Michael Fremer

You know what they say about audiophiles: only interested in what sounds good, music comes in distant second place or they repeatedly play the same few records, etc. You’ve heard the bad raps. Yet here’s a box set of vintage (read “old”) recordings digitized and processed that’s brought more inquiries into my inbox than many so-called “audiophile” recordings.

Roger Modjeski passed away December 11th 2019 at age 68 after a year long battle with cancer. He was a brilliant audio engineer who, after working at IBM and teaching at Stanford, joined Harold Beveridge in Santa Barbara, CA where he worked on that designer's electrostatic loudspeakers before becoming a reluctant manufacturer whose no-nonsense products have stood the test of time. He favored teaching and mentoring to manufacturing but managed to do both very well.

There’s so much to recommend here, starting of course with Gerry Mulligan. There’s also a great deal to live up to, given the legendary “Gerry Mulligan Meets….” series on Verve from the 1950’s, one of which (Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster) is reviewed elsewhere this month.

Friday afternoons around 4PM, after a hard week’s schooling back in 1968, my roommates and I at Cornell University engaged in a particular ritual: one of us would go into the garage behind our rented house and retrieve our well-hidden pot “stash.” The most skilled roller amongst the 4 of us would produce a doobie, and then we’d smoke away our tensions while listening to? Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower (Atlantic SD 1473), recorded live at the 1966 Monterrey Jazz Festival.