The frustration of the late 20th centruy audiophile is that, even though today's finest hi-fi gear can sound remarkably like live music, the recordings of today's finest musicians rarely do. The major labels, which have the money to sign the top talent, are generally putting out better sounding discs than they were ten years ago; yet when it comes to high fidelity - which literally means being true to the sound of real music - their efforts, with some exception, fall well short of many smaller companies. The sigh of it all is that the "specialty" labels, as they're condescendingly called, are usually stuck with less remarkable rosters of talent. The situation is less dire in jazz than in classical or pop, since hierarchies are less fixed and few musicians make much money under any circumstances. (It's often forgotten that most of the "classic" jazz labels - Riverside, Prestige, Blue Note, Contemporary - were, in their beyday, small labels.) Still, it's a rare and wonderful thing when Clifford Jordan and Hamiet Bluiett set up virtual residencies at mapleshade, Dave Holland performs a solo session on Intuition, or - to jump to the subject at hand - Arthur Blythe cuts an intimate duet recording for the audiophile jazz label CIMP. The disc is called Today's Blues, and it's an adventurous but absolutely accessible delight. Musically, Blythe is in very fine form and, sonically, he has never - not even on his well-don India Navigation LPs of the late 1970's - sounded so utterly like himself.

Blythe has one of the most unmistakeable sounds of any alto saxophonist on the block - a rich, husky tone that wails pasionately in the upper register and leaves a sweat-drenched vibrato in its wake. Harmonic inventiveness isn't his strong suit - his few recitals of be-bop tunes over the years have tended to fall flat - but run him some scale-patterns and he'll weave the most gorgeous melodies around them, or give him some blues-chords and he'll holler, weep, and soar to the wildest heights of improvisation. Today's Blues is a duet recording with cellist David Eyges, who comes off best when he does just that - tosses up a frame and holds it stead, while Blythe sails, skates, or rockets in and around its edges. In a few instances, the frames are too restrictive and not even Blythe can make much of them. But on most of the disc's sixteen tunes - all of which appear to have been improvised on the spot - the interplay clicks and ignites, then simmers or burns.

CIMP (which stands for Creative Improvised Music Projects, and is owned by the same people who publish Cadence, is a jazz magazine in Redwood, New York) is a "purist" recording label. The engineer, Marc Rusch, uses a pair of microphones plugged straight into 2-channel digital, with no artificial reverb or EQ. The results are the slightest bit dry - maby it's the digital, maybe it's the small room - but impressively palpable. Blythe's horn has dynamic presence - you hear every part of that horn just as it would sound in a very small club or galler. Eyges' cello is also convincing. There's more of a snese of air around the instruments than on some other CIMP discs, perhaps because Rush has lately been feeding the mikes straight into a digital hard-drive, bypassing tape. Several CIMP releases rank among the best-sounding jazz DCs our there, and Today's Blues ranks among CIMP's best.