Record Store Day can be an exhilarating - and, depending on where you shop, occasionally exasperating - experience. Always a lot of fun, you can raise your odds of getting the good stuff you want on RSD by doing a little planning ahead and preparing a shopping/wish list. Really.
If you're the sort of person who enjoys watching classic concert films and music documentaries (and let's face it, you're reading Sound+Vision, so I'm pretty sure you are), you probably wouldn't mind having access to a big archive if such things, available from wherever you are on almost any device.
Last night we dropped by the 7.1-equipped 3D theater in Dolby's midtown offices for a sneak peek at Francois and Pierre Lamoureux's Pat Metheny: The Orchestrion Project, the forthcoming theatrical 3D film of jazz legened Pat Metheny's latest "solo" outing with his mechanical orchestra.
If you're a fan of Blue Note's classic releases of the '50s and '60s - and frankly, what jazz aficionado isn't? - and you're a discerning digitally inclined audiophile, you're in luck! Blue Note/EMI, through our friends at HDtracks, is releasing six classics of the period in glorious 96kHz/24bit and 192kHz/24bit remasters from the original analog masters.
It’s nice to feel that the music can be improved, and in the case of Aqualung [which saw a 40th anniversary box-set reissue in 2011 with new stereo and 5.1 mixes by Steven Wilson], that wasn’t difficult because it wasn’t a very good recording.
“Anything that we sit down in, we’re good at.” This is Steven Wilson, 5.1 mixmaster nonpareil, discussing two of the gold medals that Great Britain won in the Summer Olympics — one in cycling, the other in rowing. If there were Olympic medals given for achievement in surround-sound mixing, then Wilson would own more golden hardware than Michael Phelps has collected a dozen times over.
Duke Ellington knew how to swing. Ellington (1899–1974) was one of the most prolific and influential songwriters of the 20th Century, a purveyor of what he liked to call American Music (he eschewed being labeled as “just” a jazz artist). You know him, even if you don’t think you know him: “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Mood Indigo,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” are but slivers of his deep (and deep-felt) compositional and performing catalog.
One particular set of highly attuned ears that were influenced by Ellington’s magic happen to belong to Joe Jackson. Yes, that Joe Jackson, he of the skinny-tie New Wave scene of the late ’70s who began reinventing himself at the dawn of the ’80s and never looked back. “I was always ready to move on,” Jackson, 58, said matter-of-factly over lunch in midtown Manhattan this past spring. (Well, to clarify, I had lunch; Jackson was content with “just water.”) “It never occurred to me that listeners may not have been ready to hear it. I thought the whole idea of being an artist was to do something different than everyone else.”
Back in June we got to check out the premiere of guitar legend Pat Metheny's unique new concert film, The Orchestrion Project, featuring Pat performing "solo" - with an orchestra of robots, captured in glorious 7.1 (and 3D) by director/producer brothers Pierre and François Lamoreux.
Well, the film's come to Blu-ray - and not just in Dolby TrueHD 7.1, but with the company's new Advanced 96k Upsampling feature, to deliver lossless audio - no extra hardware required - of the highest possible quality along with the pristine visuals. And we've got a couple of copies to give away.
Original Studio Album Remasters Stereo Vinyl Box Set
The Holy Vinyl Grail, Part 1 officially arrived in stores November 13. I was blessed to get the Beatles’ original studio album remasters stereo vinyl box delivered to me a full month early, and I still feel that I haven’t spent enough time with the 14 albums contained therein.