Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wes Montgomery Available Now
UPDATE 2025:
Many years ago, back in our pre-shootout days, we played a copy of this album and liked what we’d heard.
We just got another copy in and thought the sound was not worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout.
We judge it to have middling sound quality.
If you see one for cheap, pick it up, but don’t expect the sound to be anything special.
Our Old Review
This Milestone Two-Fer LP with EXCELLENT sound has 14 unreleased alternate versions of songs recorded in a variety of settings by guitarist Wes Montgomery during his period with Riverside. In many cases, the versions here are dramatically different from the versions that appear on his original albums.
Producer Orrin Keepnews, who assembled this collection, notes, “With an artist who insisted on several takes, and the obvious need to eventually pick only one for release, we had to make some rather arbitrary, borderline decisions that at the time seemed to have doomed some excellent music to oblivion.”
This set helps to rescue some of that excellent music. The tracks feature Montgomery playing with notable musicians such as include Milt Jackson, Wynton Kelly, Kenny Burrell, Philly Joe Jones and Victor Feldman.
On compilations of unreleased material such as this, the master tapes are used to make the record. There’s no need for a copy tape to have ever been made.
Vintage Vinyl
We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the score on this very blog.
We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than every other kind of record, including the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles over the course of the last thirty years or so.
We wrote about that subject in a commentary we call The Big If. An excerpt:
The best of the best vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right. That’s a big if. In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.
We go on to discuss the wonderfully accurate timbre of the better vintage pressings, in contrast to the consistently inaccurate tonality of the Modern Heavy Vinyl pressing. It’s a long story but we think it is well worth your time if you are an audiophile looking for better sounding vinyl.