Hear the Quality!

This article was originally published in early 1999. Note: These days, I'm feeling a lot more connected to today's rock and pop music, thanks to the music video channel Fuse, which is turning me on to a lot of great, new music and bands!

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I'm writing this at the beginning of a new year, feeling more detached from commercial pop music than ever. There's almost nothing on the radio I want to hear, and it's getting harder than ever to discover new and worthy albums from artists whose names aren't Celine Dion or the Backstreet Boys. Were it not for Madonna's aptly named Ray of Light, Lauryn Hill's amazing The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and a couple of other bright spots, I would have given up on pop radio circa 1998 altogether.

I'm also feeling more out of it than ever regarding non-commercial rock and pop music. This feeling was crystallized by a recent visit to a graphic designer friend, who is on the cutting edge not only of computer-based design but also computer-based music listening. He compiles playlist after playlist of MP-3 music files downloaded from the Internet for his daily listening—all ultra-hip electronic, underground, world and other totally non-categorizable music from bands I've mostly never heard of. It gave me hope—while the time I spent at his facility made me feel hopelessly out-of-touch with the musical vanguard, it also gave me an electric jolt of excitement. Man, what he played me was fresh, fantastic and thrilling—this is what I've been looking for, music that gets me emotionally excited, music I need to hear!

I've got to get more into this phenomenon over the New Year. Many in the industry have expressed fear that music delivered over the Internet will be the end of record companies and a large portion of the music business as we know it. Maybe so, but I see it as a thrilling new beginning, where more great music from more great bands and artists than ever will be more readily accessible than ever.

For now, two new releases have got me excited this month-both musically wonderful in entirely different ways, and both possessing unusually fine sound quality easily surpassing four stars....

Bireli Lagrene: Blue Eyes
Dreyfus Jazz FDM 36591-2 (distribution by Koch International USA)

Bireli Lagrene is a French guitarist I've been wanting to hear ever since Les Paul, in an interview I did with him years ago, told me that Lagrene was one of his favorite guitarists. Talk about a ringing endorsement! Talk about doing nothing about it until this CD from the French Dreyfus Jazz label was sent to me courtesy of Detroit's Dr. Jazz. And oh man, Les Paul was right—Lagrene is an amazing musician and guitarist! He plays in a classic jazz style, improvising with fire and finesse, spinning out brilliantly melodic lines and phrases filled with musical invention and lyrical beauty. His technique is, in the true sense of the word, breathtaking, whether firing off dazzling rapid-fire runs or laying into lush chord melodies. His tone is gorgeous pristine—clean amplified hollow-body arch top, on many tracks mixed with the close-miked unamplified sound of the instrument for a pleasing blend of amplified and acoustic tone. Gifted is the word.

Blue Eyes is billed as Lagrene's tribute to Frank Sinatra, a musician who Lagrene avows had a singular influence on his life. The album is a collection of songs closely associated with Sinatra: "Witchcraft," "My Kind of Town," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Come Fly With Me" and nine others. It's not a vocal album per se, though Lagrene sings on a few cuts in a voice that, while is smooth and pleasant (some may find it straying too closely into jazz-lite territory), is hardly up to the astonishing standards of his guitar playing. The music and playing are simply heavenly, just beautiful and a sheer hedonistic pleasure to listen to. Lagrene is backed by a superb, sympathetic quartet playing brilliantly throughout—Maurice Vander on piano, André Ceccarelli on drums and Chris Minh Doky (love that name) on acoustic and electric bass. The musicians play in a classic, timeless style that, musically, could have just as well been recorded in 1959 as 1999.

But not sonically. Oh no, sorry to sound reactionary here, but they never could have made a recording with this astonishing clarity, transparency and presence in 1959—even though the late 1950s are rightfully considered a, if not the, Golden Age of recording. I don't know what kind of equipment was used—the liner notes simply say the album was recorded at Studio Davout, Paris, engineered by Claude Ermelin, mixed by Jean-Loup Morette and Yves Chamberland, and mastered by Jérôme Corbier at a place called Top Master.

And I don't know how they did it, but the sound is flabbergasting. Tonal balance is fabulous, perhaps a touch on the warm side, which perfectly complements the warmth of the music. The bass is exceptionally articulate—this is, quite simply, one of the most well-recorded acoustic basses I've ever heard. You could die wallowing in the midrange and not care, and the upper midrange and highs are ultra-clean, detailed and extended without any etching or stridency. Dynamics and detail resolution and are astonishingly good, and although it sounds like this is a multimiked recording, instrumental imaging and presence are excellent, if not possessing the kind of rooted-in-virtual-space image specificity you get with purist, two-mike stereo recordings. The soundspace is wide and deep, with a credible sense of room ambience. The word that keeps coming to mind is clarity—the sound is amazingly pure and lifelike-amazingly close to the real thing.

I'm telling you, don't miss this one—quite simply, this is one of the finest recordings I've ever heard.

Fallen Angels: Rain of Fire
Wildchild 05852

And now for something completely different, as the purveyors of that famous mythical anthology, Every Record Ever Recorded, used to say. From Wildchild, a division of audiophile label Mapleshade Productions, comes Rain of Fire, an album of neo-psychedelic music from Fallen Angels, a band that burned brightly and burned out just as quickly in the Sixties, to be reborn thirty years later in a manner no one could have predicted.

The story goes: the Fallen Angels were one of the many bands that achieved regional notoriety—in their case, the Washington, DC area—without attaining national success. After releasing two albums on Roulette Records that were not properly promoted by the label (and are treasured by collectors of psychedelia) the group disbanded for "all the usual reasons," as the liner notes so succinctly put it. Thirty years later, Rick Hallock, Mapleshade's Director of Marketing, tracked down Jack Bryant, the band's leader, and convinced the band to reform (with all the original members except for a new drummer). Eight months of songwriting and rehearsals ensued in preparation for a new album, in "a cavernous basement where you had to thread your way through a jungle...of blown speakers, disemboweled amps, rusting motorcycle engines, primer-grey custom car hoods and mildewing psychedelic posters." In that "junk-lined time capsule," the reborn Angels revived.

The album sounds like it came from a time capsule—and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. That's because the music re-captures that elusive feeling of Sixties music—the feeling of complete anything-goes musical freedom and experimentation, without formulaic restrictions, and the feeling that we were all embarking upon a journey into a blissful new era of peace, love and happiness. Not a heavy, trippy, fuzz-guitar drenched album in the vein of, say, Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or an extended improv-freak out in the manner of some early Grateful Dead albums, Rain of Fire is rather more evocative of bands like the legendary band Love, with its emphasis on plaintive vocals, soaring vocal harmonies and lilting pop songcraft. It's an open, inviting sound, one which takes me back to a time when anything seemed possible.

Well, the Fallen Angels got their chops back together for this album, all right—they had to, 'cause it was recorded live-to-two-track without any overdubs! In keeping with Pierre Sprey's philosophy of ultra-purist recording, Rain of Fire was recorded at Mapleshade's studio onto two-track analog tape, digitized on a custom A/D converter at "2,823K samples per second," using minimum miking, minimum audiophile-quality cabling, with no mixing board, filtering, compression, equalization or noise reduction. Just a band playing their hearts out, the moments captured forever. A little loose, a little funky, a little rough-all the more charming and human-sounding, a real band playing real music—you know, the way it used to be?

And it sounds it—the recording is you-are-there alive and present, a band playing and grooving in your room. Exceptional sonic purity, "air" and resolution of the finest musical nuances, from the "ping" of the cymbals to the transient clarity and "pluck" of the acoustic guitars. Thrilling dynamic range and instrumental "kick." Vocals that are among the most realistically-recorded on disc—Jack Bryant's sweet, emotive singing on "I Close My Eyes" and hiccuping tremolo effects on "Everything Would Be Fine" send the proverbial chills up my spine every time, as he sounds like he is right there in front of me. Electric guitars that sound remarkably "real," from the unmistakable "moaning" sound of the Fender Stratocaster to the wah-wah'd distortion of a humbucker-equipped guitar (a Gibson semi-hollow?) overdriving an amp cranked to near destruction. (I would have mixed the guitars a little louder, but it wasn't my bread that paid for this record!)

Kudos to the band and to Mapleshade for having the cojones to pull this off. Not everyone's cup of psychedelically-spiked punch, to be sure—but I have to say I really dig this.

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Tom Petty: Full Moon Fever Update
Mobile Fidelity UDCD 735 Ultradisc II Gain 2 CD, MCA MCAD-6253 CD, MCA MCA-6253 LP

Last month, I talked about the first Mobile Fidelity's superb first release using their new Gain II system, Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever (UDCD 735). At the time, I said I'd do a comparison with the original LP for this issue. To recap: the Gain II system uses a Tim de Paravicini-modified Studer A-80 deck to play back the master tapes, which are then digitally encoded using the Sony Direct Stream Digital process in conjunction with an Ed Meitner-custom-designed A/D converter. They haven't issued any more pop titles using the Gain II system, but I tell you, I'm anxiously awaiting them.

That's because, in comparison with the original LP, the Mobile Fidelity re-issue of Full Moon Fever sounds so amazingly close that I think I'm hearing the differences in my CD vs. LP playback equipment than the differences between the Mo Fi Gain II CD and the original vinyl. (For the, ahem, record, Marantz CD-63SE CD player; Goldmund Studio/Well-Tempered Arm/Grado "The Reference" turntable. The Marantz rolls off the highs to a slight degree; the Grado cartridge much less so.) I have to say, I was surprised. (Maybe if I could get the Fi guys to lend me a Spectral or Levinson CD playback rig I could hear more subtle differences, nyuk nyuk...?) The standard-issue MCA CD is a joke in comparison to both the Gain II CD and the LP, a harmonically thin, spatially flat, emotionally uninvolving specter of what it should be. Anxiously awaiting? Make that, based on the aural evidence so far, I'm dying to hear more Mobile Fidelity Gain II releases....