String Theories, Inbox Edition
Sharing The Stereo, A David Grisman Profile, New Strings and more...
We’ve just come home from Thanksgiving, that loveable mutt of a holiday, and we enjoyed another lovely gathering in West Virginia with the Havighurst/Cooke clan. We celebrated a number of landmarks clustering around this date in November - a “big” birthday for my wife following along on our 20th wedding anniversary. My nephew is about to turn 25. My sister and her husband are marking 29 years of marriage on the day I write this. I have said it here before, but when it comes to family, I’m among the luckiest people in the world. I hope you had time with your bio or chosen family and that you’re settling into the holiday season.
This digest of recent work includes a full new essay about high fidelity audio and my hopes for getting more people exposed to good sound through a new Facebook group and events that put quality sound systems in public spaces for listening parties and consciousness-raising. Following that are links to some things I’ve loved working on. I worked my fortuitous July meeting with mandolin hero David Grisman into an essay about his lifelong pursuit of recording and archiving great acoustic music, manifested in his record label Acoustic Disc. “Dawg” Grisman proved extremely kind and responsive as I fact-checked the piece, which marks my tribute to him upon his September induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.
Also here are String episodes with late-blooming soul/R&B singer and songwriter Robert Finley, a discovery of Easy Eye’s Dan Auerach, Boise to Boston to Boise songwriter Eilen Jewell, and acclaimed artist/writer Lori McKenna. I have a WMOT essay about how the song “Nothing Else Matters” has caught a wave and provokes us to think about why more roots and Americana artists don’t cover more great contemporary songs.
Finally, in the past six weeks or so I’ve made my transition complete from Twitter/X to Meta’s Threads, and I’m finding it quite enriching. Like many others, I’ve been driven off of X by its owner’s ego-driven ideology and his amplification of some of social media’s worst contributors and features. His overt support of anti-semitic memes was the final straw for me. Twitter was, for its flaws, a masterful invention and a service to society. It had really begun to figure out how to control abuse and disinformation, but now as X, the decimated company has given up on that and seems to relish the ideological sleaze being widely peddled there. Threads has become a magnet for indie musicians who are talking about release strategies, Spotify, licensing, touring and more. So I encourage you give it a try. It’s still in a state of innocence and I’m hoping some of its spirit can last. Find me at @chavighurst.
Sharing The Stereo
For years, I held my fascination with high fidelity sound in check for fear that it could be seen as frivolous or self-indulgent. Hi-fi became a symbol of the bourgeois good life in the 1960s, but a bit like free jazz, the hi-fi industry lost its connection to regular folks and built a wall of exclusivity. Yet I kept having experiences with recorded music on (other people’s) high end equipment that felt revelatory and transcendent. In every case I felt like the audio experience brought me closer to the music itself. There really is a connection between fidelity and emotional impact, something I tried to get at in a post here a couple of years ago.
“Listening at home (as opposed to the live music experience) has its own advantages; there’s no time limit, no ticket price, no transportation, no dinner out beforehand, and a limitless choice of program. So given that we can and will listen at home, I think we should make it a life practice worthy of great musicians and the art of recording. It’s one of the finer privileges of modernity and worth an investment.”
Eventually therefore, I changed my attitude about the hi-fi world. I realized that well-made amplifiers and speakers are not just electronic consumer devices but musical instruments with integrity, craftsmanship and attention to nuance. I stopped seeing audio as selfish or a luxury and sought out a new system that brought my love of music in line with my stage of life and to some degree my professional life. But I believe now that anyone who enjoys music at all deserves a good experience when listening at home. Not the highest possible exotic gear, but a good experience, which implicates a lot of factors that don’t involve spending money.
But I had another thought that went along with this - that the problem is not that most people don’t have good stereos but that most people don’t get the chance to hear good sound and thus to understand what the fuss is about. I realized there are almost no public-facing high fidelity audio experiences available to regular Americans. But there are exceptions and they’ve inspired me to cook something up in Nashville that may offer a model for music lovers everywhere.
The first example is the William Ralston Listening Library at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, which I first visited through the recommendation of a friend around 2015. Their About Us reads: “The state-of-the-art facility offers an unparalleled teaching and learning resource and was created in memory of beloved Sewanee professor Fr. William Ralston, C’51. The Library houses an expansive collection of physical format recordings inside what many reviewers and audiophiles consider to be the best publicly-available audio playback space in the world. The Ralston Listening Library exists to bring a stunning, life-changing sonic and aesthetic experience to students and visitors. The Library's mission is entirely philanthropic, designed to spread appreciation for great music and audio to those who would not otherwise have the access or knowledge.”
This salon of sound is a remarkable place run by a wonderful couple with deep ties to the university and the late Father Ralston. The students who staff the facility have been in my experience so bright and open-hearted and excited about music. I’ve heard symphonic music, classic jazz, modern pop and vintage country music on this system with PBN amps and Wilson Audio speakers. It’s awe-inspiring, and it’s open by appointment when school is in session.
It prompted me to wonder why most colleges and universities don’t have a listening room. The capital cost would be a drop in the bucket for schools that build media labs, recording studios and TV studios. We do so much to prepare producers for a living in entertainment yet so little to cultivate a deep love of listening.
The other institution I’ve seen supporting public listening is the Memphis Listening Lab, a non-profit set up by the late John King, founder of Ardent Records and Ardent Studios. It’s a true public salon and library with individual listening stations and a great room with a lovely stereo featuring speakers by Memphis company Eggleston Works. On my visit there last December, I heard some great Memphis music and some high school kids after us listened to Ray Charles Christmas music while playing chess. I felt better about the future!
Inspired by those spaces and by the Japanese tradition of the Jazz Kissa or Jazz Cafe, where proprietors set up small taverns and coffee houses with vinyl playback over quality systems, I launched Nashville Pop-Up Hi-Fi. It has a few layers. It’s a Facebook group that connects lovers of audio with curious music fans who might be interested in upgrading their home music environments. It’s a society that can swap and trade and buy and sell gear and experiences. And soon, it’s a real-life experience where we pool our components for open-house listening parties at various appropriate venues.
As I say in the welcome note, Music City produces some of the best records in the world, and most of us celebrate the care, artistry and experience that goes into making great recordings. Yet in Nashville and beyond, most people aren't able to listen to records with enough fidelity to appreciate the impact, detail, and emotion that the artists and producers created.
After a slow start, we now have about 100 members. We’d love to have you on board.
RECENT WORK
As always, click on the headline/photo to link to the full story.