More Recordings in Living Stereo

More Exotica Recordings

• Boasting KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Living Stereo sound or close to it on both sides, this original copy could not be beat
• Exceptionally big, rich and Tubey Magical, on this pressing you will find the kind of sound that is at the heart of the best Living Stereo LPs
• It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more REAL than all of what we played

This vintage Living Stereo 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 The Best Sides Of Strings Aflame 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 1959
• 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.

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. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

Size and Space

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that — a copy like this one — it’s an entirely different listening experience.

What We’re Listening For On Strings Aflame

• 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 so common to these LPs.
• Powerful 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.

Living Stereo

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 our customers do, and any of you out there who pick this one up should get a real kick out of it.

Side One

Guadalajara
Scheherazade – Rimsky-Korsakoff, arranged by Esquivel
Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers
Andalusian Sky
Misirlou
Sun Valley Ski Run

Side Two

Malagueña
Fantasy
Foolin’ Around
Gypsy Lament
I Love Paris
Turkish March

Juan García Esquivel

Juan García Esquivel (January 20, 1918 – January 3, 2002), often known mononymously as Esquivel!, was a Mexican band leader, pianist, and composer for television and films. He is recognized today as one of the foremost exponents of a sophisticated style of largely instrumental music that combines elements of lounge music and jazz with Latin flavors. Esquivel is sometimes called “The King of Space Age Pop” and “The Busby Berkeley of Cocktail Music,” and is considered one of the foremost exponents of a style of late 1950s-early 1960s quirky instrumental pop that became known (in retrospect) as “Space Age Bachelor Pad Music.”

Esquivel’s musical style was highly idiosyncratic, and although elements sound like his contemporaries, many stylistic traits distinguished his music and made it instantly recognizable. These included exotic percussion, wordless vocals, virtuoso piano runs, and exaggerated dynamic shifts. He used many jazz-like elements; however, other than his piano solos, there is no improvisation, and the works are meticulously arranged by Esquivel himself, who considered himself a perfectionist as a composer, performer, and recording artist.

His orchestration employed novel instrumental combinations, such as Chinese bells, mariachi bands, whistling, and numerous percussion instruments, blended with orchestra, mixed chorus, and his own heavily ornamented piano style. Vocal groups were often utilized to sing only nonsense syllables, most famously “zu-zu” and “pow!” A survey of Esquivel’s recordings reveals a fondness for glissando, sometimes on a half-valved trumpet, sometimes on a kettle drum, but most frequently on pitched percussion instruments and steel guitars.

Esquivel’s use of stereo recording was notable, and he occasionally employed two bands recording simultaneously in separate studios, such as on his album Latin-Esque (1962). That album’s song “Mucha Muchacha” makes unusual use of stereo separation, with the chorus and brass rapidly alternating in the left and right audio channels.

He arranged many traditional Mexican songs like “Bésame Mucho,” “La Bamba,” “El Manisero” (Cuban/Mexican) and “La Bikina”; covered Brazilian songs like “Aquarela do Brasil” (also known simply as “Brazil”) by Ary Barroso, “Surfboard” and “Agua de Beber” by Tom Jobim, and composed spicy lounge-like novelties such as “Mini Skirt,” “Yeyo,” “Latin-Esque,” “Mucha Muchacha” and “Whatchamacallit.” He was commissioned to compose the music of a Mexican children’s TV show Odisea Burbujas.

His concerts featured elaborate light shows years before such effects became popular in live music. He performed in Las Vegas on several occasions, often as the opening act for Frank Sinatra. He frequently performed at the Stardust casino lounge circa 1964.

Several compilations of Esquivel’s music were issued on compact disc starting with Space Age Bachelor Pad Music in 1994. The first reissues were compiled by Irwin Chusid (who also produced the first CD compilation of Raymond Scott recordings and the premiere release of The Langley Schools Music Project). The success of these releases led to reissues of several of Esquivel’s original 1950s-’60s albums.

The last recording on which Esquivel worked was Merry Xmas from the Space-Age Bachelor Pad in 1996, for which he did a voiceover on two tracks by the band Combustible Edison. This album was a re-release of the six Esquivel recordings that originally appeared on the 1959 LP The Merriest of Christmas Pops, along with four more Esquivel recordings from the late 1950s and 1960s and two new Combustible Edison tracks featuring Esquivel’s holiday-themed voiceovers.

The last CD released during his lifetime, See It In Sound (1998), was recorded in 1960 for RCA, but was not released at the time because RCA believed it would not be commercially successful. The album’s concept was that Esquivel’s music would be combined with sound effects and edited in a way that suggested a visual work such as a film, though without dialog or an explicitly stated narrative. For example, the album includes a version of “Brazil” with an arrangement that makes extensive use of editing and sound effects to suggest a person going in and out of several bars, each bar featuring a band playing a unique arrangement of “Brazil.”

-Wikipedia