This Week

Years ago, someone told me that 1,200 high school kids were given a survey. A question was posed to them: Have you ever been to a stand-alone record shop? The number of kids that answered “yes” was . . . zero.

Time sure flies. Just 16 years ago, I was a senior in college at SUNY Binghamton. In my time there I had the pleasure of seeing Phish play a few shows at the Broome County Arena. The last of those concerts occurred 16 years ago this week (12/14/1995), and was released as the first in the Live Phish series.

Naxos - the world's largest independent classical label - is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. While the company made its name on budget releases of recordings by Eastern European orchestras and rereleases (and occasional remastering) of out-of-print material, it's moved on to create a  strong catalog of contemporary music, and has embraced high-resolution releases, with a number of SACD and Blu-ray releases in the last few years. And, of course, they've jumped into the FLAC format. This week, HDtracks is paying homage to the label's achievements with a featured set of CD-quality and high-resolution releases from the label, spanning the 19th and 20th Centuries. 

We've learned about some cool surround discs coming out (we like to keep an eye on interesting sources such as the great UK magazine Record Collector).  We'll be looking for them soon so we can review them for you.  Included are:

Rio Grande and Johnny Guitar

This week Olive Films are releasing these two classic westerns from the early 1950s. Rio Grande (1950) is part of what is known as John Ford’s cavalry trilogy — along with Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) — based on stories by James Warner Bellah.