Carl Smith & Sonny Rollins article June 25, 2009

It's no surprise that one of our owners is in the news this week because of his love of music. Carl Smith is one of our owners and founders of Transparent Audio. Below is taken from an article titled "Sonny Rollins Hits the Road" by Alexandar Varty of Vancouver's Online Source; it explains the very interesting story behind Carl's contribution to Sonny's Grammy winning song in 2006:

"The version of “Blossom” heard on Road Shows, Vol. 1 comes, along with two other tracks, from the collection of Carl Smith, a businessman and jazz scholar whose surreptitious recordings so angered the Rollins camp that Sonny's late wife and manager, Lucille, once threatened to confiscate his tapes should he be caught red-handed with a DAT machine. In a further irony, Smith had never really been a Rollins fan until encountering him in concert in the year 2000.
It was, as Smith explains over the phone from his summer home in Maine, a life-changing experience. “What I heard on the stage was something entirely different, with so much more improvisation and, well, freedom—emotional and artistic freedom—than I'd ever heard on any of his records,” he reports. “I remember turning to the fellow next to me and saying, ‘We are in the presence of greatness—and I don't mean past greatness, I mean right now!' ”
Smith began to acquire as many Rollins recordings as he could find, and his own tape of Rollins's first appearance following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—which the saxophonist witnessed from his Manhattan apartment—was used on the Grammy-winning release Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.
“After my wife passed on, I got a more benign attitude towards these things,” says Rollins. “He [Smith] made me understand that these weren't bootlegs; they weren't being sold. These were mainly records done by collectors, and they were not being copied and sold. All of these things sort of softened my attitude, so I finally met Mr. Smith, and together with some of my own archives, we came out with Road Shows, Vol. 1.”

Read the full article here:
http://www.straight.com/article-236547/sonny-rollins-hits-road

Season Finale Symphony - Bartok, Demars

Demos (pictured left) and his wife Jen, Rich (pictured left center) and his wife Lori, Josh and his wife Portia (pictured right), and Amy all attended the Season Finale of the Portland Symphony Orchestra last night. Robert Moody energetically conducted two wonderful performances. The Bartok was clearly everyone's favorite but we all found the Demars interesting. Here was the program from last night:

BARTOK
Concerto for Orchestra
DEMARS
Sabar: Concerto for Senegalese Drums and orchestra

In a recent review of the performances in the Portland Press Herald by Christopher Hyde, he talked about the Bartok piece and how "Moody made the most of the stark contrasts ...ranging from fortissimo to an almost inaudible pianissimo in the introduction....The orchestra obviously got into the spirit of things." and of the Demars piece: "was also vastly entertaining, serving primarily as a showcase for four Senagalese drummers. They provided more than enough variety in pitch, tone and rhythm to justify the term "concerto," without even considering their virtuosity on the drums, generally played with one hand and one stick.
The pleasant orchestral part was reminiscent of the exoticism of Rimsky-Korsakov, purely tonal and imitating some Senegalese instruments and vocal music. It was a good start, but someone needs to pay attention to the nuances of the many musics of Africa, with their complex polyrhythms, microtonal pitches and elaborate counterpoint. A more contemporary approach might work better than traditional Western harmony. An added attraction was the superb Sengalese dancing of N'tifafa Akoko Tete-Rosenthal, Malang Bayo and Alioune N'Diaye, which gave new meaning to the word vivacity – or was it eroticism? It was hard to tell who deserved the standing ovation more – the orchestra, the drummers or the dancers."

The program notes are always insightful and can be found here:
http://www.portlandsymphony.com/Event-86.html

UltraAudio's Feature Article

We had a very enjoyable visit from Jeff Fritz and Randall Smith from UltraAudio.com earlier this year. They published a wonderful article about us on-line this month.

Check it out here:
http://www.ultraaudio.com/features/20090601.htm