Publisher's Synopsis
Garrett Hongo's passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honour the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfilment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about being a Hawai'i-born, Japanese American kid growing up in California in the shadow of the shameful internment of his people during World War II, about picking up on the music of his Black classmates in high school, about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane?s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel's piano from his car radio while driving the freeways. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio components as well as designers of the latest tube gear, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a multicultural diversity of poetic elders, and turns his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and 'ukulele; doo-wop and the Beatles; Bach, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own, now-celebrated voice.
