Jazz, Guitar

George Benson – Breezin’

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  • Superb sound throughout this vintage pressing, with both sides earning Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • Tubey Magical richness and plenty of note-like bass are two of the important qualities that separate the winners from the also-rans, but smooth, grain-free, present vocals for “This Masquerade” are a big part of the best pressings too, so make that three important qualities
  • This copy will blow the doors off your old copy or any MoFi pressing — guaranteed!
  • It’s got all the elements this smooth masterpiece needs to come to life today, almost 50 years later if you can believe it
  • You hear right into the music, something that is only possible on the most transparent copies – exactly the quality that the modern Heavy Vinyl reissue cannot reproduce
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • If like us you’re a fan of jazz guitar, this is a killer album from 1976 that belongs in your collection.

This album features the huge hit “This Masquerade” and lots of other strong material as well. Benson is at the top of his game, with blazing guitar lines accompanied by his scat vocals at many times. No one else ever did music like this so well again, in our humble opinion.

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Joe Pass – Portraits of Duke Ellington

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  • Portraits of Duke Ellington is back on the site for only the second time in years, here with excellent Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this original Pablo pressing
  • Remarkably spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a solid step up over most of what we played
  • Some of the tubiest, biggest and richest guitar sound you could ask for from a mid-70s jazz record – this is the sound of analog done right
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The interplay between the three musicians [Pass, Ray Brown, and Bobby Durham] is quite impressive, and Pass’s mastery of the guitar is obvious… Recommended.”
  • Yet another record we’ve discovered with excellent sound on the best pressings

Maybe it’s the fact that there are only three instruments playing, live in the studio, that accounts for the amazing recording quality. Nobody knows, certainly not us, but the one thing we can say for sure is that you will have a very hard time finding a guitar trio album that sounds remotely as good as this one does.

And the music is by The Duke himself. How great is that? Can’t fault the song choices in any way; they’re all classics: “Satin Doll,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” “In A Mellowtone,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Do Nothin’ ‘Till You Hear From Me” and more.

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Lee Ritenour – Friendship

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  • Superb sound throughout this original Direct-to-Disc Japanese import pressing, with both sides earning Double Plus (A++) grades – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way you want your vintage analog to sound – the guitar is surprisingly real here
  • Both of these sides are Tubey Magical, lively and funky, with the kind of rich, solid sound that will fill your listening room from wall to wall
  • “The third of three Lee Ritenour sets originally cut for Japanese JVC matches the studio guitarist with … Ernie Watts (on tenor and soprano), both Dave and Don Grusin on keyboards, electric bassist Abraham Laboriel, drummer Steve Gadd and percussionist Steve Forman.”
  • Friendship is without a doubt this group’s best sounding album, and, to our way of thinking, their only essential one

This is one of my all time favorite audiophile discs. It’s actually real music.

The song “Woody Creek” is wonderful and reason enough to own this excellent album. The guitar of Lee Ritenour and the saxophone of Ernie Watts double up during a substantial portion of this song and the effect is just amazing.

Special kudos should go to Ernie Watts on sax, who blows some mean lines. But everybody is good on this album, especially the leader, Lee Ritenour. I saw these guys live and they put on a great show.

By the way, looking in the dead wax I see this record was cut by none other than Stan Ricker of Mobile Fidelity fame himself!

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Barney Kessel – Some Like It Hot

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 Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Barney Kessel

  • Kessel’s brilliant 1959 large group outing is back on the site for the first time in years, here with excellent Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides of this vintage Contemporary pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • With Tubey Magic, richness, sweetness, and dead on tonality from top to bottom, this is a textbook example of Contemporary’s sound when it’s really working
  • Skip the OJC on this title – some sides of the copies we played were good, but make no mistake, there is world of difference between those sides and the Hot Stamper pressings we are offering on our site
  • An All Star West Coast lineup came together for this one: Art Pepper (on sax and clarinet!), Shelly Manne, Joe Gordon and others
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Such tunes as ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You,’ ‘Runnin’ Wild,’ ‘Down Among the Sheltering Palms,’ and ‘By the Beautiful Sea’ are given fairly modern arrangements…”

This copy is spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. 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. (more…)

Gabor Szabo – The Best of Gabor Szabo

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  • This Impulse pressing boasts superb Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • Clean, clear, full-bodied and present with tons of Tubey Magic and right-on-the-money instrumental timbres, the originals may be a bit better sounding, but both are they expensive these days and rarely can be found in audiophile playing condition
  • For some reason, the guitar sound from this era of recording seems to have died out with the times – it can only be found on the better copies of these vintage pressings

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Barney Kessel Carmen – A Great Disc for Testing Transparency

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Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Barney Kessel

We highly recommend you make every effort to find yourself a copy of this album and use it to test your system. The right pressing can be both a great Demo Disc and a great Test Disc.

The best Hot Stamper Original pressings have the Tubey Magic we’ve come to expect from Contemporary circa 1958, with that warm, rich, full-bodied sound that RVG often struggles to get on tape.

However, some pressings in our shootout managed to give us an extra level of transparency and ambience that most of the original pressings we played could not.

There’s a room around this drum kit. 

So many copies don’t show you that room, not if they have the full sound that a copy like this does.

It’s amazing all the detail you can hear in a leaned-out record, but what good is that? The sound is leaned out and that means it’s ruined.

If you like that sound, buy the OJC or the CD. Leave these originals to those of us who are after this sound.

Such a wonderful idea for an album. The melodies from Bizet’s Carmen are unforgettable and perfect fodder for jazz improvisation. Don’t think that this is just guitar and rhythm. This is a full band with lots of horns, clarinets of all kinds, bassoons, oboes, flutes, piano, vibes — the variety of sounds to be found on this album is practically unlimited.

And with Roy DuNann‘s engineering, you will never hear richer, fuller sound with more accurate timbres for all the instruments mentioned above. The guy was a genius. His recordings define High Fidelity for me. I know of none better.

From an audiophile point of view, how can you beat a Roy DuNann recording of so many instruments? It’s audiophile heaven. The sound is gorgeous, all tube, live-to-two-track direct from the Contemporary studio.

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Gabor Szabo / More Sorcery

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Reviews and Commentaries for Gabor Szabo

  • With two incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, this original Impulse pressing is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This copy was bigger, richer and clearer, with less smear and distortion, and more Tubey Magic, than practically all others we played
  • Recorded in 1967, this vintage stereo pressing boasts exceptionally natural guitar sound, as well as note-like bass and the kind of energy you rarely get outside of a live performance
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “In 1967, guitarist Gabor Szabo had his finest working group, a quintet with the very complementary fellow guitarist Jimmy Stewart, bassist Louis Kabok, either Marty Morrell or Bill Goodwin on drums and percussionist Hal Gordon.”

This is a live recording that’s got that small jazz club feel. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” runs almost ten minutes and gives everybody involved a chance to stretch out. “People” is also exceptionally good here.

It’s hard to find a recording Szabo did that isn’t full of Tubey Magic, huge studio space and right-on-the-money instrumental timbres. This album is right up there with the best of his recordings, courtesy of the two top engineers noted below.

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Laurindo Almeida / Virtuoso Guitar – It Is, Or Can Be, An Awesome Direct to Disc

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Reviews and Commentaries for Direct to Disc Recordings

This recording has very little processing or EQ boost, and the studio is somewhat dead sounding (all too common in the late ’70s). That combination can mean only one thing: If you don’t play this record loud, it will not sound right. 

The famous Sheffield S9 is exactly the same way. It sounds dead and dull until you turn it up good and loud. When you do, lookout — it really comes alive. The best pressings can sound shockingly like live music, something one just does not hear all that often, even when one plays records all day long as we do.

The snare drum on this copy represents one of the most realistic and dynamic sounding snares I have ever heard. Talk about jumping out of the speakers! If you have plenty of large, fast, powerful dynamic drivers like we do, you are in for a real treat. Track one, side one — lookout!

What to Listen For

What typically separates the killer copies from the merely good ones are two qualities that we often look for in the records we play: transparency and lack of smear. 

Transparency allows you to hear into the recording, reproducing the ambience and subtle musical cues and details that are the hallmark of high-resolution analog.

(Note that most Heavy Vinyl pressings being produced these days seem to be rather seriously Transparency and Ambience Challenged. A substantial amount of important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply nowhere to be found. We believe that a properly mastered CD is likely to be more transparent and have higher resolution than the vast majority of  Heavy Vinyl  remastered pressings being produced nowadays.)

Lack of smear is also important, especially on a recording with a plucked instrument. The speed and clarity of the transients, the sense that fingers are pulling on strings, strings that ring with tonally correct harmonics, are what make these kinds of records so much fun to play. The best copies really get that sound right, in the same way that the best recordings of Cat Stevens and the Eagles and Pink Floyd and so many others get the sound of stringed instruments right.

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Pat Metheny Group – First Circle

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  • This early pressing of Pat Metheny Group’s 1984 release boasts solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is huge, spacious, lively, transparent and punchy (particularly on side two) – this is jazz fusion that really rocks
  • 4 stars: “The ever-restless Metheny…mixes up the music, not quite leaving the Brazilian glide behind but coming up with some fascinating permutations always affixed with his personal stamp.”

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Barney Kessel – Vol. 3: To Swing Or Not To Swing

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  • Boasting seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades from start to finish, this early Contemporary MONO pressing is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Vol. 3, To Swing Or Not To Swing you’ve heard – reasonably quiet vinyl too
  • Tubey Magic, richness, sweetness, dead-on timbres from top to bottom – this is a textbook example of Contemporary sound at its best
  • For some reason, the guitar sound from this era of All Tube Chain Recording is seems to have died out with the times – it can only be found on the best of these vintage pressings, like this one
  • 5 stars: “The unusual repertoire on this set … would by itself make this bop/cool set noteworthy. Add to that a very interesting lineup of players (trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, Georgie Auld or Bill Perkins on tenor, pianist Jimmy Rowles, the rhythm guitar of Al Hendrickson, bassist Red Mitchell, and Shelly Manne or Irv Cottler on drums) … and the overall result is a recording highly recommended to fans of straight-ahead jazz.”
  • If you’re a fan of Jazz Guitar, this All Tube MONO Recording from 1955 belongs in your collection.

Man, this music is a blast when it sounds this good. I don’t think there’s a whole lot you could do to make this music sound any better! It’s one of the best early mono Contemporary LPs we’ve ever played. It’s so Tubey Magical. Kessel’s guitar sound is out of this world.

The music here matches the sound for excellence. The whole band just swings. There’s a real old rag-timey feel to the songs. Look at this list of all-star players: Harry Edison, Jimmy Rowles, Red Mitchell and Shelly Manne — this is some serious jazz talent.

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