Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
The earlier pressing on the site as of this writing is an amazingly well recorded album with many fine qualities:
Boasting seriously good grades from top to bottom, this vintage Contemporary pressing is doing just about everything right.
These sides are bigger and more open, with more bass and energy, than most others we played – the saxes and trumpets are immediate and lively.
Mr. Earl Hines himself showed up, a man who knows this music like nobody’s business – Leroy Vinnegar and Shelly Manne round out the quartet.
“Great musicians produce great results, and most of the LP’s tracks were done in one or two takes. The result is ‘a spontaneous, swinging record of what happened’ when Carter met Hines ‘for the first time. . . .'”
Our notes for the Yellow Label reissues point out that they are always more compressed, with some added upper midrange. The intro benefits from this but the peaks can get congested.
The earlier pressings, especially the originals on the Black Label, are the most likely to sound right, but they are tough to find in audiophile playing condition.
If you see a copy on the site with these grades — less than 2+ on both sides — it will proabably have a Yellow Label and some of the shortcomings we mention above.
Correct, In This Case
Some people like to search for relationships between the sound of the pressing and the label it has, but in our experience that is more often than not a fool’s errand once confirmation biases and other kinds of mistaken audiophile thinking are taken into account.
When the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — in other words, when it comports with reality, at least for the six copies of this album that we played — we are happy to temporarily put aside our skepticism and learn the lessons playing a stack of copies of this title has taught us.
Why? Because the experimental evidence supports it.
When rules of thumb work, they’re very handy for the amateur record collector looking for better than average sound. It’s all the times that they don’t work that are the problem — the exceptions to the rule, especially if one of those exceptions just happens to be a favorite album of yours.
Then you’re really up a creek. You followed a general rule that usually works, but in this case failed, and now you really don’t know of any other way to find a solution to your problem.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, we do, and we share that knowledge with you out of the goodness of our hearts.
As of 2024, we’ve even started to reveal a great deal of stamper and pressing information, the kind you are reading about in this very listing.
Further Reading