More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings
- Here is an original Stereo Verve pressing (and only the second copy to ever hit the site) with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish
- Remarkably spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – the Velvet Fog is right in the room with you on this one
- The reproduction of Torme’s voice is exactly what you would expect from a Hot Stamper – he sounds rich, smooth, tonally correct and above all real
- “The mellow arrangements…wrapped Tormé in soft strings, but also allowed for many individual voices, including guitar and trumpet. It’s a style of arranging that perfectly suited Tormé’s growing inclination toward breezy, contemplative adult-pop during the 60s.”
This vintage Verve 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 My Kind of Music 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 1962
- 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.
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 My Kind of Music
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- 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.
- Tight note-like 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.
Side One
You And The Night And The Music
A Stranger In Town
I Guess I’ll Have To Change My Plan
Born To Be Blue
County Fair
Side Two
Dancing In The Dark
Welcome To The Club
By Myself
The Christmas Song
Alone Together
A Shine On Your Shoes
AMG Review
If Verve needed a concept for Mel Tormé’s last album on the label, there were certainly a few available. For one thing, My Kind of Music features five of Tormé’s own songs, including chestnuts like “The Christmas Song,” “A Stranger in Town,” and “County Fair,” as well as lesser-knowns like “Welcome to the Club.”
The other half-dozen compositions are by the underrated songwriting team of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, creators of the 50s Broadway hit The Bandwagon. Though they’re rarely spoken of in the same breath as Rodgers & Hammerstein or Lerner & Loewe — could it have anything to do with the lack of smoothness in pronouncing their names? — Dietz and Schwartz wrote many standards, including “You and the Night and the Music,” “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “By Myself.” Also, My Kind of Music was the second LP Tormé recorded in Britain, the home of his most devoted audiences.
The mellow arrangements — by Brits Wally Stott, Geoff Love, and Tony Osborne — wrapped Tormé in soft strings, but also allowed for many individual voices, including guitar and trumpet. It’s a style of arranging that perfectly suited Tormé’s growing inclination toward breezy, contemplative adult-pop during the 60s. And Stott’s arrangement for the musically varied six-minute showtune “County Fair” captured a quintessentially American musical composition with flair.
Call it whatever you want — Tormé Sings Tormé, Tormé Sings Dietz & Schwartz, Tormé in London — but My Kind of Music is a solid album that only suffers in comparison to his masterpieces of the previous few years.