- A STUNNING copy of Sonny Red’s 1962 release with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from top to bottom – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- Tubey Magical Analog – the sound is open, spacious and transparent, with a huge three-dimensional soundfield
- If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1962 All Tube Analog sound can be, this killer copy will do the trick, thanks to the superb engineering skills of Ray Fowler
This vintage Jazzland pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What the best sides of Images have to offer is not hard to hear:
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1962
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record! We know, we’ve heard them all.
Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.
Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings and this is no exception. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.
What We’re Listening For on Images
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
- Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering — which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
- Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt — Ray Fowler in this case — would have put them.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
The Players
Sonny Red – alto saxophone
Blue Mitchell – trumpet
Grant Green – guitar
Barry Harris – piano
George Tucker – bass
Jimmy Cobb, Lex Humphries – drums
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Images
Blues For Donna
Dodge City
Side Two
Blue Sonny
The Rhythm Thing
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
Sonny Red
Sylvester Kyner Jr., known as Sonny Red (December 17, 1932 – March 20, 1981), was an American jazz alto saxophonist and composer associated with the hard bop idiom among other styles. Sonny Red played with Art Blakey, Curtis Fuller, Paul Quinichette, Donald Byrd, Grant Green, Blue Mitchell, Wynton Kelly, Billy Higgins, and Cedar Walton.
In the late 1940s, when he was still in his teens, Sonny Red began to play professionally in Detroit with Barry Harris. He continued to play with Barry Harris until 1952. He went on to play with Art Blakey in 1954, and in 1957 recorded with Curtis Fuller on three albums.
Sonny Red first came on the greater jazz scene in the late 1950s with Art Pepper in the album Two Altos.
He made two albums as a leader in 1961; both were released by Jazzland Recordings, a subsidiary of Riverside Records. He continued to record in the 1960s, including four albums with Donald Byrd in 1967.
By the 1970s, however, Sonny Red was falling into obscurity. He died in March 1981, at the age of 48.
-Wikipedia