Sarah Vaughan – At The Blue Note

A superb copy with top quality sound throughout. This album has the same track listing as the rare ten-inch ‘The Divine Sarah Sings’ but with a few extra tracks included.

This vintage Mercury pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely 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 amazing sides such as these 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 1956
  • 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 studio space

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.

What We Listen For on At The Blue Note

  • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
  • Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
  • 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 so common to these LPs.
  • Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also 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 instruments.
  • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

The Touch Of Your Lips
S’Wonderful
Tenderly
It’s Magic
Honey
Let’s Pull Out The Lights

Side Two

I’m In The Mood For Love
I Don’t Know Why
Paradise
Time On My Hands
Gimme A Little Kiss
Make Yourself Comfortable

AMG  Review

… a quintessential artifact of the 1950s; easy listening in gleaming hi-fi for the white suburbs. Here, Vaughan purveys pop standards and novelties in a mostly light-hearted pop manner, backed by Hugo Peretti and his Studio Orchestra’s lavish orchestral backings occasionally equipped with a beat and a “modern” touch like an electric guitar. Nevertheless, Miss Sassy does her job supremely well, even making stoic work of the cuter-than-words treatment of “Honey,” and occasionally she gets a chance to show off her uniquely wide-screen range, turning in an especially lovely “Tenderly” with some virtuosic glides.