More Living Stereo Titles

• Paul Desmond’s 1963 Cool Jazz Classic returns to the site for the first time in years, here with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish
• These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended from top to bottom”…”big and rich and 3D”…”very full and rich sax”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”3D and lively guitar and snare”…”texture and space all there!” (side two)
• The brilliant Ray Hall engineered – anyone hearing this copy will understand exactly why we love to find his fabulous 60s recordings here at Better Records
• Desmond joins forces here with Jim Hall, whose guitar stylings perfectly complement Paul’s velvety sax tone
• This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once
• 4 1/2 stars: “Everyone wanted Desmond to come up with a sequel to the monster hit Take Five; and so he did, reworking the tune and playfully designating the meter as 10/8. Hence Take Ten, a worthy sequel… There is not a single track here that isn’t loaded with ingeniously worked out, always melodic ideas.”

For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are enchanting. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1963 All Tube Analog sound can be, this killer copy will do the trick.

This vintage pressing is spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. 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 may well be a CD of this album, but those of us in possession of a working turntable and a good collection of vintage vinyl could care less.

What The Best Sides Of Take Ten 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 1963
• 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.

Best Practices

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process is simple enough. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

What We’re Listening For On Take Ten

• 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.

The Players and Personnel

• Alto Saxophone – Paul Desmond
• Bass – Gene Wright (tracks: A1), Gene Cherico (tracks: A2-B4)
• Drums – Connie Kay
• Guitar – Jim Hall
• Engineer – Ray Hall
• Producer – George Avakian

A Jazz Masterpiece

We consider this Paul Desmond album his Masterpiece. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

Take Ten
El Prince
Alone Together 
Embarcardero

Side Two

Theme From “Black Orpheus”
Nancy
Samba De Orfeu
The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

Now listeners enter the heart of the Paul Desmond/Jim Hall sessions, a great quartet date with Gene Cherico manning the bass (Gene Wright deputizes on the title track) and MJQ drummer Connie Kay displaying other sides of his personality.

Everyone wanted Desmond to come up with a sequel to the monster hit “Take Five”; and so he did, reworking the tune and playfully designating the meter as 10/8. Hence “Take Ten,” a worthy sequel with a solo that has a Middle-Eastern feeling akin to Desmond’s famous extemporaneous excursion with Brubeck in “Le Souk” back in 1954. It was here that Desmond also unveiled a spin-off of the then-red-hot bossa nova groove that he called “bossa antigua” (a sardonic play-on-words meaning “old thing”), which laid the ground for Desmond’s next album and a few more later in the decade.

Two of the best examples are his own tunes, the samba-like “El Prince” (named after arranger Bob Prince), an infectious number with on-the-wing solo flights that you can’t get out of your head, and the haunting “Embarcadero.” Hall now gets plenty of room to stretch out, supported by Kay’s gently dropped bombs, and he is the perfect understated swinging foil for the wistful altoist. There is not a single track here that isn’t loaded with ingeniously worked out, always melodic ideas.