Love the Early Punk playlist @kristi!
So happy you are enjoying it!
This month it’s Grammy winners, New Orleans Jazz, Celebrating Black Classical Composers, booty-shakin’ Nu Disco, and a historical look at Black Trailblazers!
This March, we’re featuring several new playlists: a Partner playlist from Victrola celebrating their integration of Roon Ready Relay technology into four turntable models, the latest in our Reference Tracks series curated by Jamie Madden, “Steep” - a dark and moody playlist for atmospheric listening, “Nevermind” - a spotlight on 90’s rock, plus our regularly updated New Music Friday collection and the continuing Classical Community playlist. Cheers!
Recently, I upgraded this system with Elac Debut 2.0 B5.2 speakers.
Thank you @jamie for an excellent system test playlist. On the Tom Waits track, his piano was revealed nicely. Perhaps that is your target for including that track.
P.s. Cambridge Audio AXA35 integrated amp and CA Dacmagic 100 with Roon via optical out from Chromecast on that Sony TV
That’s a nice setup, @Frederick_Davidson; you can’t go wrong with Cambridge Audio and ELAC speakers.
@kristi will be posting a new Listeners Compass article/interview on our blog soon, where I’ll go into each of these songs in greater detail, what attracts me to them, what I listen for, and other assorted fever dreams.
This Tom Waits track is intoxicating to me on so many levels. Waits is better known for the gruff carnival barker-esque eccentricities these days than his tin-pan alley piano in the back of the corner bar brilliance. This track proves that the ghosts of his early musical persona still conspire to animate his hands when they find the keys.
My favorite elements here are the worn edges of his close mic’ed spoken jazz vocals and the perfection of his delivery, the warm, rounded lope of the standup bass that seems to come up from behind when listening in headphones, the fuzzy reed of the lovely Paul Desmond-styled alto solo, the piano intertwining enchantingly with uncredited vibes, and the way the entire piece sizzles with some elusive electricity that blends the vibration of the reed, a record needle riding the groove, and heavily sweetened tape hiss.
That secret concoction that glues the whole thing together is the hook for me. This track has haunted my musical imagination since I first spun in on a jazz radio show shortly after its release in 2002. It’s a rough beauty I can’t pull away from. The story flickers along like a black & white movie.
If you poured the remnants of a whisky sour containing a maraschino cherry and crushed out cigarette on a piano stool, covered it with a pork pie hat, and closed it up in the dark for two weeks, it would sprout a song like this. It’s some too-strangely-beautiful-to-believe aberration that finds your memory when no other tune will scratch the itch.
Let’s play it again…
@jamie, nicely said.
I’ll cue it up again and invite my wife.