Hi All,
This website is no longer put up to date because I’ve moved my site to http://www.jazzintheattic.com
So please visit http://www.jazzintheattic.com
Regards
Tom
Edgar Knecht
Dance on deep waters (LP-Ozella Music-52:68)
Edgar Knecht, announced as one of the best that Germany has to offer in the world of jazz piano, continues his journey through the German traditional music. All tracks, except ‘Wiegenlied’ (composed by Brahms), are arrangements from familiar sounding tunes. Little ‘new’ music here, but it’s well done and played with love. The quartet stands as a tight group of excellent musicians. Especially the bass and piano are coming forward in the music. The liner notes show us that this music is meant to be an trip down to the big questions of humanity. As these notes sound a bit heavy, at first hearing one must admit that this music has enough potential to stay interesting. The opening track ‘Lilofee’ summarizes the record and slips without any effort from the melancholic movements in ‘Tiefe Wasser’ to the dancing mood of ‘Gedankenfreiheit’. The joyful lines of ‘Schwesterlein’ are followed by what is, arguably, the most beautiful song on this record ‘Frühling’. Finally we get the introvert ‘Wiegenlied’ as a desert.
The record that was used for this review was the vinyl disk that was very well presented with a nice quality inner sleeve, TOP. Also the sound is mixed for the vinyl pressing and it’s a real joy to feel that there are still peoples caring about (and loving) good sounding records!
Edgar Knecht (p), Rolf Denecke (b), Tobias Schulte (d), Stefan Emig (perc)
reviewed by: Tom Decuyper
Scores:
Musical content = 7/10, Presentation and sound quality of LP = 9+/10
After some months of intense home refurbishing, I managed to clean up the attic and free up some space to play the music.
First of all, I was very happy when I had the chance of buying 3 seats from the Queen Elisabeth Hall. These are in a very good shape and a real delight to sit in and listen to the music!
As the refurbishing in the other part of the house made progress, I had the opportunity to clean up the attic. There was also a special HiFi rack designed and build for most of my HiFi equipment. The shelves can handle a weight of 100kg per shelve, at least that was the specification 😉
The future projects include the building of bass traps, anti-reflection screens and I also want to create some storage space in the lower sections of the attic.
One can notice that the speakers are fed trough Chord Epic loudspeaker cables in a regular speaker feeding topology. Before this I used bi-wiring but by using the Epic cables and the Signature jumpers I managed to ameliorate bass performance and increase imaging in the system. The interlinks are changed to Chord company Anthem cables that gave me even more bass definition and imaging of a detailed soundstage.
But the best thing that happened was the better placement of the speakers. Finding the best bass performance location in my room turned out to be the key to a really good sounding system. Then I moved the speakers further back from the wall and set-up the best toe in for the speakers. This was a long and precise project where I carefully adjusted and measured out every change. The tool I found to be very helpful was a laser with the possibility to project square lines.
The only thing that rests is to get rid of some reflections on the sides of the speakers. Due to the distance between speakers and listening position, I do not experience a lot of problems. But unless I have tried it, I could not say if those anti-reflection screens will improve the sound or not…
Just a small post to demonstrate the new situation in my HiFi system. I have decoupled the speakers with rubber pads underneeth concrete slabs. This together with fine tuning of the speaker placement gave a more dinamic soundscape. Now let’s enjoy the music.
Bass is getting less laizy while mid and high stay detailed and fresh.
When the suffering of a melo-maniac gets tuff the tuff keeps going… With the pedal to the metal, the isolation works are getting into their final form:
As one can see, there is al lot of stuff in the room that shouldn’t be in there… But it allowed me to set-up my HiFi system.
Everything is in place and now, the final tuning of the SME V on the Gyro SE. The speakers are not equipped with their spikes yet, as a result the music is transmitted trough the whole house 😉 No worries here, the dust must be played away!
The recuperated sofa/bed is the temporarily listening position. Sound-wise, the room is already sounding good thanks to the isolation works and the extra stuff in the room. The airborne noise is successfully blocked by the mineral wool (26cm) isolation. When the gypsum plates will be added onto the ceiling, the sound will get harder and acoustic measures will then be taken to adjust the sound of the room (reverberation wise).
The first record on the deck is “street of dreams” by Grant Green… Since the spikes are put underneath the speakers, this listening session is a private one.
Finally, the isolation products arrived on site, I can finally start!
Here are some snapshots of how I mounted 8cm and 18cm off mineral wool isolation material from Knauf insulation. The 8cm layer is put in between of the wooden roof structure. The 18cm is put in between the thick wooden beams. To support the isolation material, a metal stud frame is build in between the beams. Finally a vapor arresting shield was put into place.
While waiting for the isolation materials to arrive, some early loudspeaker placement study is done.
Some detailed reflection paths are drawn and zones of reflections are identified. This speaker placement is oriented on the southern part of the listening room.
The following drawings are made for the speaker placement on the northern side of the room.
Since the loudspeaker placement on the northern side of the room is more suitable for the general room layout, this situation was studied more in detail.
Reflection zones are marked with dashed lines. A first placement showed some nasty first reflection zone at the door. Therefore a shift of 60cm was proposed and that seemed to solve the issue. Also some horizontal first reflection is observed around the listening position. In order to attenuate these reflections, a carpet will be added under the listening chair. There will probably be a need for some bass trapping in the horizontal corners of the room.
Of course this is only a planning and the placement has to be confirmed by the real world exercise.
As a second step, the thermal isolation works are getting started. A 18cm thick isolation layer is added on the underside of the roof. This isolation has 2 functions. Its first function is to stabilize the temperature in the listening room so that my precious records will be stored at 20C. A second function of these glasfiber mats is to isolate the airborne noise from outside the listening room.
The white foil is protection against vapor insertion. In order to have good acoustic properties a layer of gypsum plates will be added. In this way a reflective but inert roof will be created.
It’s been a long time that I’ve listened to ‘some day my prince will come’ (1961) with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb.
I had the pleasure to meet Mr. Cobb at the first edition of the Leffe Jazz Nights where he played a very tasteful concert together with Joey Defrancesco and Larry Coryell. This festival in Dinant is in my humble opinion the best jazz festival in Belgium. 4 days of jazz in a very relaxing environment…
This record is a nice end of the day record, just concluding the day with a piece of this fresh music is the best nightcap. Of course the band is high quality, the music is also top of the line and now for the first time on the Gyro SE with SME V, it sounds so detailed and yet relaxing that it is like I’m in the recording studio.
Hearing Mr. Cobb on the drums remembers me that, after all these years, he is still playing at this high level. This summer he played a version of the kind of blue theme that one can only dream about.
Although ‘some day my prince will come’ is straight ahead jazz, I’m enjoying it 100%!
This monday (10th of december 2012), Loren Stillman and the Bad Touch were performing at the HNITA jazz club. Altough it was freezing cold outside, the atmosphere inside the HNITA club was warm and welcoming as always.
Also as usual, the concert starts at 20h30 jazz time… The band kicks in with some very interesting musical sentences from drummer Ted Poor. These first musical lines sounded very promising to me. Indeed the beginning of the concert was fulfilling my expectations as interesting and exiting. The first set started with ‘move’, ‘skin’, ‘verse’ and finally ‘bad touch’ was concluding the set.
The general atmosphere of the music of ‘the bad touch’ was sometimes relaxing and other times a little free. The band proved to be very professional and sometimes they were in for some serious musical joking and improvising.
The second set started with a relaxed ‘holiday of unlimited tears’. ‘The brothers breakfast’ and ‘new tree’ were concluding the concert. Despite the cold, the band came back up for a last song called ‘GNU’.
Unfortunately for those who were absent, those two sets were very exiting!
(All pictures were taken by the author of this article with a device NOT suited for taking pictures…)
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