High on Hi-Fi

This article was originally published in 1998. Note: I no longer have a professional relationship with VAC (Valve Amplification Company) as stated in the article (they're still great friends, and make great gear of course).

The All-Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison
DCC LPZ(2)-2042 (LP), GZS-1118/A 28888 (CD)

George Faber: It Beats Workin'
Pope Music PMG-2023-2 (CD)

Louis Armstrong: Louis Under the Stars
Classic Records/Verve Records re-issue MGV-4012 (LP), VSCD-4012 (Classic Compact Discs)

Music for A New World
Chesky Records W0170 (CD)

For those of us in the audio business, audio-related trade shows are among the most exciting and significant happenings in our professional lives. A few times a year, the consumer electronics community converges in some major city to experience the latest and hottest in high-end (and mainstream) audio and video. Friendships are renewed, news and gossip crisscross among reviewers and manufacturers like ripples in a pond, tens of thousands subject themselves to too much bad food (and sometimes drink) and too little good sleep, soles are worn and souls are rejuvenated.

And of course, dozens of new audiophile recordings are released on both CD, (more and more!) vinyl and now, next-generation higher-resolution digital audio on a number of emerging formats. An embarrassment of recorded riches are proffered, tables and tables of vinyl and polycarbonate. (You got it—an audiophile hard-core dream fantasy come true.) Every show, I return with luggage many pounds heavier and a wallet many dollars lighter, thanks to my acquisition of a plethora of new audiophile recordings.

I thought it'd be a good idea over the next couple-a-few issues to cover a selection of audiophile LPs and CDs I picked up and was impressed with at the recent Stereophile Hi-Fi '98 Home Theater and Specialty Audio Show, as well as other recent releases and re-issues that demand attention. Man, so much good stuff has been released so far this year by the audiophile labels...! Don't have room for but a handful here (and my reviewing time's been limited the past several weeks), so I'll be covering a lot more next issue, along with some surprises.

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The DCC re-issues of The All-Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison on vinyl and gold CD are cause for celebration. Although the original Monument LPs (Lonely and Blue, Crying, In Dreams) are among the finest recordings ever produced, original pressings of The All-Time Greatest Hits vary from acceptable to just plain mediocre, pale sonic shadows of the originals' aural magnificence. The DCC re-issue LP and CD are re-mastered from the original master tapes by Steve Hoffman with new liner notes by Bill Porter, the legendary RCA engineer of the monumental original recordings, and both blow away the original All-Time Greatest Hits LPs in every respect. The classic hits are all here—"Only the Lonely," "In Dreams," "It's Over," "Crying," "(Oh) Pretty Woman" and the rest, recorded by the man who was perhaps the greatest pop singer of the Twentieth Century—certainly the one with the most powerful and emotionally thrilling voice. The CD offers amazingly lifelike, detailed, dynamic, wideband, open, spacious sonics—and the LP is even better, with details and subtleties not heard even on the original Monument LPs. Consider these DCC re-issues must-have of must-haves.

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Every show, it seems there's always a select handful of recordings that establish themselves as the favored demo recordings, and one hears them in room after room while traversing the show. At Hi-Fi '98, George Faber's It Beats Workin' may have been the most popular, and deservedly so—it's a fine-sounding (give it three-and a half stars) recording, but more importantly, Faber's songs are terrific. Although workin' with tried and true rock/blues instrumentation and arrangements using mainly electric and acoustic guitars (featured throughout, with killer slide work on many cuts), drums, bass, acoustic piano, Hammond organ, saxophone and harmonica, Faber's music sounds like no one else, intensely soulful, passionate and hard-driving with strong, powerful melodies. His rough-hewn, gritty voice is the utterly perfect vehicle for his down-to-earth songs of love found and slipped away, lost; of trying to get by in a world of painful pasts and uncertain futures. When Faber sings "I had a Tele and a Strat and a '55 Les Paul/The IRS came one day and man, they took it all/Even so, it beats workin'" in the title track, you know the man speaks from a lifetime of hard livin' and hard rockin'. Although, truly, each song is excellent, I'd have to pick "History's Longest Day," the deeply moving "Turn to Gray," "True Love, Blue Love," the moodily reflective "All About You" and "Revelation," a soaring, medium-tempo, yes, instrumental with, yes, a harmonica as lead instrument...!

The sonics are excellent overall, with dynamic punch, good instrumental presence, an open, uncluttered mix and a tonal balance a touch on the warm side with just a hint of upper-midrange emphasis on some tracks, particularly on the vocals. This recording lacks a small measure of detail resolution and air and as a result is not the last word in openness and three-dimensional soundstage, but there's a story here—it was originally mastered on a DAT (!) and issued on a CD under Faber's own auspices. For this issue, Pope Music auteur Gene Pope remastered the DAT using his proprietary mastering hardware and jitter-reduction techniques, effecting a dramatic improvement upon the too-bright, flat-sounding original. (He also re-sequenced the track order to make a more cohesively-paced album.) If you like your music no-nonsense, straight up, without "artiste-ly" affectation or pretension, this is a record for you (and me).

Important Note: I have a professional relationship with VAC (Valve Amplification Company), who happened to be co-exhibiting with Pope Music during Hi-Fi '98 (along with Platinum Audio). Lest any of you think I'm writing this to promote this disc as a favor to Gene Pope, and there's a conflict of interest here: I received the original version of this disc and intended to write about it long before I knew Pope was going to remaster it, or that Pope was going to exhibit with VAC, or that I was even going to attend Hi-Fi '98. My review of It Beats Workin' is in no way influenced by any factors other than my own opinions, and would be exactly the same if I had never set foot in the VAC/Pope/Platinum room. I thought about not writing a review to avoid any potential appearances of impropriety, but then decided, "let it fly"—I'm an honest person, and this is too good a record to not write about.

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I've said this before, somewhere (where's my long-term memory today? I forgot): some records are OK. Some records are fun to listen to. Some records are brilliant artistic achievements. And then there are the ultra-rare few that are astounding works of transcendental genius. I call recordings like this The Cosmic Truth. Recordings like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Are You Experienced? by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

This recording of Armstrong doing standards like "I Only Have Eyes for You," "Stormy Weather" and "Body and Soul" is one of them. Listen, and hear The Cosmic Truth. You'd never know it by the unassuming cover and the two-sentence liner notes—Louis Armstrong isn't even mentioned by name (!) and no personnel are listed save for conductor/arranger Russell Garcia. If ever you can't judge an album by its cover....

Armstrong had that "it," that indefinable something that yet defines genius. From literally the first note out of his mouth in that familiar, well-loved gravelly voice, you are captivated—and his trumpet playing is a thing of timeless grace and elegance, musically right with utterly perfect note choices, pacing and expression. His playing and singing are simply sublime, the absolute pinnacle of jazz artistry and musical expression. The arrangements, featuring a large string section and a crack jazz rhythm section (I'm not enough of a musicologist to identify the players by ear) are sensuously voluptuous, the kind where you hedonistically revel in the sheer ravishing beauty of the music. The sound is excellent, with the smooth-yet-detailed, tonally right, dynamic, expansive sound of classic fifties and sixties vacuum tube-based recordings. Although many of the instruments are panned hard left and right—a typical production technique of the era (you paid an extra dollar a record to get stereo and by g-d, the producers were going to give it to you), the mix overall is spacious enough that it doesn't detract from the music one whit. Only major flaw—the bass in "Stormy Weather" is distorted; sounds like tape overload (in the original recording), and you hear it in both the LP and CD versions. Speaking of which—the CD is excellent, and the LP is superb, with a bit more resolution and ambience giving a greater sense of "being there" with Armstrong and the musicians.

Many of the greatest musicians—Carlos Santana has said this time and again—say that when they're really "on," in the zone, they're not thinking about what they're playing, but feel as though they're opening up to become a conduit for a higher spiritual force which simply passes through them and expresses itself as their playing. That's as good a definition as The Cosmic Truth as I can come up with, because ultimately, words fail to describe the musical experience, and these words fail to truly describe how wonderful Louis Under the Stars truly is. Just listen and you'll hear what I mean.

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Chesky Records has slowly but surely grown over the years to become a label of wide-ranging musical diversity. Kinda snuck up on me—although I've been enjoying many of their releases immensely over the years, and applaud their efforts to constantly improve the state of the recording art (well, how could you not?), it took this excellent musical sampler to impress upon me just how rich and varied the label's offerings have become.

Usually, when I see an album that sells itself as "world music," I get defensive and expect the worst—so many companies have jumped on the politically correct/trendy world music bandwagon in the last few years with recordings that are nothing more than repackaged, tepid New-Agey chants, boring percussion-based "ethnic" stylings, and singers that either put me to sleep or give me a headache.

Not here. Every cut is superb, and the level of artistry from this cross section of past and present Chesky releases is consistently wonderful. In fact, I think this disc might just be an excuse for Chesky to bring some excellent music to the attention of listeners who might otherwise never give it a chance.

Chesky has always specialized in Brazilian and other Latin American music, and its it's well represented here with Carlos Heredia's flamenco-dazzling "No Quiero Verte," Mongo Santamaria's irresistible salsa-flavored "Cuco y Olga," the breathtaking—and breathtakingly beautiful—classical guitar virtuosity of Romero Lubambo and Raphael Rabello, along with cuts by Ana Caram and Badi Assad. Among the many other highlights of this exceptional collection: A group called I Ching is featured on two haunting, brooding pieces that defy categorization, blending traditional Chinese instruments and musical motifs with synthesizers and other modern instruments to create lush sonic dreamscapes, vast in their size and depth. The incandescent percussionist Babatunde Olatunji is heard in "Bebi Alolo," a riveting selection from his Love Drum Talk disc [Chesky WO10] that flipped me out a few months back in these pages. Rebecca Pidgeon contributes "Fhear A Bhata, " a traditional Irish melody with English lyrics translated from the original Gaelic, and her rendition is exquisite, gorgeous. And I must single out the two tracks from Astor Piazzolla, who plays the bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument with his piano-violin-guitar-bass ensemble. I cannot begin to do justice in describing "La Camorra" and "Michaelangelo," two astonishing compositions that blend elements of classical, avant-garde, jazz, tango and even what sounds like mutant movie soundtrack music into a sound I have never heard anywhere else on planet Earth—and which I find thrilling.

The sound, as you'd expect, ranges form excellent to stupendously good—Chesky has steadily improved its recording quality over the years. Tonal balance, image placement, vocal and instrumental presence are overall exceptionally natural-sounding, with a wealth of musical detail and "air." The soundspaces of the original recordings vary, but all (except the I Ching tracks, which are deliberately spatially manipulated) present a convincingly realistic soundspace and ambience. Dynamics are mostly outstanding, and the music "breathes" with an effortless quality, rarely digital or electronic-sounding.

Listening to this disc, I realize there's only one thing to do—I simply have to get the discs on this sampler I don't have (most of 'em). I must hear the rest of these artists' work—every one of them!