Shelly Manne & His Men – At The Black Hawk, Vol. 4

More of the Music of Shelly Manne

  • Here is an early Contemporary stereo pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides
  • This is West Coast Jazz at its best, and if anyone can capture the realism of a live jazz club, it’s the engineers and producers at Contemporary
  • For our shootout, we chose to play Volumes 2, 3 and 4 on the same day, which taught us something we might not have known otherwise — Volume 4 tends to have the best sound of those three albums
  • If you want to hear a healthy dose of the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful live session recorded at the Black Hawk in September 1959, this copy will let you do that
  • 4 stars: “Shelly Manne’s 1959 quintet (with trumpeter Joe Gordon, tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Monty Budwig, and the drummer/leader) was … a hard-swinging unit well versed in bebop. The lengthy solos are consistently excellent, making this entire series recommended to straight-ahead jazz fans.

This vintage Contemporary LP 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 At The Black Hawk, Vol. 4 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 1960
  • 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 At The Black Hawk, Vol. 4

  • 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.
  • Tight, full-bodied 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.

Players and Personnel

Side One

Cabu
Just Squeeze Me

Side Two

Nightingale
Theme: A Gem From Tiffany

AMG 4 Star Review

Shelly Manne’s 1959 quintet (with trumpeter Joe Gordon, tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Monty Budwig, and the drummer/leader) was not his most important, but it was a hard-swinging unit well versed in bebop. Their three days at the Black Hawk (a popular San Francisco jazz club during this era) was almost completely documented…on four LPs.

As with the first three sets, the fourth volume adds an alternate take (of “Cabu”) to the original program (“Cabu,” “Just Squeeze Me,” “Nightingale,” and a full-length version of their theme, “A Gem from Tiffany”). The lengthy solos are consistently excellent, making this entire series recommended to straight-ahead jazz fans.

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