You might not think of chamber music as ‘for the masses,’ as the PR blurb has it, but then, the brilliant bassist’s reference point is the Chamber Music Society of Oregon, the community orchestra that she joined as a five-year-old violin prodigy. Her Heads Up debut Esperanza traversed many genres, but this one brings classical sounds to the mix, with a string trio including supreme session cellist David Eggar, weaving music of rich complexity. Spalding’s vocal flights can seem too indulgent, though she’s helped out on two numbers by the ever-fascinating Gretchen Parlato and on one by a weary-sounding Milton Nascimento. But still, a fresh, inspiring album.
With a large element of theatre, Kinch alternates raps and instrumental numbers, and the theme is the modern slavery of debt: ‘Today’s fetters are mostly invisible,’ he says. Guest vocalist Jason MacDougall is effective on ‘Help’, Eska Mtungwazi sings superbly on ‘Escape’, but it is Kinch who brilliantly leads a whole cast of speakers in ‘Paris Heights’, satirising the brutality of debt collection. But the other musicians are great too, Femi Temowo on guitar chording like a keyboard when he’s not soloing, and multi-reed player Shabaka Hutchings adding an arresting bass clarinet solo on ‘Trade’. In ‘On The Treadmill’ the mournful horn ensemble echoes early Ellington.
Sharon plays her folksy fiddle very nicely, and delivers deliciously silky harmonies with her family business. Unfortunately, left to her own devices for her first solo album, she has delivered a handful of gems wrapped in acres of pastel-coloured tissue to fill the empty space. There are three pleasant enough swoony Celtic instrumentals, and at the end of the disc three fairly memorable songs that feel like a consolation prize for having waded through all the foregoing mediocrity. The powerful closer, ‘Love Me Better’, has a touch of gutsiness that suggests a direction she could usefully pursue if she has any ambitions beyond lulling her listeners to sleep.
As eerie a song as has ever topped the charts, the surprise success of ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ ensured that Gentry’s 1967 debut LPwould also reach No 1. In retrospect, this is a seminal release helping to create the break between traditional, Opry-style country warblers, the gutsy, bluesy component turning this into, sort of, a distaff effort at the outlaw approach, with Gentry eschewing the beehive, pointy-bra’d, down-trodden angst of most of her contemporaries. As Gentry faded from the public a mere five or so years afterwards, working only sporadically, this reissue is a reminder of how much she helped to empower today’s country songbirds.
Sound Quality: 88%
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In case anyone thought that a stint in the US Army might have dulled Elvis’s talents, this astonishing LP from 1960 delivered exactly what the title promised, including the exclamation mark. His voice was in superb form, he was backed by the most sympathetic line-up in his career – including Scotty Moore, the Jordanaires, Hank Garland, and DJ Fontana – and the repertoire included ‘Fever’, ‘The Girl Of My Best Friend’, ‘Reconsider Baby’, ‘Such A Night’… Do you really need any more of an inducement to rush out and buy this state-of-the-art two-disc, 45rpm edition? Audiophile-grade Frank and Elvis LPs in the same month: oh, we are spoiled rotten.
Sound Quality: 95% . .
Originally released in 1968, this is a cornerstone of the Canterbury prog-rock scene. It benefits, however, from the presence of Kevin Ayers, who instilled upon the project a sense of whimsy absent in the band’s later, more serious and jazzy works. Yet even his sense of the absurd, and the inclusion of shorter numbers rather than epic slices of self-indulgence can’t disguise the fact that this is a definitively British underground/hippie/acid affair, despite being recorded in New York. What makes it of interest 40 years on is that it’s so easily digested – without the need to ingest psychedelics.
If 1962’s Live In Paris was breathtaking, Sinatra At The Sands from ’66 defies categorisation. I mean, accompaniment by Count Basie and his Orchestra, conducted and arranged by Quincy Jones? And it was recorded at the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas? If ever there was a Rat Pack-less souvenir of Sinatra at the top of his game, a primer in cool stagecraft, this LP takes the honours. All of his standard showstop tunes were delivered, up to and including ‘It Was A Very Good Year’. Add to that slick patter, ‘All Of Me’, plenty of the Basie band, ‘One For My Baby’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ … there’s a reason why Ol’ Blues Eyes still remains the Boss.
If the Platinum Series was designed to enhance Monitor Audio’s ‘street cred’ among audio purists in the 21st century, it certainly hit the mark, the compact PL100 standmount and fl oorstanding PL300 having garnered numerous awards and accolades around the world.
In photographs the ’200 might look identical to the PL300 but sit them side by side and immediately you’ll notice that it is unquestionably better suited to cramped living spaces, being 155mm slimmer, 85mm shallower and standing 115mm shorter at 998mm (39in) in height.
The ribbon tweeter employed is formed of a material that Monitor Audio calls C-CAM: Ceramic- Coated Aluminium/Magnesium, the company claiming an output approaching as high as 100kHz. The ribbon was developed to work in a two-way speaker so it had to be able to operate from 2.
As soon as B&W introduced diamond tweeters to some of its 800 series speakers in 2005, people began asking for a diamond tweeter to be fi tted to the smallest model in the range, the 805. Well, the wait is over – the offi cial 805 Diamond is here – though its price has more than doubled over the old 805S.
The good news is that this isn’t a mere swap job: B&W has taken the opportunity to re-engineer the 805 thoroughly. For instance, the input terminals are more than chrome plated, with metal ‘nuts’ replacing the previous plastic items.
In 1955 Wireless World published articles by Quad’s Peter Walker on the practical and theoretical aspects of making a full range electrostatic speaker. That year, he demonstrated two different prototypes developing one for the first public demonstration at the 1956 Audio Fair. Due credit must be given to Walker for the huge amount of pioneering work involved and the brave decision to make it a commercial product.
When first introduced, a single ESL would have set you back £52, yet demand was far greater than supply.
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