk Firm's Arthur Khoubessarian (BSc physics, University of Surrey) at last Spring's High End Munich show as he attempted to introduce me to the Houdini cartridge de-coupler. Everything I've learned and been taught by my mentors is that headshell/cartridge coupling is essential for efficient energy transfer; the goal being to drain it... Read More
Comments: 1September 28th, 2022
The 1994 Winter CES Show Have a Look Back Almost 30 years to the 1994 CESBy: Michael Fremer
This report was originally written in 1994 for The Absolute Sound and never published there. Please keep the date in mind as you read it!–Ed.Everything was out of joint this year (though not out of joints – judging by the odors emanating from some parked cars around the Sahara bi-level), from the unusually cold wet weather – it rained almost every day – to the thoroughly bizarre product mix at The Saharaʼs bi-level complex High End audio exhibits. Who would have dared... Read More
Comments: 0September 27th, 2022
Vince Guaraldi's "Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus" Is Next Craft Recordings "Small Batch" One-Step AAA Release Also announced is deluxe 2 CD, 3 LP set newly remastered, with Plangent Processed "bonus material"By: Michael Fremer
Craft Recordings Celebrates 60th anniversary of Vince Guaraldi's Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus featuring the GRAMMY Award-winning instrumental hit "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" with a Small Batch (limited to 3000 copies) all-analog edition of the original album cut by Bernie Grundman using the original master tapes, "One-Step" processed and pressed at RTI on 180 gram NeoTech VR900 compound. Set for release February 24th, 2023, the Small... Read More
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