Film music specialist LaLaLand Records continues its series of comprehensive 007 reissues with the score that set the musical template for the entire series.  Take a deep dive into the story behind the creation of this iconic piece of 60s pop culture, and a detailed assessment of this important restoration and reissue.  Barry, Bassey and Bond - nobody does it better…

Roy Thomas Baker, one of the rock era's most successful producer/engineers, best known for producing Queen's first five albums, as well as the first four albums by The Cars, died at age of 78 at his home in Lake Havasu City, AZ on April 12 his family just revealed. Cause of death not known. (Photo credit: Jimmy Steinfeldt)Baker's best known production, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" released in 1975 is currently the most streamed song... Read More

Some of the most glorious moments in music history owe to a glitch in the mainframe — those fleeting, thrilling ruptures where the real shit breaks through. Case in point: Cadence Records, and its short-lived but seismic sister label, Candid Records.From 1952 to 1964, Cadence mostly trafficked in vanilla fare — Andy Williams’ supper club ballads, the Everly Brothers’ clean-cut harmonies, the Chordettes trilling “Mr. Sandman” and “Lollipop.” There were outliers, sure:... Read More

Dylan Peggin did a great job writing for Tracking Angle recently when he gave us the back story of the making of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album. He also gave us the scoop on the new Rhino High Fidelity pressing, giving it very high marks for packaging, music and sound.For comparison, he used the well-regarded 2006 Rhino pressing of Paranoid cut AAA by Kevin Gray, which was subsequently repressed on colored vinyl in 2015 for Vinyl Me Please. He also had the Rhino vinyl... Read More

AXPONA 2025 Video 4 has plenty of analog but it also spotlights the miniaturization trend on display—at least among a few companies. In the Sound Organization room (Rega, Chord importers) you'll see the new miniature Chord Suzi modular system featuring a very small yet powerful stereo amplifier into which you can plug a preamp, or a DAC or a phono preamp total size that of shoe box. Sound Org also showed the new Rega Mercury preamp and Solis power amp—as Rega... Read More

(Yesterday's Press release): April 17, 2025 – (Los Angeles, CA) – For Neil Young, music and film have always had a very long and close relationship. Not long after the rock & roll master started making records, he turned to the movie camera. Coastal: The Soundtrack is a live solo recording and companion piece to the filmed, Daryl Hannah-directed tour documentary recorded during Young's 2023 Coastal solo tour. Coastal: The Soundtrack album is available... Read More

The beautiful J. Sikora turntable shown in the thumbnail below is not included in this video (it was featured in Video 1) but it's too beautiful to not feature so here it is. Video 3 isn't the final Tracking Angle video shot at AXPONA 2025. There's at least one more, perhaps 2. This video begins with the "exploded" version of Mo-Fi Electronics MasterDeck turntable. Designer Allen Perkins is on hand to explain what's been revealed in... Read More

It may not be Halloween, but it’s always a frighteningly good time to discuss the Zombies— the UK-based rock band from the late 1960s that wrote and recorded seminal music that helped define the sound of those golden year—not the brain dead ghouls found skulking around after dark in your local cemetery. The Zombies found early success then found maintaining chart magic challenging.Formed in St. Alban’s in 1961, the band’s core group during their chat-topping days... Read More

The Doors are one of the most represented Record Store Day artists, guaranteed every year to have a special release. Whether it's reissues of long-forgotten mono mixes, singles, curated compilations, live recordings, or studio outtakes, RSD is a means for the most obsessive of Doors completists to stuff their shelves with the yearly limited edition offerings. No artist output has been nit-picked and criticized as much as the Doors' catalog, but the past few... Read More

The second of who knows how many videos it will take to cover AXPONA 2025 includes big news about the return of Koetsu cartridges, the world premier of the Alieno Phono Preamp from Italy, premiers of SME's new Model 8 and Model 35 turntables, the new Thales Reference turntable and Phono preamplifier American premiers, the first American presentation of the Supatrac Nighthawk tonearm and Revox's B77 MkIII and the special Alice Cooper model.This video also... Read More

With Sonic Presence microphones around my ears I dove into AXPONA 2025 expecting to capture binaural sound in every room. Unfortunately, Shure's Motiv app that worked beautifully at FLAX didn't work at all at AXPONA. Could have been an iPhone upgrade but with so many rooms to visit there was no time to find out!AXPONA 2025 was an extremely well-attended show. It was crowded all three days from morning through closing. The demographic skewed younger and there... Read More

In early 1928, in Avalon, Mississippi, John Hurt was awakened at 2 am by a knock on his door. He recognized the voice of Willie Narmour, a white man and a local fiddler who Hurt sometimes accompanied at dances. Narmour said "Get up John. Here's some people from New York want to hear you play some." Of course, Hurt didn't believe this incredibly unlikely story, but as a Black man, he knew better than to say so. "I didn't say anything to... Read More

Having owned a couple of copies of Mulligan Meets Monk, I’ve always felt that the stereo record magnified the differences between these two musicians by featuring them on different channels and casting too much of a spotlight on Mulligan’s sax. As good as those copies sound, including the 1980’s OJC LP and the AP 45 from the ‘90s, I had little experience with the mono recording that was made in the studio at the same time, except for a Fantasy SACD. So, when I heard... Read More

If my previous Tracking Angle review — on the new Pharoah Sanders Izipho Zam reissue — framed Strata-East within so-called spiritual jazz, this trio of new vinyl pressings should shake loose any such pigeonholing.(That’s the storied, forward-thinking jazz label, founded by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell in 1971, whose new affiliation with Mack Avenue produced that Izipho Zam (My Gifts) reissue — read all about it. As the newly partnered... Read More

Los Angeles, CA (April 9, 2025) – Craft Recordings announces six new reissues from Original Jazz Classics (OJC), the audiophile series celebrating critically lauded, fan-adored seminal jazz albums. The latest installment features newly remastered editions of Bill Evans’ Interplay and Moon Beams, Lee Morgan’s Here’s Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter’s Introducing Wayne Shorter, Benny Golson’s Gone With Golson, and Ken McIntyre & Eric Dolphy’s Looking Ahead. Spanning the... Read More

The initial interest draw here is a supplied Lenovo Tab M8 touchscreen remote, with Belleson’s visually attractive program installed, that lets you set all functionality from where you sit and listen.A powerful, unique convenience feature for sure, but it wouldn’t be sufficient to justify a review if that’s all that was tacked onto a ho-hum solid state phono preamplifier. So obviously there’s more to this American-made, fully balanced $8500 phono preamp that's... Read More

Here are the final six (of a total of a dozen) choral settings of extraordinary value, most of them unaccompanied (a-cappella). The settings are from Medieval times to our era, but are not necessarily in chronological order.

The Qobuz playlist is here: https://play.qobuz.com/playlist/25258347

Roiled by political uncertainty and contention over race and identity, the late 2010s and early 2020s witnessed a resurgence of what’s now commonly called spiritual jazz. And close to the end of his life, with his final statement to the world, Pharoah Sanders found himself at the center of its discourse.The product of myriad cultural and ideological influences, this tenuously defined subset of the music nonetheless has identifiable hallmarks. It runs the gamut between... Read More

“Stunning. They can hang out in the living room”. Forty reviewing years and that comment from wifey was a first! Her response early last Fall seeing the dramatically “painted by nature” Acora VRCs unpacked and sitting in the driveway in the early morning sun.The light made an already dazzling looking speaker look even more so. It also resembled the delivery of our granite kitchen counters back in 2011, during which the narrowest section had cracked during the truck... Read More