Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Duke Ellington Available Now
If you are a fan, this record on the original 6-Eye label will be a thrill. If you’re unfamiliar with the Duke’s music, I can’t imagine a better introduction than this.
This LP also includes Gerry Mulligan’s only performance with the Ellington band.
Paul Gonsalves’s saxophone performance is superb and worth the price of the album alone.
The clarinet parts on Princess Blue are out of this world — Ellington at his best!
This is an older jazz review.
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a full-time practice for our staff of ten.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we freely admit.
There is no reason to hide the fact that we know a great deal more now than we used to. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
100% of the records we offer on our site have been cleaned, then auditioned head to head against a number of other pressings under rigorously controlled conditions. We award the copies in the shootout sonic grades for each of their sides, and then condition check the best sounding ones for surface noise before listing them on the site.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which requires a highly trained staff. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever do the work we do, not at scale anyway.
The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.
Not just a good sounding record. A record that was played in a shootout and did well.
The result of our labor is the scores of jazz titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
Further Reading