Album Reviews

This album blew me away, and I listen to it in heavy rotation, years later. Hedges was onto something...

Here in Baltimore, we were lucky to have Michael play around town (especially at "The Horse", actually called The Horse You Came In On) regularly when he studied at Peabody Conservatory. His use of harmonics, various guitar dynamics and the longest finger stretches I have ever seen put him in a class of his own. More than once saw him "dedicate this one to D'Addario string company" as he would break strings retuning. He played at Artscape (largest free art festival in the US) here the summer before his death. It was quite a homecoming. Will have to check this one out on vinyl, I admit I bought his stuff on CD instead (such was the 80's). Would love to see The Road To Return reissued on vinyl. Thanks for keeping us up to date Michael, always the 1st site I log onto.

There is nothing quite so dramatically dynamic and startling as the track "Rickovers Dream" played back on my Apogee Duetta Sig's. It catches unsuspecting fellow audiophiles by total surprise. What a totally different application of this tapping technique, and on acoustic guitar too, not electric. Must have fingers of iron.

Is a really good LP. Peter Lederman played it to death at RMAF '11 and I was really impressed by the sound. I got home, acquired it, and was shocked at how good Face Yourself sounded.

Michael,
Wasn't that released in the '90's?

I have Michael Hedges Breakfast in the Field, his first record for Windham Hill. I think it's a great record and it sounds great too maybe because the the back of the jacket says this record "was recorded without overdubs or multitracking on a MCI JH 110 A analogue two-track tape recorder at 30 inches per second through a Neve 8036 console with minimal equalization." This record was also half-speed mastered by Stan Ricker at Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab and pressed at RTI. Wow!

Michael, thanks for the review. I have multiple copies of the original pressing so I was curious about this re-master. I just received my copy so I will be interested to hear the sound - on my brand new Soundsmith Zephyr II no less. I agree it is a game changer for the genre.

But, you say you only own two Windham Hill records from their catalog?

I think you are bit dismissive of the work that this label did for independent artists mostly of the acoustic variety. There are more records in the catalog that are ground breaking both from a artistic and sonic perspective.

Let me recommend recordings by the likes of The Turtle Island Quartet, Michael Manring, Darol Anger, Paul Horn (this is a killer and innovative and rare recording), The Soul of the Machine (synth record sampler), and Malcolm Daglish. I will even stick my neck out and recommend some George Winston recordings. He is responsible for many of the archival (Lost Lake Arts) recording series of Pierre Bensusan, Prof. Long Hair, and others. If you have ever seen George Winston in concert you will know he is a real musicologist and plays piano and guitar compositions that span the range from Steve Reich to the stride piano stylings of Prof. Longhair.

Because of the A&M hookup there was a flood of Windham hill vinyl product in the eighties that is still easily available in local record stores. Much of it even NOS sealed records. These records almost always have killer sonics and our very worthy of getting a spin on your turntable!

... and say this album is so good, it's even worth having on CD!

I only ever found it on CD. It is, by far, my fave. Ritual Dance and Rootwitch still give me goosebumps. For me this is his apex.

...I didn't think too highly of the Alto Analogue reissue. In direct comparison vs. my original 1984 Windham Hill pressing it was very disappointing. Go figure.

I am curious about this new reissue though. Hmmm. What to do, what to do! Lol

So I'm browsing through my collection and come across a couple of albums I hadn't listened to in a while. How about Anthony Braxton - Seven Standards 1985, Volume 1 & 2. Hank Jones on Piano, Rufus Reid on Bass, Victor Lewis on Drums. Produced by Steve Backer and Michael Cuscuna. Got enough street cred yet? Still PO'd Michael? What label? Blue Note? Nope. Yep you guessed it Windham Hill on their Magenta subsidiary label.

All labels have to have there big sellers to keep the lights on. That doesn't mean there are not gems when you dig a bit deeper.

-CB

Mike,
I find your notes re: the master's origin interesting. I had sent an email to Audio-Fidelity inquiring as to whether the master was from an analog or digital source. The person who responded literally refused to tell me saying basically a good product is a good product. Even when I mentioned that as a consumer buying a product I should be able to find out what it is I am actually buying. Still, he wouldn't tell me. I'm still p.o.'d about this and I am declining the purchase, (so far).
My fiend brought over his new reissue copy and we compared it to my original WH release. The reissue is more immediate, clear, and at first seems to cream the original. But, what I found (both recorded to my Masterlink) was the reissue puts emphasis of his guitar on the "strings" and I can't hardly detect any on the guitar itself. Where in the original there's more emphasis on the guitar, more wood tone from the guitar itself. Overall it's a bit subdued vs. the reissue but so far I'm gravitating towards the original. This may change when I get more time to compare them but then I'd have to get over being snubbed!

Although I have no musical talent when I moved to the Bay Area for a couple years in the mid 80's I happen to meet Michael at Music Store in Palo Alto. I was taking doumbec lessons with Mary Ellen Donald (amazing and just turned 72) in San Fran and was wandering around the congas when I noticed him in the store and had to go up and say hi and tell him how big a fan I was. He frequently played live in a very small semi outdoor cafe on the main street in town, and I had heard him perform some of Aerial Boundaries. He asked me if I played any instruments and I mentioned the doumbec and he was pretty interested and asked me to come up to his apartment studio so that he could record some of my drumming solo and while he played guitar. I was horrified and nervous as hell but I went anyway and he thanked me for giving him something he could play around with. I had actually been playing for several years but I was so nervous there was likely nothing that he would have ever considered using. Nicest guy you could meet, pretty shocked when I out he accidentally drove off the side of a hilly canyon road in Northern CA and ended up at the bottom.

This LP allows me to make my living room shake! I love the title track very much.I have a Promo copy of the album in GREAT shape and I'm pleased also that you have a review of it here Michael.My heart goes out to the surviving family members, what a loss.

This album won a Grammy Award for Best recording, with Steven Miller, Will Ackerman and Hedges himself behind the mixing console in the mobile bus they used at the Windham Hill Inn.
It does beg the question; why remaster a recording that was already so revered? From the '84 Grammies, to 30 years later, we're still talking about it. Many of us have the promo vinyl that was sent out to Hi-Fi stores in the early 80s, this is where I discovered Hedges, with BITF. I've just A/B/X tested this SACD ISO through FOOBAR, DSD DAC, Objective2 headphone amp and Sennheiser HD 250 Linear II cans, hard to get a flatter rig than that for less money...
Whether the Engineer knows it or not, this re-master has clearly enjoyed the use of a compressor, or preamps that have done this, I can pick it every time in blind testing. I've also been playing these songs on guitar for over 20 years, working on piezo pickup development (post FRAP) and with the Sunrise pickup Hedges used here, also building guitars not unlike his. Clearly some of these signal paths have been tweaked, there is more Bass (of the kind that cannot be reproduced by a typical Martin D-28 soundbox) on this recording. The EQ on the FRAPs has changed, not as bright. Channel separation is different, things sit differently in the mix. The verb on the title track is breaking up, out wide, where it is typically clear... Some parts of "Spare Change" are even positioned differently in the mix, as if the L & R channels were inverted! For all the DR reports, this sounds like the quiet sections are louder and the loudest sections, more flattened out in dB terms. Go and get out your promo vinyl and give it a spin again, and re-acquaint yourself with every nuance of Aerial Boundaries. It was meticulously put there for a reason. From writing the tune in Larry Hagman's barhroom (Yes, true story) for reverb, to "tone production" in playing, fingernails, attack, sustain and overall the "Silence" Hedges spoke of, this re-master seems to miss all of that. It may well show up on a spectrogram with more DR, but it sounds like a belated casualty of loudness wars, more than faithful to the composer's original intention. Disappointed. Save yourselves some dough, and crank up that original. After all, what made Hedges 12th fret harmonic slap so "explosive" was the difference between carefully crafted quiet passages and his visceral attack on the strings. The original, it would appear to the naked ear, has more dynamic range, more "wood", more harmonic content, than this master does. It is an album ahead of it's time and still sounds like it, left alone!

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