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 July 15, 2009 Kent Poon’s Audiophile Jazz Prologue III
Many audiophile jazz recordings sound tight and dry, with performances to match. They’re clean, but seem to have little to do with the real world of music. Not so Audiophile Jazz Prologue III, which is, first and foremost, a musical experience. The musicians show just what a global community we’ve become. The vocals are by Marcia Seebaran, of Montreal, Canada; Hong Kong resident Peter Scherr plays double bass (and also co-produced the recording); New Yorker Bruce Huron plays saxophone; and Hong Kong artist Mat McMahon plays keyboards. Saxophonist Blaine Whittaker, trumpeter Toby Mak, guitarist Kenneth Rose, and drummer Simon Baker all hail from Australia. When they play, the sound is pure late-night jazz, so cohesive and personal that it sounds as if they’ve been playing together since childhood. The sound is warm and intimate, but without a trace of unpleasant harshness or angst. It’s as if you were sitting in the perfect small club with ideal acoustics, at a table near the center, with all the annoying sounds of talk, clinking glasses, and scraping silverware whisked away -- a private concert by the musicians, just for you. Some of the greatest ballads are included -- "April in Paris," "Lush Life," "I Should Care," "You’ve Stepped Out of a Dream" -- balanced by such upbeat excursions as "Barbados," "Afro Blue," and "You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To." In fact, that last tune is a sweet little tour de force for all concerned. It begins with the best-recorded bowed double bass I think I’ve ever heard, and continues with plucked bass and guitar under the vocal. Seebaran sings it relatively straight, with subtle expression that really puts the words across, and with only a little ornamentation on repeats. She shines on this tune, and on four others in this 13-track set. My measure of a great recording is when you can follow each line, no matter its relative unimportance at any given moment. You can do that on "You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To," and with every other track on this set. This is not just another good jazz recording -- it’s a great one. Audiophile Jazz Prologue III has been released as a two-disc set. The first, a CD-R playable in any CD or DVD player, is at the standard CD resolution of 16-bits/44.1kHz. Each disc is individually numbered and comes with a corresponding PlexTools graph that shows the exact measurements of that disc. The CD-R would sound good enough for most folks, but also included is a DVD-ROM on which the album has been encoded at both 24/96 and 24/192. I played around with these files in many different ways, converting them to 24/48 for my Logitech Squeezebox to play through my main audio system (my MartinLogan speakers seemed to almost say "thank you" for this mix) -- and then, because the soundcard in my computer can handle anything up to 192kHz but the Squeezebox can’t, I burned DVD-Audio discs that allowed me to hear the higher sampling rates. The CD-R sounded perfectly good, but the extended sampling rates, and particularly the extra bits, took a tiny bit of varnish off the sound, letting me hear greater detail. I think most people could tell the CD from any of the 24-bit versions in an A/B comparison, but distinguishing among the various sampling rates will depend on one’s equipment and ears. All sounded better than average, and served the music rather than just stopping at the sound. In other words, without these marvelous jazz performers playing with such soul and purpose, there’d be no reason for better sound. But they are so good that you want to get every nuance possible. Don’t take my word for this -- go to Poon’s site and download some free samples at different bit and sampling rates and prove it to yourself. If you’re like me, you’ll then want the entire album. If you don’t want to order the discs, there are HD downloads of the entire project. You can also go to hifitrack.com, where you can download the recording in 24/96. While there, look around for a wide variety of Hong Kong music in HD. I’ll be writing about this exceptional website in the future; for now, whatever method you use, you simply must hear Audiophile Jazz Prologue III, or you’ll have missed something significant. It’s one of the great ones. . . . Rad Bennett
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Kent Poon is known to many
readers from his association with Design w Sound. Regarded as one of the best recording
engineers in Asia, Poon is a consultant for Weiss Engineering, and is in demand for his
superb abilities. He’s enthusiastic about the digital music revolution and setting
standards that will affect many others, yet in corresponding with this young man about his
latest project, Audiophile Jazz Prologue III, I found that Poon exhibits a humility
that eludes most in this profession. Perhaps this is because what’s most important to
him is the music. From this set of discs, my impression of Poon’s attitude is that if
the music is great enough to begin with, it should be recorded in the best manner
possible, and not the other way around. 