Teasing the Korean

Debussy - Nocturnes - RCA (Victrola, mono) Monteux & BSO Probably my favorite Debussy orchestral piece.

"Spinal Tap" is a great film, and I've kept up with all or most of Christopher Guest's mocumentaries over the years. They were being interviewed last night on Tavis Smiley as themselves, not in character. Either this was a piece of brilliant performance art, and they were satirizing themselves and the Hollywood establishment, or these are three of the most pompous guys you've ever seen. Actually, Michael McKean came off OK, but Guest and Shearer came off as totally pretentious windbags. My favorite line of the evening was when Shearer said, and I'm paraphrasing, "The best thing about this tour is that we're playing the songs as ourselves. When we played those Spinal Tap songs for the movie, we were approaching those songs as the characters would. Now, we're playing them as ourselves, so we can make different artistic choices." Keep in mind that he's discussing songs about Satan, Stonehenge, and girls with fat asses. If this appearance was intended as promotion for their tour, I wouldn't go.

Boulez/Cleveland Orchestra - Debussy Vol. 2 - Columbia Masterworks (stereo) Includes Images and Danses.

How'd you miss the "O" with the apostrophe?

"National Association of Broadcasters." A lot of early hi fi sets, including my Dad's, had EQ presets for different broadcasting companies. NAB was one of the choices. It was a mammoth two-speaker tube mono hi-fi, by Pilot. It sounded great and I wish I'd kept it.

What is the excuse for labels NOT to put their entire back catalogs on iTunes or whatever? They're going to digitize everything for posterity anyway (one would think). There's no cost for printing or jewel cases. They can still manufacture CDs of the name artists.

I really love that Dizzy album. A clean copy has eluded me.

I have found that most mono Brubeck albums have a better balances between the drums and piano, Time Out being a prime example. That said, I prefer his bossa album in stereo.

Just saw "muscular" again. Still banned for 2009.

St. Patrick's Day means only one thing at our place: An excuse for a CHICO O'FARRILL MARATHON! First up: Married Well - Verve (blue label, mono).

I have the Rodgers and Hart and Bacharach for the Ladies, but I don't know offhand if he is on these. My recollection is that he is.

Straight Life.

My wife and I are having fondue for dinner. What else could we possibly listen to except: Horst Jankowski - Black Forest Explosion! MPS "Mais Que Nada" is so ON THE BEAT!

Mingus Dynasty - Columbia (Scorpio reissue, MONO). Mingus Moves - Atlantic (original) Lester Young - Pres and Teddy and Oscar - Verve (twofer, mono).

I like the full-length Firebird but it doesn't pack as much of a punch as the suite. Stravinsky arranged a loner suite in the 1940s, presumably to extend the copyright. I've never heard it. It supposedly contains everything in the shorter suite with about 10 minutes of music added.

For a group that embodied what was at the time hip, fashionable, and counter-cultural, the Beatles brand has been marketed in the most conservative, stuffy fashion for the past few decades.

Some of the capitol monos are better than the parlophones, imho.

From what I read, he was the one that pushed for the first four being released in mono. There's been so much revisionist history with these guys you have to wade through so much to figure out what's what. Lately, GM has said that he had nothing to do with the stereo albums until around Revolver, and that Junior engineers did them back in the day. George Harrison claims he didn't even know you could buy those early albums in stereo back then. It has been confirmed that they put all of their work and time into the mono mixes, and that the stereo mixes were done really quickly, shortly before they were released. The audio evidence bears this out. That changes with the White Album though. They put more work into the stereo version, and that's obvious when you hear the mono one (which is disappointing IMHO).

I like ALL of Randy's stuff from that period, with the exception of a UA album of tunes from a failed Broadway play, which I unloaded. Everything else from UA, Jubilee, and Riverside is top notch. Hard to single out a favorite.

I qualified it by saying "groovy funky."

Some of the early 70s Up with People albums have some groovy funky tracks mixed in with the schlock. Someone needs to do a best of, if they haven't already.

That and Dolby. If you make a cassette of a heavy metal album using Dolby noise reduction, you end up with a blank cassette.

What a waste of a good sound system ! Great for testing the limits of noise reduction!

Do you know offhand the ratio of instrumental grooviness to vocal beat group stuff on this collection?

Wow, that's pretty cool! I'd buy a whole CD of that kind of material easily (for the right price, of course). You should get "Soul of Mann."