Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder
UPDATE 2024
Recently, in preparation for a new shootout, we played a few copies of this album that were laying around.
We were much less impressed with the sound than we were ten years ago when we last played it.
Live and learn or did we just not have the right pressings this time around?
Nobody knows. For now our Gentle Jug project is on hold indefinitely. If you see one for cheap, pick it up and see if it does anything for you.
Our Old Listing
- Superb Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish for this Moodsville Classic – on fairly quiet vinyl too!
- These two killer Rudy Van Gelder recordings capture the truly wonderful sound of Ammons’ smooth, rich, breathy, bluesy sax
- The transfers from 1977 by David Turner are in tune with the sound of these wonderful mono recordings
- We love the reverb RVG placed on the drums here – it’s sounds just right for a classic jazz album from the ’60s
- “…the tradition of the tenor ballad was fully defined by Gene Ammons and Ben Webster… this [album] is the source of a tradition. One of the absolute necessities to any jazz collection.”
This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP features WONDERFUL sound and music. Those of you who have been customers for more than ten years may remember an OJC label called Moodsville. Moodsville was a subsidiary of Prestige designed to emphasize ballads and other relaxed melodic material, mostly derived from the great American songwriters.
Gene Ammons made a number of records for Moodsville and this album combines two of the best: Nice An’ Cool and The Soulful Mood Of Gene Ammons. The liner notes talk at length about how perfectly suited he was to both the label and the material. He was such an accomplished musician that he had no need to show off but instead was able to explore these songs using relaxed ballad tempos. The result is pure emotion, exploring the heart of the music in the purest, simplest, most unadorned way. It’s just Gene, piano, bass and drums. That’s pretty much all he needed.
The sound is Rudy Van Gelder at his best. You can hear the breath coming through the horn beautifully. I also like the amount of echo Rudy puts on the drums. It sounds just right for a classic jazz album. He created that sound.
Side One
Till There Was You
Answer Me, My Love
Willow Weep For Me
Little Girl Blue
Side Two
Something I Dreamed Last Night
Something Wonderful
I Remember You
Someone To Watch Over Me
Side Three
Two Different Worlds
But Beautiful
Skylark
Three Little Words
Side Four
On The Street Of Dreams
You’d Be So Nice To Come Home
Under A Blanket Of Blue
I’m Glad There’s You
Rave Review
I’m a tenor player and a very serious jazz fan and I consider this to be one of the all-time great albums of the genre. Jug is the source of a tradition – the tenor balladeer.
In opera, its Caruso before Pavoratti. In jazz tenor ballads, it’s Ben Webster and Gene Ammons before all others. After Hawk’s ‘Body and Soul,’ the tradition of the tenor ballad was fully defined by Gene Ammons and Ben Webster.
Jug knew how to love and how to cry. Spent a lot of years in jail persecuted for his drug habit. His pain and his blues come through these classic ballads. He doesn’t try to pretty them up with virtuosity: just straight story-telling, which is what a ballad is.
If it hadn’t been for this recording, there would never have been a Houston Person or Scott Hamilton: probably no Coltrane Ballad album either. This [album] is the source of a tradition. One of the absolute necessities to any jazz collection.
-A.K.L., Amazon Reviewer
We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended we did. All knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.
If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our live and learn section. We regularly learn from our mistakes and we hope you do too.
But we learn things from the records we play not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the ranking for all the records in-between.
We’ve learned to ignore everything but the sound of the records we’ve actually played on our reference system.
This approach allows us to have a unique, and, to our way of thinking, uniquely valuable service to offer the discriminating audiophile. When you’re tired of wasting your time and money on the ubiquitous mediocrities that populate the major audiophile dealers’ sites and take up far too much space in your local record store, let us show you just how much more real handpicked-for-quality recordings can do for your enjoyment of music.
Further Reading