Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Freddie Hubbard Available Now
Red Clay is one of our favorite CTI albums – Red Clay (the song and the album) is Hubbard’s soul jazz masterpiece, and it’s a record that belongs in every audiophile’s jazz collection.
Lenny White drums up a storm on this album – on this copy he is playing right in the room with you.
If you’re a Hubbard fan, or perhaps a fan of early-70s soulful jazz, this title from 1970 is surely a Must Own.
We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with more of an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Red Clay is a good example of a record most audiophiles may not know well but would benefit from getting to know better.
Hubbard was a master of funky jazz, and the song “Red Clay” is arguably the funkiest jazz track he ever committed to tape. At 12 minutes in length it is a transcendentally powerful experience — and the bigger your speakers and the louder you turn them up the more moving that experience is going to be!
The intro to “Red Clay” begins with a stylized free-form jam, sounding like a bop-jazz band of old, then takes form and solidifies into a groove of monstrous proportions. Ron Carter’s bass playing is stellar! It’s big and lively with tons of presence and energy.
5 stars: “This may be Freddie Hubbard’s finest moment as a leader, in that it embodies and utilizes all of his strengths as a composer, soloist, and frontman. [It] places the trumpeter in the company of giants such as saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Lenny White… This is a classic, hands down.”
Rudy Is The Man
The really good RVG pressings sound shockingly close to live music — uncompressed, present, full of energy, with the instruments clearly located and surrounded by the natural space of the studio. As the stereo has gotten better, and we’ve found better pressings and learned how to clean them better, his “you-are-there” live jazz sound has come to impress us more and more.
Rudy gets one hell of a lively trumpet sound in this period of his career. If you have a good pressing of one of his early 70s jazz recordings, the sound can be positively explosive, with what feels like the power of live music.
Further Reading