LATEST ADDITIONS

Over the last 40 years, Giulio Cesare Ricci’s Fonè record label has been slowly churning out limited audiophile “one stage” (the same basic process as MoFi’s one-step) records using an all-analog chain. These Pallas-pressed recordings of classical, jazz and various other types of acoustic music are limited to 496 copies each. Why 496 specifically? Because Ricci is fond of the number, that’s all. Fonè is clearly a labor of passion and love for Ricci as he not only runs the label, but serves as his own recording and mastering engineer.

Readers skeptical of the Kirmuss Vinyl Restoration process should examine the above photo. Lately Mr. Kirmuss has been using it to restore Edison cylinders. The results are easier to see here than on a vinyl record.

Spoken word or sung poetry? There’s plenty of both in the British Isles: the rolling, sprawling narratives of Kai Tempest; the angular Sinead O’Brien, smiling in Irish; the arch delivery of Dry Cleaning; the startling machine-gun rapping of Little Simz; a new collection on Decca by Cerys Mathews, the first in a series of “poem song” albums, pairing poets with musicians from Hidden Orchestra. From the defiant 70’s reggae of Linton Kwesi Johnson, to the many decades of the late Mark E. Smith, to the current dystopian punk barrage of Sleaford Mods, the British Isles has an abundance of musical poetry on record, joined now by Londoner Arlo Parks.

When Chet Baker died in 1988, he wasn’t an icon of “cool,” he was a has-been. The biopic with the Hollywood star and the consistent ranking among the top-selling jazz CDs on Amazon was far in the future and long after he was gone. The New York Times obit was perfunctory, misstated his age, and devoted two sentences to his career post-1950s. Baker, in the 1980s, had been the same unrepentant, narco-ssistic junkie mess that he had been since the mid 1950s, but he was working in Europe, playing mostly small clubs, driving from gig to gig, and sleeping on couches instead of the way it had been in the ’50s in the U.S.—playing concert tours, fielding movie offers, topping the jazz polls and charts, his popularity making even Miles Davis jealous.