Album Reviews

ORG Music is a new division of ORG, the label that's been reissuing mostly classic jazz titles over the past few years along with the heart of Nirvana's catalog. ORG Music will specialize in classic rock reissues, with an enhanced, extra track edition of this Tom Petty breakthrough album  coming first.

Former Image Hi-Fi magazine editor Dirk Sommer and his wife Birgit Hammer-Sommer recorded and produced this solo double bass performance by Dieter Ilg using a purist analog chain direct to ¼” analog audio tape. Compression was neither contemplated nor used, nor was there any filtering or equalization of any kind.

The prospect of a new Johnny Cash album in 2024 is both daunting and exciting, especially when the album has been created posthumously from unreleased demos. Fortunately, the new 180g 1LP set simply dubbed Songwriter suffers none of the issues that often plague releases of this nature, due in no smart part to having been produced by the late, great artist’s son, John Carter Cash. Read Mark Smotroff’s review to see just how Songwriter honors the indelible Johnny Cash legacy. . .

Another sonic spectacular from the Everest catalog, this pairing of Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony, completed in 1945, with Prokofiev’s score for the 1933 film “Lieutenant Kije,” offers rich, warm orchestral colors, remarkable transparency and air, and dynamic contrasts that mimic what one hears in a good concert hall.

Last night during the intermission between performances of Brahms’ Third and Fourth Symphonies, I stood on the Avery Fisher Hall balcony talking with a couple I didn’t know who were probably in their mid-sixties and I mentioned that I wrote about “stereo” equipment. They reacted with surprise, with the husband exclaiming, “Stereo. Now that’s an old-fashioned term. I didn’t think anyone used it anymore.”

The title track is not twice as good as Desmond's surprise jazz “hit” “Take Five,” immortalized on the Time Out album recorded with his regular band mates in the Brubeck quartet, but it has its own serpentine charm, and having Jim Hall comping on guitar instead of Brubeck on piano gives the track a far different, more delicate texture.