More time with the Pono player

I have quite a handful of hi-res audio files, which I have been sampling on the Pono.  Some observations:

There's quite a bit of debate online among audiophiles about the degrees of quality about this-or-that hi-res master, for example.  I haven't spent enough time obsessing over this to have a fully formed opinion, except to say: the critics are right in many cases. Some hi-res files are indistinguishable from the CD version... One example that I noticed: Talking Heads "Fear Of Music."  I'll keep my iPod rip of it. The Pono cannot redeem a poor remaster.  But, so far, these have been in the minority. Currently I'm listening to Steely Dan's "Two Against Nature" (provenance unknown, though it's supposed to be a rip of a SACD two-fer with the underrated "Alive In America" as a bonus).  The audio is clearly superior to CD.  The linked site above says that the then-circulating copy is a rip of a DVDS-audio.  I can't find any reference to a "Two Against Nature" SACD (though I didn't go past page one of Google search).

There was some debate among the early Pono bidders about whether the Pono music store would offer truly new hi-res masters, or simply recycle the stuff already on HDTracks. It's too early to say, except--the Pono version of "Rust Never Sleeps" is *clearly* superior to any other master that I've heard. To me, that's the acid test: when I hear a well-worn album that I've lived with for decades as if it's brand new--like I'm hearing it for the first time--then the Pono is worth the price of admission.

I think that this is where the media critics have gotten lost. Most casual music consumers won't notice, and won't care about (much less hear) the difference between a perfectly adequate 256 K MP3, and a 192khz, 24bit master. But if you have lived with this music and it has become part of the fabric of your life, you *will* hear the difference, because you have internalized every nook and cranny of the sound.

This is of course a niche market, but one that I've been a part of for quite a while.

Some small issues with the Pono that I've noticed: file transfers are very slow, even over USB 3. Not sure what is causing this. And a highly annoying issue: album art. The JRiver media center does not tag every album file with the "official" album art, only the first song.

Day Four (or Five): What's on my Pono? (or, New Adventures In Hi-Fi)

After The Gold Rush (Neil Young)
American Stars 'N Bars (Neil Young)
Back To Black (Amy Winehouse)
CSN&Y 1974 (came with the Pono)
Fear Of Music (Talking Heads)
Harvest (Neil Young)
The Idler Wheel (Fiona Apple)
The Raven (Rebecca Pidgeon)
Remain In Light (Talking Heads)
Retrospective (Rebecca Pidgeon)
Rust Never Sleeps (Neil Young)
The Shape Of Jazz To Come (Ornette Coleman)

Pono Player: Day Two (or, the experience of the early adopter)

I've gotten my Pono player to upgrade the firmware and I've added some albums. Neither of these tasks were very easy, but they weren't impossible, for a reasonably savvy end user to accomplish.  Just the normal hickups of an early adopter process.

The Pono developers chose the JRiver Media Center to manage both the Pono player and associated audio files, and although it seems to work reasonably well, most problems seem to stem from the JRiver software. It's totally unreasonable to expect Pono to build a custom media center from the ground up to work with the player, so licensing a copy of JRiver (retail cost, $49.98--not cheap) is a good compromise.  I notice that it takes a few steps, performed in the correct order, to get the JRiver software to recognize the Pono player. First, you plug the player in to the computer; then, you have to click through a couple of choices on the player (correctly) before the device is recognized by the OS and mounted by the file system (which I prefer--I like to actually see what's there).  Upgrading the Pono firmware takes several clicks on both the device and on JRiver to work correctly, and unintuitively, you have to eject and disconnect the Pono player (assuming you have made the correct clicks) for the firmware to install.  Some users had difficulty with this, but I was able to do it.

Basically, I think that most of us have been conditioned by iTunes to behave in certain ways and expect our media devices to do certain things, and unlearning this will take a few minutes. In many ways, JRiver and Pono are throwbacks to the early 00s, before iTunes obliterated the portable music media ecosystem. I don't have a problem with it, in my Old Skool way. In many respects, the Pono player is very much like an early 00s MP3 player (albeit, with more sophisticated DA converters), and those of us who hate iTunes (even while embracing its ubiquity) will like it.

I fully expect that all these glitches to be ironed out by the Pono team in the coming months, and I don't mind being a beta tester for Neil. (It's the least I can do to thank him for giving "Pocohantas" to the world.)

Will the Pono player sound "better" than my six (or seven) iPod Classics running 256 K MP4 files?  I think so, but it will all come down to how the digital files are mastered. If you've used HDTracks, then you know that some tracks sound better than CD quality (44.1kHz/16bit), and others don't--it depends on what the record label provides. You can take a digital recording originally mastered at 16bit and blow it up to 192kHz/24bit, and sell it for twice the cost of a CD--but it will still "sound" no better than 256 K iTunes CD rip.  This is the snake oil that critics accuse HDTracks of trafficking in (rightly so, though HDTracks is simply using what the record label provides). Will Neil Young be able to strong-arm the record labels into providing decent masters?  Let's hope so.  At the very least, one thing that I *have* noticed in the Pono store is that all tracks are at least CD-quality, including one album (Talking Heads, "Bonus Rarities & Outakes") that is only available elsewhere in the iTunes store in lossy format.  So if you're like me and refuse to pay good money for lossy iTunes downloads, you can support Pono and your fav recording artists by purchasing lossless versions at Pono Music (and other hi-fi audio retailers like CDBaby and AcousticSounds).

Pono player--received today (Christmas present to myself)

Those who stumble upon this post--and know what Neil Young's Pono music player is--are probably early adopters, like me. I got one of the limited editions (chrome CSN&Y).  It's currently charging. I already have hi-rez music to copy to it... Definitely all my Rebecca Pidgeon hi-rez... Duke Ellington's "Money Jungle"... The list is endless. Pono is jumping into the hi-rez party at just the right time, because the music has been available for a while, just waiting for the right audio player to play it. But will it succeed?  Don't know, don't particularly care. I speak as the owner of at least (possibly seven) iPod Classics--the last two purchased last year, before Apple stopped making them. There will always be a market (although a niche one) for portable audio players. I don't care if they make millions--I just need one.

So will the music sound different, and will I be able to tell?  The first is a maybe, and the second is a probably.  I think that my biggest limitation will be headphones. Not sure which model to buy--except to say that it probably won't be Beats by Dre.

American Top 40, May, 1977

It's a very-rare 4-day weekend for me, so I actually had time to listen to some Casey (recorded via Dar.fm).  It's strange listening to this stuff, mostly because the bulk of this music never really left the radio. But there's always a song or two that I distinctly remember not remembering. And it's interesting for me to see what my now-refined musical palate thinks of the stuff I listened to as a teen. I didn't make note of exactly what week this show was from (but it was the week that Barry Manilow had his "third Number One hit," "Looks Like We Made It").  As usual, I skipped over about half the songs, including the aforementioned. The few notable songs from the playlist:

Slave, "Slide". Slave was a funk band from Ohio that I had never heard of. Their hit from that week, "Slide," sounds as solid as any funk song from that seminal period, and I can't believe that it was not more of a crossover. I don't remember hearing this song, ever.  I've added it to my Amazon Prime funk playlist. Thank you, Casey, for that one.

Another song that caught my ear was the one-hit wonder, "Ariel," by Dean Friedman. There's a sort of Billy Joel vibe going with this hippy-dippy song that could only have come from this decade. (Billy Joel has lately been critically reevaluated, though not entirely redeemed.)

My recording of this show included the "musical extra" of "Boogie Nights," by Heatwave, one of my fav tracks of the decade. (In the '80s or '90s I bought a white-label promo 45 with an extended mix.)

Honorary mention: "Smoke From A Distant Fire" from the Sanford-Townsend Band. I was too young to truly appreciate the lyrical nuance of that song in 1977, though it perfectly resonates now.

(There was also a Helen Reddy song in the countdown. I don't remember the name of it, and I mention it solely because I mistakenly thought that it was a Toni Tennille song that I'd never heard, which would indeed be a surprise. I've always quite liked Toni Tennille, for reasons I can't fully articulate.)

Insomnia compels me to offer an opinion of Nicki Minaj's video Only

First, I don't really know who Nicki Minaj is, aside from a few photographs I've seen of her in the celebrity news sections, wearing various outfits. But I'll go out on a limb and guess that she's a hip-hop artist. Contemporary hip-hop isn't my bag, and not for want of trying to make it so. I sampled Kanye's "Yeesus" a while back and found it unlistenable--noise, really.  (To be perfectly fair, I'm not hip to Taylor Swift, either.)  I keep wanting it to be like the golden-age stuff that turned my ears around in the early '90's, but, like trying to bring back the Beatles like we did in the '70s, it ain't happening.

So I'm biased. Still, I was prepared to be impressed with "Only."  I can somewhat dig that Minaj is trying to make a provocative statement by donning Nazi-esque imagery in her video (assuming that she's the one behind such a novel artistic move). On a strictly visual level, she succeeds. By evoking scratchy newsreel footage that pans through a mechanistic landscape of washed-out reds and grays, I can almost see it. Visually, it's quite impressive.

It's when her "lyrics" start rolling across the screen that she loses me. I'd quote them, but I'd have to up the safety level of my blog. And since they're plastered across the screen, I can't just turn off the sound and dig her freaky scene. They are a grotesque parody of the lowest hip-hop stereotypes that we've fallen to in--whatever this wasteland of a decade is called. (The Teens?) No narrative flow, no "story"-- just rants about activities that, in earlier days, would likely get you arrested in Boise and a number of other jurisdictions.

I can only recommend that Nicki dig out some Leni Riefenstahl next time (preferably in the original German) to get this done right. There's art, potentially, there, but I'm not feeling it.  (I'm tempted to recommend that she put on some Tribe to hear some REAL hip-hop, but I know that ain't happening, either.)

Update: Minaj disclaims any credit for the video's composition. The video's director, Jeff Osbourne, explains (Billboard):

First, I'm not apologizing for my work, nor will I dodge the immediate question. The flags, armbands, and gas mask (and perhaps my use of symmetry?) are all representative of Nazism.

But a majority of the recognizable models/symbols are American: MQ9 Reaper Drone, F22 Raptor, Sidewinder missile, security cameras, M60, SWAT uniform, General's uniform, the Supreme court, and the Lincoln Memorial. What's also American is the 1st Amendment, which I've unexpectedly succeeded in showing how we willfully squeeze ourselves out of that right every day.

I think that what Osbourne is trying to say is that he drew a deliberate analogy between symbols of Nazism and American militarism, as a way of highlighting the abuse of power in the latter, in a way that would not be automatically assumed by many Americans, particularly here (where I live, in a deep red state). Certainly something to ponder today, Veterans Day.

It still don't match the lyrics, tho.

Two excellent Nashville concerts this month

First was Paul McCartney, a voice from my 1960s (a decade that I remember all too well), and Mindy Smith, who did a tenth-anniversary live rendition of "One Moment More."  It was my first for Mindy, fifth for Paul. Mindy was clearly nervous at the beginning, fearful, she said, at performing these "old" songs. I sent her positive vibes; hopefully they helped. Of the singer-songwriters who come and go (and casual readers of this lowly blog know that this is my current bag, and has been for a while), Mindy Smith is one of those rare performers who would motivate me to drag myself to Nashville and pay for valet parking at some toney wine-establishment-frequented-by-millennials kind of scene (even if they do have wine on tap). Back in the day, I was an evangelist for Ms. Smith. I've turned more than one person on to her unique aural presence (even an agnostic who professed to hating her for recording "Come To Jesus," but later recanted after hearing the whole CD).  More than once I've wondered: how could this Long Island New Yorker express such authentic Americana?  But then, Gillian Welch is from New York also.  Perhaps there's something about New York that predisposes musicians to be un-New Yorkish and to seek authenticity where it is most easily found. Hey, even Mike Doughty is covering John Denver now.  BTW: "Come To Jesus" was the final song of her encore.  I suspected that it would be her finale, but I didn't know how the millennial crowd would respond. I needn't have feared; this was Mindy's crowd... It merited the last of several standing ovations.

A Mike Doughty curiosity

For the past year or so, I've been playing what apparently is a Mike Doughty "greatest hits" collection that is available only outside the a United States and Canada: "Introduction," on the label Nois-O-Lution, catalog number B001LPDJMY. You can find this disc on various international Amazon.coms, but no other info except maybe a track listing--no reviews, no notes. I wasn't even sure that it was a legitimate release (you can get bootlegs and probably counterfeits on Amazon.com; I keep looking for in vain "David Hasselhoff, Live In Germany").  So here's the cover:

I've been listening to the mp3s that I "found" somewhere but I decided to spring for the CD because is functions as a really good "greatest hits" of Mike Doughty's early period.

American Top 40, June 26, 1976

As I've mentioned before, I remember the music of 1976 as being better than it actually was. Still, the now-late Casey Kasem was a staple of my teen years and I certainly won't complain that his classic shows are being re-run. (I'm downloading them from 94.5 KOOL FM via dar.fm.)  While I credit myself as having a near-pornographic memory of that time, there were a few surprises from that show, to wit:

*If I ever knew this, I'd forgotten it: Todd Rundgren did a perfect note-for-note cover of the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations" that got into the Top 40 that summer. Funny that I've never read about this in any of the adulatory (and probably deserved) Rundgren reportage that came later.

*One of my fave tunes from that year, "More More More," was introduced by Casey as being by Andrea True "from Nashville."  I'd forgotten that Andrea True, like Bettie Page, was from Nashville.

*A song that I did know, but had completely forgotten about, was America's "Today's The Day" (from their "Hideaway" album).  To my 2014 ears, though, it's an incredibly good song, well-crafted and well-produced, and it holds up very well. There's a hint of Beach Boys in the production.

*Speaking of which, it's only because the Beach Boys are so great that I forgive them for their '76 version of "Rock and Roll Music."  (The album that it came from, however--"15 Big Ones"--is a memorable one for me and impossible for me to dislike.)

*The standout tune from that show was Marvin Gaye's "I Want You."

Ray Smith has finally disappeared from the airwaves

Jazz collector extraordinaire Ray Smith passed away in 2010 at the age of 87, but his weekly radio show, "Jazz Decades," had been on the air for many, many years. I didn't become a fan until a year or so ago, when dar.fm made it possible for me to record online radio audio (a great service which I highly recommend, by the way).  His hour-long show became a weekly habit. I discovered many "new" artists through his show.  But the one radio station that broadcast his archives--KCSM in San Mateo--has apparently run out of past shows. They ceased broadcasting "Jazz Decades" about a month ago.  And I can't find the show listed anywhere else.  (WGBH has a handful of shows on their site, but nowhere near the thousands that Ray broadcast.)  Such a shame that this wonderful resource has been lost.

If you are a fan of Ray Smith, or perhaps know of where I might find some archived recordings of "Jazz Decades," feel free to post a comment.

Laura Cantrell, Peel Acres, May 8, 2003

This is one of my musical touchstones (I get these about once a decade or so) that completely shifts my musical orientation. In this case, it turned me (back) to acoustic-based music: folk, bluegrass, or, in somewhat watered-down form, "singer-songwriter."  I downloaded this session from the usenet soon after it was broadcast. I'm not sure, but I don't think there was any other way to get John Peel in the US back then. I downloaded it on a lark, as usual.  I didn't know who John Peel was, didn't know who Laura Cantrell was. But I heard that spark. Once in a decade or so, I hear it. Re-listening to this session now, it's still there.

Shenandoah Cut Ups

I'm a bluegrass novice, but I listen to Bluegrass Breakdown every week, and I often find something compelling to search out and buy (if it's available).  I am gradually refining my bluegrassical palate. I veer toward the "old-timey" end of the genre for, perhaps, karmic reasons--but more likely because that's what I grew up listening to--my father had a bunch of bluegrass records, as well as some early "good" country singles (most notably, Porter Wagoner's first 45 from 1954).

I won't say anything bad about mainstream country music, per se; I just don't listen to it, for the same reason that I don't listen to much else that's on the radio. Too bland, too uninteresting.

(A side note: Nashville tourists are easy to spot: they're the only ones wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and various hats. I'm just not hip to that jive.)

There is something universally compelling about good folk and bluegrass (and some country). It is, after all, "roots music," and when you reach a certain age--assuming that you're still interested in discovering and owning good music--you want to discover the sounds behind the sounds that moved you as an adolescent. And the 1960s and 1970s in particular were quietly informed by the folk and bluegrass bubbling up in the background. (When I first heard some early Buck Owens, for example, my first thought was, "This sounds just like the Monkees!")

Which brings me, circuitously, to the Shenandoah Cut Ups. "Bluegrass Breakdown" recently featured three cuts from the self-titled album from 1973. I made note of the group, went online, expecting to pick up the CD--only to discover that there is no CD. In fact, only limited numbers of the vinyl (Rebel 1526) exist. I snatched up a "very good" graded vinyl copy for what I considered to be a fair price of $18, and I'm glad that I did. They're all gone now, at least on Amazon.com.

Very little information exists online for either the Shenandoah Cut Ups, or the Rebel 1526 album.

I can't put my finger on why this particular album is so good. It may simply be a combination of simpatico musicians and the magic of the moment--that undefinable, unidentifiable element that causes a particular session to be transcendent. However, if you do find this album somewhere, give it a spin--I won't even begin to try to describe why this album is particularly in-the-pocket. And if some informed reader stumbles upon this blog and knows more about the Shenandoah Cut Ups, circa 1973, I'd like to know more.

American Top 40 - The 70s: May 1, 1976

Every other week or so, I download Casey Kasem's "American Top 40 - The 70s" from dar.fm--well worth the price, and a service I'm happy to promote.  (It's one of the few online services that I pay for.)  I was an avid listener of Casey Kasem in the day.  (A shift in my music tastes caused me to lose interest in the "Top 40" format by the late '70s.)  But it's a nice break to re-hear some of those classic shows again.

So, I lived it.  Is it worth re-living it?  What, possibly, could I hear now that I didn't hear then?

Well, one thing that I hear now--and suspected at the time--is that 70s Top 40s music is, generally, awful.  Much worse-sounding now than I remember it being at the time.

Something else I've noticed is that the Top 40 playlist can be roughly broken down into several broad categories: songs that have been played to death by "classic FM radio" in the ensuing decades; novelties by marginal acts that are justifiably forgotten now; and, some intriguing music that I either ignored at the time, or have forgotten about since, that deserve a new listen.

It's to that last category that I'd like to give tribute to: The songs and artists from American Top 40 that are forgotten now, but today make me go, "Whoa--who's that?  And where do I buy that 45?"

Today's tribute is to a group largely forgotten today, but whose single, "Union Man," is a truly contemporary blend of guitar funk with an menacing urban backbeat: the Cate Brothers.

I vaguely remember the song from the time.  I definitely remember the record.... I saw it in abundance at used record stores.  But it wasn't until today that I truly *heard* it.

This debut album is available today (for a price) on CD, but I  picked up a still-sealed vinyl copy.

So far, the rest of "American Top 40" from May 1, 1976 is the predictable blend of really bland stuff that, even now, I can't remember listening to, an hour or two after the fact.

But I'm only halfway through it, so there might be a Part Two to this otherwise forgettable week in music history--the Cate Brothers, notwithstanding.