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What Jeff's Spinning

August 25, 2007

I had a long talk with Jeff Catalano this week. Jeff owns and runs High Water Sound, an audio dealership and distributorship in the town so nice they had to name it twice -- New York, NY. Amidst talk of Jeff's 20,000 LPs and collection of phono cartridges, he mentioned his blog, which is linked on the High Water Sound website. I am a professed blog hater. I can only take so much rambling self-absorption mixed with pictures of house pets. But Jeff's terse blog is different and seems to be a perfect extension of him. "I feel like I just shed a skin" begins the June entry, which goes on to poeticize life in America today with sympathy and anger. It ends with "I welcome June," which sounds to me like a distant echo of the opening line of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": "April is the cruellest month."

What will keep people visiting, however, are the eclectic listings of LPs Jeff plays on a pair of German-built TW-Acustic turntables. In March it was Radiohead, Junior Kimbrough and the Butthole Surfers, while April saw Moby Grape and The Clash. The two Warren Zevon titles in July – Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School and Excitable Boy -- caught my eye, as did the Jo Jones Trio's Self. This month Jeff has been spinning records by Duane Eddy, The Sir Douglas Quintet, Chico Hamilton and a host of other notables. He writes, "Thankfully, I have friends: Raven AC-Graham Phantom-Dynavector XV1-S" -- his 'table, 'arm and cartridge of choice.

Check out Jeff's blog. It's the collected thinking of that guy in high school with the coolest records and the best stereo, but now he's all grown up....Marc Mickelson, editor@soundstage.com


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