Carlos Montoya – From St. Louis to Seville

More Carlos Montoya

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

  • A stunning Triple Plus side one backed with a better than Double Plus side two
  • Flamenco Meets Jazz in this extraordinary recording, and it works
  • The Three-Dimensional space and Tubey Magic are jaw-dropping on this copy
  • An amazing Webster Hall Living Stereo All Analog recording from 1958 – nothing else sounds like it
  • It’s yet another recording we’ve discovered with (potentially) excellent sound
  • When you’ve played as many Living Stereo titles as we have (250+ and counting), you’re bound to run into this kind of Demo Disc sound from time to time – it’s what makes record collecting fun

Ed Begley is the engineer here and he knocked this one out of the park. What an amazing sounding Living Stereo recording.

Need a refresher course in tubey magic after playing too many modern recordings or remasterings? This record is overflowing with it. Rich, clear, natural, sweet, overflowing with space and ambience, absolutely correct tonality — it’s all here.

The Rhythm Accompaniment is made up of three top players from New York. Sally Montoya noted at the time: “Carlos just recorded the first Flamenco jazz record for Victor, with Osie Johnson and Milt Hinton and Barry Galbraith on electric guitar. A most relaxed and informal session. The other musicians said it was unique in their experience.”

It’s certainly a unique record in my experience, with mind-blowingly good sound and engaging music.

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1958 Analog sound can be, this killer copy may be just the record for you. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so big, full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone in the music industry seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

If you like the sound of acoustic guitar driven jazz, you will have a hard time finding a more magical recording of the genre than this.

Side One

Lively and present yet so tubey and rich, the sound is simply hard to fault.

Side Two

Rich bass, clear guitar transients, huge 3-D space, Tubey Magic for days, this side was right up there with the best we heard and could have been given our top Triple Plus grade with no qualms on any other day.

Hi-Fidelity

What do we love about these Living Stereo Hot Stamper pressings? The timbre of every instrument is Hi-Fi in the best sense of the word. The instruments here are reproduced with remarkable fidelity. Now that’s what we at Better Records mean by “Hi-Fi”, not the kind of Audiophile Phony BS Sound that passes for Hi-Fidelity these days. There’s no boosted top, there’s no bloated bottom, there’s no sucked-out midrange. There’s no added digital reverb (Patricia Barber, Diana Krall, et al.). The microphones are not fifty feet away from the musicians (Water Lily) nor are they inches away (Three Blind Mice).

This is Hi-Fidelity for those who recognize The Real Thing when they hear it. I’m pretty sure you, our customers, do, and whichever of you picks this one up is guaranteed to get a real kick out of it.