Dark Clouds — Stu Goldberg and Cassius Khan

This is a review I wrote for SA-CD.net and published there on the 14th of October 2006. SA-CD.net has since become hraudio.net and the old review pages went with it, so this is reproduced from the Internet Archive’s capture. It ran as a site review, and carries a joint copyright line with SA-CD.net.

The review is reproduced as it stood. Only the site’s own furniture around it — the star graphics, the “was this review helpful?” footer — has been dropped, and the ratings it carried are restated as numbers below.

Dedication Records · DR-2181 · hybrid disc · stereo and multichannel · PCM recording

Performance 4/5 · Sonics stereo 4.5/5, multichannel 3.5/5

If you are the sort of person who likes jazz but runs away whenever the phrase “world music” is mentioned, don’t be put off from giving this album a listen. Yes, the promotional blurb does say “Innovative, all acoustic, multicultural World Music” [not my capitalization] but this is a very listenable album even if you prefer your jazz as American as apple pie or a hamburger.

The liner notes say that this album grew out of a set of jammin’ sessions between pianist Stu Goldberg and tabla-vocal performer Cassius Khan (after Stu saw Cassius perform at a local gig). The music on this album sounds polished, but reflects a lot of it’s improvisational roots.

Indeed, the opening piano solo of the first track (Ragamala) sounds like it could have been an excerpt from a Keith Jarrett solo concert. It is a beautiful, rather expressive, melancholic piece (Stu says in the liner notes Hurricane Katrina was very much on his mind when he was playing this piece). The tablas complement the piano very well, and the end result did not sound that “ethnic” to me (or maybe truly good music always sounds “universal” regardless of it’s influences). On the surround mix, the pianos were very much fixed to the front left/right channels, but the tablas were positioned a little more expansively on the soundstage. The front centre channel seems to be mainly used for reverb on this track.

The second piece, Rain, is probably the most “commercial” and easy to listen to piece on the album (I can almost imagine this song getting airplay on an adventurous radio station), and features Jennifer Lauren Goldberg singing accompanied by pianos and tabla, and background vocals by Cassius. On the surround mix, Jennifer’s voice is almost entirely panned to the front centre, whilst Cassius’s background vocals and the percussion are imaginatively mixed and panned across the entire surround soundfield.

Keherwa is percussion duet featuring Stu on Frame Drum/Udu Igbah and Cassius on two differently tuned tablas. On the surround 5.0 recording, make sure you have full range speakers all around you (or have bass management enabled), as there’s quite a lot of low frequency content on this track (as well as the next, and last track).

The last track, entitled Dark Clouds, had the strongest multicultural “feel” to me, and I was instantly reminded of the soundtrack to the film “Gandhi”. A lot of it was a duet between Cassius and Jennifer and the music seemed an appropriate blend between the East and West. Cassius’s voice seems to come from the front left, but Jennifer’s voice (heavily drenched with reverb) is panned all over the place. Stu’s piano playing wraps around them in a subtle, and yet enticing way.

A note on the difference betwee the surround and stereo mixes. Normally, I tend to prefer the surround mix on SA-CDs as they sound a bit more expansive and the additional channels often impart extra “punch” and apparent resolution that makes the stereo mix sound dull and congested in comparison. However, on this album, I prefered the stereo mix, which sounded a bit better defined and less brittle. This is apparent from the very first track where Stu’s piano sounds a bit more alive and natural on the stereo mix, and just a little strained and dull on the surround mix. However, the rather imaginative pans of the vocals on tracks 2 and 4 are certainly enjoyable on the surround mix.

I was curious about the apparent difference in the sonics between the mixes, so I read the album booklet notes a little closer. The album is a multi-mic, multi-track 44.1kHz 24-bit recording done using MOTU’s Digital Performer and Altiverb was used for convolution based reverb.

I wondered if different reverb settings were used for the multi-channel mix compared to the stereo mix, and received the following reply from Stu: “… for this project I used multiple stereo Altiverb instances, using multiple different impulse responses (samples of actual acoustic spaces), selectively panned, to create the ambiences on the multichannel mixes. My goal with the surround ambiences, particularly on the piece “Dark Clouds”, was to create an imaginary three dimensional world where the fantasy of all the vocal overdubs, piano & percussion could thrive & develop. I wasn’t going for “sonic realism”, recreating an actual acoustic room - as I said, I could’ve done that very easily with an Altiverb preset. I saw this project as an opportunity to create a filmic soundscape in 3D.“

All in all, this is a well recorded and mixed album, although I would have preferred the vocals a little less “wet”. The use of compression and limitng is nicely restrained, resulting in a lot of “openness” to the sound but at the same time the recording should not be too difficult to reproduce on most equipment.

A final note to “SA-CD purists”: no, this is not a DSD recording, nor is it a high bandwidth PCM recording. However, in my opinion, there’s plenty of resolution even on 44.1kHz 24-bits, and it does have some advantages (in terms of minimizing quantization noise and being more tolerant of jitter). If you are the sort of person who avoids 44.1kHz recordings, listen to the album and judge for yourself - at the end of the day it’s the results that count, and the results in this instance are quite pleasing indeed.