More Contemporary Label Jazz
- Pal Joey returns to the site for only the second time in nearly five years, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this vintage Contemporary label pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
- Our better Hot Stamper copies will show you just how good 50s All Tube Analog can sound
- Yet another Demo Disc for Contemporary, more brilliant work by the engineering team of Dunann and Holzer
- One of Andre Previn’s better jazz performances on record – his pals Manne and Mitchell are no slouches either
- 1957 just happens to be a wonderful year for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.
The piano sounds uncannily lifelike right from the start, a beautiful instrument in a natural space, tonally correct from top to bottom. I can’t think of many records off the top of my head that get a better piano sound than this one. Dunann and Holzer in 1957 are hard to beat.
For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1957 All Tube Analog sound can be, this killer copy will do the trick.
Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.
This is the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is of course a CD of this album, but those of us who possess a working turntable and a good collection of vintage vinyl could care less.
These sides are rich and Tubey Magical in the right way, because they’re still clear and reproduce the space of the room. Warmth turned out to be key to the sound of the best copies. When the piano sounds warm and smooth everything else in the recording seems to fall into place. That was the problem with the OJC pressing we played — we found it to be a bit on the thin and brittle side, not remotely the right sound for a vintage Contemporary recording.
With tight, deep bass and an extended top, both sides are analog at its best.
What The Best Sides Of Pal Joey 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 1957
- 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.
What We’re Listening For On Pal Joey
- 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.
Side One
I Could Write a Book
That Terrific Rainbow
Bewitched
Take Him
Side Two
Zip
It’s a Great Big Town
What Is a Man?
I’m Talkin’ With My Pal
Do It the Hard Way
AMG Review
… pianist André Previn, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Shelly Manne perform eight songs that debuted in the show Pal Joey. Best known is “I Could Write a Book,” which quickly became a standard, but the other, more obscure songs such as “Take Him,” “Zip” and “Do It the Hard Way” are also generally good devices for jazz improvising.
An enjoyable set of straight-ahead trio music.
Further Reading