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SACD

Dadawa – Sister Drum (1995) [Reissue 2014] [SACD / Bailey Record – BCDS13014]

adminOctober 3, 2025 75 Views

Title: Dadawa – Sister Drum (1995) [Reissue 2014]
Genre: New Age, Ambient, Folk
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Sister Drum is the second studio album by Chinese singer Dadawa, which is heavily influenced by the music of Tibet. The album is notable for being the first Asian album to ship over one million copies in China. In traditional Tibetan culture, Sister Drum, whose drumhead is made out of a pure girl’s skin, was used for honoring the god. This behavior has now been prohibited in modern Tibet. This studio ‘Sister Drum’ is based on this cruel context. Only the skin of a pure girl could be chosen to make the drumhead. To prevent them from disturbing in the real world, those girls are better mutes. If it is necessary, sometimes their tongues would be cut out.

It’s hard to be rough on an album with such a marvelous beauty to it. Nonetheless, the extremely attractive Sister Drum, which draws its inspiration from Tibetan music and settings, is on the hand a fantastic showcase for Dadawa herself and, in its own way, a travel document for the region that ignores its turbulent situation. A Chinese singer of some repute, Dadawa was approached by producer/songwriter He Xuntian to be the voice for his musical project exploring Tibetan work with an eye towards modern composition and recording. While it’s a bit of a push, in ways Sister Drum is the Chinese equivalent of Enya’s Watermark, an exquisite and atmospheric record drawing its roots from a non-mainstream cultural source. He’s sense of arrangements is quite fine, mixing traditional Tibetan instrumentation with synths, electric guitars and technology while exercising a clear restraint throughout – music and mood is suggested rather than fully spelled out. Indeed, there’s a careful drama throughout Sister Drum that’s lovely to hear and appreciate. Dadawa’s vocals, sometimes full-bodied, sometimes hushed, meanwhile, suit the lonesome, meditative mood of the music, whether kept in the distance in the mix to increase the sense of soaring vistas or sitting squarely in the middle of the understated performances. When she’s backed by a full choir on songs like “Sky Burial” and the soaring orchestral concluding piece “The Turning Scripture,” the result is truly breathtaking. Evocative and wonderful as this album is, however, one can’t help but feel that there’s something troubling about it – or more accurately, about the fact that the Chinese government’s record on Tibet continues to be horrific while allowing this intentionally apolitical work to be created and marketed. The liner notes carefully emphasize questions of spirituality and native Tibetan beauty – and it would be churlish to doubt Dadawa’s sincerity regarding her lyrical sources and inspirations. Yet more than most albums, Sister Drum is one to enjoy while wondering about what hasn’t been included as much as what has been. On its own a lovely triumph, in context something questionable still lingers.

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3 min read

SACD

Doug MacLeod – Whose Truth, Whose Lies (2000) [Reissue 2007] [SACD / AudioQuest Music – 55-AQM-1054]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 79 Views

Title: Doug MacLeod – Whose Truth, Whose Lies (2000) [Reissue 2007]
Genre: Blues
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

In 2000, you would have been hard-pressed to find a more lowdown blues-oriented recording than singer/guitarist Doug MacLeod’s Whose Truth, Whose Lies?, which should appeal to anyone who likes his/her blues dark, shadowy, and moody. This isn’t an album that tries to win you over with slickness; whether MacLeod is going electric or acoustic, he obviously identifies with the simplicity and honesty that characterized the country blues artists of the ’30s and ’40s. Not that Whose Truth, Whose Lies? sounds like a recording from that time. MacLeod’s lyrics obviously aren’t pre-World War II lyrics, and he has been influenced by soul, rock, and folk as well as country and urban blues. Not everything on this superb album adheres to a 12-bar format, and some of the tunes fall into the folk category. But even when he is getting into a folk or R&B groove, MacLeod can always be counted on to provide a wealth of blues feeling. Whose Truth, Whose Lies? may not be the work of a purist, but it is certainly compelling.

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2 min read

SACD

Doug MacLeod – Unmarked Road (1997) [Reissue 2000] [SACD / AudioQuest Music – AQ-SACD1046]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 72 Views

Title: Doug MacLeod – Unmarked Road (1997) [Reissue 2000]
Genre: Blues
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Doug MacLeod’s dark singing and sparse guitar playing are a throwback to the country-blues artists of the 1930s, although his lyrics have more modern sensibilities. Much of this superior album is haunting and mildly disturbing, giving one the feeling that there is a great deal beneath the surface. It is the type of blues/folk recording worth experiencing several times, in contrast to those of recent times that express more obvious sentiments. Bassist Jeff Turmes is on just seven of the dozen songs (five of which also include drummer Stefev Mugalian); three of the remaining tunes are duets by MacLeod with percussionist Oliver Brown, and the two others are unaccompanied solo performances. Although the leader’s guitar playing is impressive, it is his distinctive and very sincere voice on his dozen originals that sticks in one’s mind.

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1 min read

SACD

Don McLean – American Pie (1971) [Reissue 2016] [SACD / Capitol Records – 5368206]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 85 Views

Title: Don McLean – American Pie (1971) [Reissue 2016]
Genre: Folk Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Don McLean’s second album, American Pie, which was his first to gain recognition after the negligible initial sales of 1970’s Tapestry, is necessarily dominated by its title track, a lengthy, allegorical history of rock & roll, because it became an unlikely hit, topping the singles chart and putting the LP at number one as well. “American Pie” has remained as much a cultural touchstone as a song, sung by everyone from Garth Brooks to Madonna, its title borrowed for a pair of smutty teen comedies, while the record itself has earned a registered three-million plays on U.S. radio stations. There may not be much more to note about it, then, except perhaps that even without a crib sheet to identify who’s who, the song can still be enjoyed for its engaging melody and singable chorus, which may have more to do with its success than anything else. Of course, the album also included “Vincent,” McLean’s paean to Van Gogh, which has been played two-million times. Nothing else on the album is as effective as the hits, but the other eight original songs range from sensitive fare like “Till Tomorrow” to the sarcastic, uptempo “Everybody Loves Me, Baby.” American Pie – the album – is very much a record of its time; it is imbued with the vague depression of the early ’70s that infected the population and found expression in the works of singer/songwriters. “American Pie” – the song – is really a criticism of what happened in popular music in the ’60s, and “Vincent” sympathizes with Van Gogh’s suicide as a sane comment on an insane world. “Crossroads” and “Empty Chairs” are personal reflections full of regret and despondency, with the love song “Winterwood” providing the only respite. In the album’s second half, the songs get more portentous, tracing society’s ills into war and spiritual troubles in “The Grave” and “Sister Fatima.” The songs are made all the more poignant by the stately folk-pop arrangements and McLean’s clear, direct tenor. It was that voice, equally effective on remakes of pop oldies, that was his salvation when he proved unable to match the songwriting standard set on Tapestry and this collection. But then, the album has an overall elegiac quality that makes it sound like a final statement. After all, if the music has died, what else is there to say?

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3 min read

SACD

Don Grusin – Out Of Thin Air (2020) [SACD / Octave Records – OCT-0001]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 96 Views

Title: Don Grusin – Out Of Thin Air (2020)
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Out of Thin Air is PS Audio’s Octave Records’ premier launch recording. This is a beautiful collection of music composed and performed by world-renowned pianist, Don Grusin. We’ve spared no effort to create what we consider to be one of the finest piano recordings we’ve ever heard. We are excited to share this recording, featuring masterful solo piano playing by Don, as an ultimate reference for letting you hear how a piano can come alive in your room.
Octave Records is PS Audio’s effort to both help musicians realize their artistic goals in a nurturing creative environment, and to further the state of the art in musical reproduction. This collection of pure DSD recorded music is nothing short of stunning, both musically and sonically. Recorded and mixed live to stereo at 8440 feet in Don Grusin’s Moose Sound by Robert Friedrich of Five/Four Productions and mastered by Gus Skinas at PS Audio, each of the 12 tracks is a sonic masterpiece you’ll want to have in your collection. Recorded on the Sonoma multi-track workstation which uses pure one-bit Direct Stream Digital® (DSD) technology. From the format’s inception, the point man on DSD recording has been Gus Skinas, who has worked on countless SACD and other releases including reissues of nearly two dozen Rolling Stones titles, plus numerous classics from Nat King Cole, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Sheryl Crow, George Harrison and others.

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2 min read

SACD

Donald Runnicles, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra – Britannia: Elgar, Davies, Turnage, Britten, MacMilan (2007) [SACD / Telarc – SACD-60677]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 96 Views

Title: Donald Runnicles, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra – Britannia: Elgar, Davies, Turnage, Britten, MacMilan (2007)
Genre: Classical
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

The Atlanta SO play brilliantly for Runnicles, and aside from coolly matter-of-fact performances of two of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, the conductor proves a persuasive interpreter of some challenging scores.

Except for the Britten, this is a kind of highbrow British pops collection, featuring three accessible post-modern dazzlers bracketed by two of Elgar’s most enduring audience-pleasers. I don’t mean to suggest anything schlocky in the Maxwell Davies, the Turnage, or the MacMillan. But An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise , which slowly dissolves into delightfully alcoholic chaos, is surely one of Maxwell Davies’s more approachable scores: the melodic material has a strong folk profile, and the rhythmic and harmonic thorns are all justified by the programmatic intention. Turnage’s musical response to Francis Bacon’s paintings is a bit tougher on the ears, but it too has a popular substratum (in this case, Spanish dances) and it, too, makes its impact more through hedonistic riotousness than through intellectual challenge. Commissioned for the Association of British Orchestras and consequently widely performed, MacMillan’s Britannia has a more serious intent. Although described by the composer as a “fantasy based on ‘patriotic themes’” (including drinking songs and samplings from Elgar’s Cockaigne ), its crazy quilt of quotations is closer in spirit to Bolcom’s Piano Concerto (24:3) than to Charles Ives, less a celebration of national spirit than a rumination on “petty chauvinism.” Still, its Dadaesque hijinks (including appearances of auto horns, police whistles, and duck calls) are comical as well as critical. There’s nothing here as grim, say, as Holst’s similarly prophetic Mars. In this high-spirited company, Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem seems distinctly out of place—longer, darker, more severe than anything else on the program. It’s particularly jarring to have its final plea kicked aside by the boisterous opening of Pomp 4 . Yes, you can program it out, but still, it gives the disc as a whole an odd balance. No complaints about the performances, though. Runnicles is not the most demonstrative of conductors (the trios of the Elgar marches are notably free of sentiment)—but this music has so much built-in sensationalism that it really doesn’t need an extra kick from the podium; and I think the resulting readings, magnificently turned out by the orchestra, will hold up well on repetition. The engineering, especially in SACD surround, has tremendous impact as well, with nearly ideal clarity and spatial definition. All in all, warmly recommended.

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3 min read

SACD

Donald Fagen – The Nightfly (1982) [Japanese SACD 2011] [SACD / Warner Bros. Records – WPCR-14170]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 93 Views

Title: Donald Fagen – The Nightfly (1982) [Japanese SACD 2011]
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

The Nightfly is the debut solo studio album by American singer-songwriter Donald Fagen. Fagen was previously best known for his work in the group Steely Dan, with whom he enjoyed a successful career in the 1970s. The band separated in 1981, leading Fagen to pursue a solo career. Although The Nightfly includes a number of production staff and musicians who had played on Steely Dan records, it was Fagen’s first release without longtime collaborator Walter Becker.

A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late ’50s/early ’60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date. Continuing in the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records, The Nightfly is lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental, the songs are slices of suburbanite soap opera, tales of space-age hopes (the hit “I.G.Y.”) and Cold War fears (the wonderful “The New Frontier,” a memoir of fallout-shelter love) crafted with impeccable style and sophistication.

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2 min read

SACD

Donald Byrd – Street Lady (1973) [Reissue 2020] [SACD / Vocalion – CDSML 8576]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 87 Views

Title: Donald Byrd – Street Lady (1973) [Reissue 2020]
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

A landmark album by Donald Byrd – the first one where he really started to click with jazz-funk producer Larry Mizell! Mizell and Byrd had worked together previously on the Black Byrd album – a soaring bit of futuristic jazz funk that took Byrd’s career to a whole new level – but this album’s the one where they really began to make the formula cook, blending together tight funky rhythms, spacey keyboards, soulful vocals, and some of Donald’s best solo work of the 70s! The whole thing’s a masterpiece, and all tracks sparkle – including “Lansana’s Priestess”, “Witch Hunt”, and “Street Lady”, one of the funkiest tracks ever on Blue Note. A haunting record with a beautiful spacey groove, and one of the best-ever albums on Blue Note!

Not so much a fusion album as an attempt at mainstream soul and R&B, Street Lady plays like the soundtrack to a forgotten blaxploitation film. Producer/arranger/composer Larry Mizell conceived Street Lady as a concept album to a spirited, independent prostitute, and while the hooker with a heart of gold concept is a little trite, the music uncannily evokes an urban landscape circa the early ’70s. Borrowing heavily from Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Sly Stone, Donald Byrd and Mizell have created an album that is overflowing with wah-wah guitars, stuttering electric pianos, percolating percussion, soaring flutes, and charmingly anemic, tuneless vocals. It’s certainly not jazz, or even fusion, but it isn’t really funk or R&B, either – the rhythms aren’t elastic enough, and all of the six songs are simply jazzy vamps without clear hooks. But the appeal of Street Lady is how its polished neo-funk and pseudo-fusion sound uncannily like a jive movie or television soundtrack from the early ’70s – you can picture the Street Lady, decked out in polyester, cruising the streets surrounded by pimps with wide-brimmed hats and platform shoes. And while that may not be ideal for jazz purists, it’s perfect for kitsch and funk fanatics.

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2 min read

SACD

Donald Byrd – Black Byrd (1973) [Reissue 2019] [SACD / Vocalion – CDSML 8559]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 90 Views

Title: Donald Byrd – Black Byrd (1973) [Reissue 2019]
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

A landmark album – Donald Byrd’s first session with producer Larry Mizell, the man who went onto forever change the face of jazz funk! After rumbling around for a few years attempting electric styles that really didn’t fit his mode, Donald wisely hooked up with Larry, and hit a groove here that would carry him for many many years. The album’s a masterpiece of soul – heavy production with great keyboards, creating a nice set of grooves that let Byrd solo over the top, sounding better than he had in years! Great all the way through, and with tracks that include “Flight Time”, “Sky High”, “Black Byrd”, “Slop Jar Blues”, “Mr Thomas”, and the prophetically-titled “Where Are We Going?”.

Purists howled with indignation when Donald Byrd released Black Byrd, a full-fledged foray into R&B that erupted into a popular phenomenon. Byrd was branded a sellout and a traitor to his hard bop credentials, especially after Black Byrd became the biggest-selling album in Blue Note history. What the elitists missed, though, was that Black Byrd was the moment when Byrd’s brand of fusion finally stepped out from under the shadow of his chief influence, Miles Davis, and found a distinctive voice of its own. Never before had a jazz musician embraced the celebratory sound and style of contemporary funk as fully as Byrd did here – not even Davis, whose dark, chaotic jungle-funk stood in sharp contrast to the bright, breezy, danceable music on Black Byrd. Byrd gives free rein to producer/arranger/composer Larry Mizell, who crafts a series of tightly focused, melodic pieces often indebted to the lengthier orchestrations of Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield. They’re built on the most straightforward funk rhythms Byrd had yet tackled, and if the structures aren’t as loose or complex as his earlier fusion material, they make up for it with a funky sense of groove that’s damn near irresistible. Byrd’s solos are mostly melodic and in-the-pocket, but that allows the funk to take center stage. Sure, maybe the electric piano, sound effects, and Roger Glenn’s ubiquitous flute date the music somewhat, but that’s really part of its charm. Black Byrd was state-of-the-art for its time, and it set a new standard for all future jazz/R&B/funk fusions – of which there were many. Byrd would continue to refine this sound on equally essential albums like Street Lady and the fantastic Places and Spaces, but Black Byrd stands as his groundbreaking signature statement.

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3 min read

SACD

Donovan – Storyteller (2003) [Audio Fidelity] [SACD / Audio Fidelity – AFZ 015]

adminSeptember 30, 2025 80 Views

Title: Donovan – Storyteller (2003) [Audio Fidelity]
Genre: Folk Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

This set makes a nice introduction to Donovan’s peak years in the mid- to late ’60s, including both his Baroque flower power material for Epic Records like “Sunshine Superman” and the fairy tale funky “Hurdy Gurdy Man” as well as his earlier and more folky recordings for Pye Records (they were released in the U.S. by Hickory Records) like “Catch the Wind,” “Colours,” the stylistically prescient “Sunny Goodge Street,” and the beautiful “Turquoise” (which is as gorgeous as it is ridiculous). The sides included here are perfect examples of Donovan’s unique Woody Guthrie meets Timothy Leary style, and having both the Pye and Epic material side by side is a definite plus.

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1 min read