Music Monday: Three Short Reviews

I am starting to feel a tiny bit of urgency that perhaps I have not accomplished as much over break as I had wanted. This ordinarily wouldn’t bother me much — after all, it’s a break — but I have a feeling that this semester is going to be a bit of a doozy in terms of work, unpredictability, and stress. 

With this in mind, I need both some good music and a short blog post and it happens that there are three albums that I’m really enjoying these days.

First, like half the world, I’ve been transfixed by Hasaan Ibn Ali’s Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album. Ali was a Philadelphia based pianist who is sometimes seen as one of the “invisible hands” in the jazz world. His sound apparently inspired Coltrane and, in particular, influenced his “sheets of sound” approach which he refined when he relocated to Philadelphia. I’m not so sure about this, but Ali’s music absolutely shares the kind of dense, sometimes stuttering, sometimes soaring, character of early 1960s Coltrane and offers the contemporary listener a challenging but exceptionally rewarding listen.

Second, for the last year or so, I’ve been interested in Daniel Carter. He’s a multi-instrumentalist who came out of the 1970s New York loft-jazz scene. His most recent album, New York United, Volume 2, with a bunch of forward-looking electronic musicians blends Carter’s avant-garde playing with roots in the free jazz movement with the more driving drums, bass, and electronic beats. I haven’t spent enough time in New York to say whether this album embodies the sounds of the city, but it certain coincides with how I imagine New York sounding or feeling.

Finally, I’ve really enjoyed Adam O’Farrill’s Visions of the Other. O’Farrill is the third generation of the great O’Farrill Cuban jazz dynasty, but rather than continuing the trajectory of Cuban jazz (a completely honorable trajectory though it may be), Adam has crafted his own style. Visions of the Other with its emphasis on complex melodies, room for improvisation, and laid back sound (at least compared to Ali’s Metaphysics!) feels like contemporary jazz. It was neither boring nor predictable and seemed always ready to draw you into the music deeper than you ever expected. 

One last thing… I had to immense pleasure of listening to these albums with a brand new set of tubes in my stereo amplifier. In a vacuum tube stereo amp, tubes are a bit like the tires on a car. You can tell when they’re getting old and worn, but as long as they continue to do their job, it’s hard to justify changing them. When you finally do change them, the change is remarkable and you rue that you waited so long to make the change. My amp went from tired, but obedient to dynamic and rich almost instantly (and the power tubes, I’m assuming, will take a while to completely “burn in” and settle down). Some of this might be attributed to the new signal tubes which were a bit of an upgrade over the last set, but I suspect more than anything, it is that the new power tubes (KT120s) are happier being driven at full throttle than the previous set that were struggling to hold bias.

One thing that struck me immediately was the improved soundstage. My main system consists of a pair of Zu Omen Def (Mark II) and Zu Undertone subwoofers. These are full range driver speakers with super tweeters and they tend to be a bit beamy (that is have a limited sweet spot where the full stereo effects are audible). With my new tubes, however, the beaminess dissipated and while I can’t say the speakers disappeared, they certainly faded into the background a bit more than usual. I suspect this is because the amplifier was provided more low mid-range and upper bass where so much of spatial information is embedded (and I know my room has a bit of a mode in the low mid-range, say 300 hz, and upper bass).